Although the US Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority on Friday greenlit President Donald Trump's voter purge database, it also helped deliver yet another blow to Missouri Republicans' push for a rigged congressional map. "In 2022, the Missouri Legislature enacted a redistricting map for elections to the US House of Representatives.…
Page A3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 26 September 2026
THIRD TIME
Missouri Republicans' congressional map loses at the Supreme Court a third time, landing them back where they started.
As it ran on the front
Missouri's congressional map has now traveled from 2022 to 2025 and back to 2022, by way of three Supreme Court orders, and the ending point is the starting point. That is not a metaphor. It is the docket.
In 2022 the Missouri Legislature drew the district lines the state used for two election cycles. In 2025, like Republican legislators in other states, Missouri's lawmakers passed a new map — a tighter 7-1 GOP split — in response to public pressure from the president. Under the Missouri Constitution, that new law doesn't take effect if enough voters sign a petition to put it to a referendum, and enough of them did. The Missouri Supreme Court told the state to revert to the 2022 lines for November while that referendum plays out. State officials called the reversion a "federal-election-administration disaster" and, on September 5, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn it.…
…(cont) On September 8, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — the justice assigned to Missouri's emergency filings — turned them down. On September 10, the full Court blocked a separate order that would have kept the GOP map alive, leaving the state court's reversion in place. That's two. On September 23, activists asked the Court to just end the mess, the third ask of the month. On September 25, it did: an unsigned order, the Court's third ruling in this fight, holding that forcing Missouri to restore the 2025 map — the one Republicans wanted — "would usher in electoral chaos." The Federalist noted the Court barely explained itself, since, given the two prior orders, "our conclusion that this was error should come as no surprise." Missouri now runs its midterm on the 2022 map. The same lines the state had before any of this began.
What changed, over three rounds of litigation, is nothing on a map and everything on a ledger. That money comes out of the same Missouri budget that funds schools and Medicaid, spent instead on relitigating an outcome the Court kept handing back unchanged. There is a well of money for this. It is just never the well that pays for anything you'd notice going without.
“Three trips to the same court, three losses, and the map lands exactly where it was before anybody billed a single hour on it. That's public money buying private law firms nothing but practice, out of the same budget that pays for your kid's classroom. They tell you there's no money for schools, but there was money for this.”
“This is federalism working exactly as designed — the legislature passes a map, the courts sort it out, the state defends duly enacted law. That's not some kind of pattern of losing, that's just the process, and the process just happens to keep ruling against the state, which — did I say that? Never mind.”
The receipts
The Supreme Court said in an unsigned decision that ordering Missouri to restore its 2025 map "would usher in electoral chaos."
Activists in Missouri asked the Supreme Court to end the messy legal saga over which congressional map the Show-Me State will use in November, with the high court being asked to weigh in on the redistricting fight for the third time this month. The current confusion began late last month when the Missouri Supreme Court […]
The Supreme Court rejected a Trump-backed Missouri congressional map, ensuring the state will use its 2022 districts for the midterm elections.
'Given this Court’s two prior orders in this litigation, our conclusion that this was error should come as no surprise,' the high court ruled.
· Supreme Court denies bid to reinstate new congressional map in Missouri from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Supreme Court blocks Missouri's use of GOP-favored congressional map from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Missouri asks Supreme Court to overturn block of new congressional map before election from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.