Missouri's twice-rejected congressional map returns from the dead a third time, six weeks before ballots print.

Missouri Republicans have now sent the same congressional map to the Supreme Court twice, lost twice, and on Monday got a third invitation to try again — this time from three judges who owe their jobs to the party asking. On September 4th, Missouri's attorney general filed with the Supreme Court to restore the map, warning that a lower court's block had unleashed a "federal-election-administration disaster." The justice assigned to hear it, Brett Kavanaugh, denied that request the following Tuesday, September 8th. Late that same evening, the fight briefly ran in two directions at once — the Supreme Court and a lower federal court handing down conflicting orders within hours of each other, a collision the record calls chaos and does not otherwise describe. The next day, September 9th, the group that had already beaten the map in state court, People Not Politicians, asked the justices to restore the map that predates the Republican redraw — not to stop the vote, but to pick a different map to run it on. On September 10th the Supreme Court ended that round: it struck the GOP map a second time, and not one justice on a court with a Republican supermajority noted a dissent. Seven days later, a panel of the 8th Circuit sat down to consider reviving the map anyway. On Monday it did — ruling that the 2022 map cannot be used in November and that only the 2025 map, the one the Supreme Court has twice blocked, satisfies the Constitution. All three judges on that panel were put there by Republican presidents: one by George H.W. Bush, two by Donald Trump. Even the New York Times, filing the same day, noted the order may have little practical effect, since the Supreme Court's block is still standing. That is the whole trick: the ruling does not need to survive review to do its job. It only needs six more weeks. Three judges, not voters, just put Missouri's map back in play with the general election in November. The count of dissents at the Supreme Court's second block was zero. The count of Republican appointees on the panel that just overruled that block is three. One number stayed at zero. The other one kept climbing.