Missouri fires an official for 'too much integrity,' then loses its map at the Supreme Court again.

…(cont) September 10th. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins appears before the state Supreme Court on a contempt question, for directing local officials to proceed with the new map anyway. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court tosses the new map a second time, no dissents noted, in an order that includes three appointees of President Trump — one of them Justice Kavanaugh, the same justice who'd rejected Missouri's emergency request two days earlier. The state's top judges then press officials, that same Thursday, on how they intend to revert to the old lines.

September 14th. The Washington Examiner runs the lawsuit Nick La Strada filed against Secretary of State Hoskins: the election integrity director's job lasted fifteen months, and the paper's own phrase for what happened before the firing is "slowly stripped." The Federalist runs a story the same day quoting the Missouri Freedom Caucus on judicial reform, and on drawing, in their words, "an eight-zero map here in the next couple years."

That's the order. I didn't put it in that order. That's just the order it happened in.

I've got a car that needs a fan belt about twice a year, and I've had, over the years, three or four guys look at it. The good ones tell you the belt's going before it snaps on you on the highway somewhere with no shoulder. That's the whole value of the guy — he tells you before, not after. If you fired that guy the week before the belt went, you wouldn't call it bad luck when it went. You'd have a pretty short conversation with yourself about why you fired him.

Nick La Strada held the title of election integrity director in Missouri for fifteen months. The lawsuit — against Secretary of State Hoskins, covered by the Washington Examiner in a story that ran September 14th — uses the paper's own phrase for what happened before the firing: slowly stripped. Stripped of what, over those fifteen months, and what was left of the job by the time La Strada got to the end of it?

Five days after Missouri went to the Supreme Court asking to keep its new map, the Supreme Court said no. A second time. No dissents noted — not from the three Trump appointees, not from Kavanaugh, who'd already told Missouri no once that week. Does a map get thrown out twice by a court with no recorded objection from its own side because the map had a problem, or because the objection wasn't there to raise?

That same Thursday, Hoskins was in front of the state Supreme Court answering for having told local officials to use the map anyway, while it was blocked. Is that the conduct of an office that had already gotten all the integrity it needed out of the director whose job was to watch for it?

Now here's the part I keep having to set down and pick back up, because I don't love where it goes. The same day the Washington Examiner runs that lawsuit, the Federalist runs the Freedom Caucus saying the answer to two map losses is judicial reform — new rules, in their words, for the judges who keep reading the map back to them. Excuse me, before you go — the director who watched the map, and the judges who read the map, land on the same reform list this week. What's left, once both of them are gone, to tell anybody whether the map still has any integrity in it?