Supreme Court blocks Missouri's GOP map twice; a federal judge orders it used anyway, same day.

…(cont) The next day, September 9th, People Not Politicians, the group that had fought to block the map in the first place, went back to the Court and asked it to settle the fight for good. On September 10th, the Court answered: it tossed the GOP map a second time. The order carried no noted dissents, despite a right-wing supermajority that includes three of Donald Trump's own appointees.

Hours later, on that same September 10th, a federal judge ordered Missouri to use the new Republican map anyway. The Supreme Court had just left in place a state ruling barring it. The federal judge's order pointed the other direction.

That is the docket going into this week: two rejections from the nation's highest court, one order from a federal judge running against both of them, and no map settled.

On Thursday, that contradiction arrived at the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, before a three-judge panel, with Missouri's ballot window — The Hill's headline verb, exactly — "closes" in a matter of days. The question before the panel, per that same report, was whether it is too late to make any changes to the map at all. The two Supreme Court rebuffs and the contrary federal order sit in the same docket, unresolved, days from ballots going out.

All together now: filed the 5th, denied the 8th, denied again the 10th, ordered anyway the 10th, argued the 17th. Read the sequence back and it does not resolve into an answer. It runs out of calendar before the appeals court has to give one.

Missouri will mail its ballots on whichever map is standing when that clock hits zero. Which map that is depends on which of these five entries — filed, denied, denied, ordered, argued — a three-judge panel decides outranks the other four. The docket does not say. It just keeps filing.