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 […]
Page A3From§Eachthe early bird edition — 26 September 2026
Missouri will run 2026 on the map it spent five Supreme Court denials trying to replace
As it ran on the front
Count the denials, because the state never did.
September 5: Missouri officials file an emergency application with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, arguing that the state's own Supreme Court has created a "federal-election-administration disaster" by ordering the old congressional lines back into use. September 8: Kavanaugh declines. Missouri must revert from the new 7-1 map to the existing 6-2 map, and here is the part worth sitting with — the emergency was never a rigged map versus a fair one. It was six of eight seats versus seven. The entire disaster was one seat.…
…(cont) The state court had already said the quiet part into the record: voters would have to approve the new map by ballot measure. Missouri had already held its primaries on it anyway. September 9, People Not Politicians — the group that got the map onto a ballot in the first place — asks the high court to put the previous lines back. September 10, the court blocks a federal judge's directive that had told Missouri to keep implementing the new design. That block landed moments before a hearing on whether the secretary of state should be held in contempt for directing local election officials to proceed with the new lines regardless. The same day, Missouri's top judges had to press the state on how, mechanically, it intended to go back.
September 23: the third trip to the Supreme Court in a single month. Activists ask it to end the mess. September 26: shut down. November ballots will be cast in the districts used in the past two elections.
And the governor who championed last year's redistricting says the outcome is "disappointing."
Disappointing is the word you use for a rained-out ballgame. Five denials in twenty-one days is not a disappointment; it is a result, delivered repeatedly, in writing, by a court this party built. The legislature drew lines. A state court sent them to the voters. The voters were not consulted before the primaries ran. A federal judge was recruited, then overruled. An elections officer was hauled toward a contempt hearing over instructions already issued. Every institution in the chain said no, and the machine kept feeding the same paper back into the slot.
Nobody in Missouri asked for three weeks of not knowing which district they live in. That confusion has a price, and it is paid by the county clerk printing ballots and the voter who shows up to the wrong precinct — never by the people who ordered the reprint.
They tell you there is no money for your kid's school. There was money for five applications over one House seat. The bottom line here is a map from two elections ago, and the only thing left to do is climb.
“They already had six of the eight seats and spent three weeks and five trips to the Supreme Court trying to make it seven — that is not a fight about fairness, that is a fight about one more chair at a table they already own. A state court said put it to the voters; the primaries ran on the new map anyway, and an elections officer got dragged toward a contempt hearing over it. Five no's in twenty-one days, and the governor's word for it is "disappointing," which tells you how many more times they intend to ask.”
“Look, the state's position was always that the real problem here was administrative — the application says so, "federal-election-administration disaster," their words, not mine. Did I say "their"? That doesn't sound like me. And nobody lost anything, the November election runs on a map Republicans take six of eight on, so I'm not sure what the complaint is, and I'd appreciate you not characterizing five separate denials as a pattern.”
The receipts
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R), who championed last year’s redistricting efforts in his state, shared his disappointment in a Supreme Court decision requiring Missouri to use its old congressional map in the November election. “It is disappointing that today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court means Missouri will conduct its…
After weeks of legal battles, Missouri voters will cast November ballots in the districts used in the past two elections.
· Missouri asks Supreme Court to overturn block of new congressional map before election from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
· Supreme Court urged to wade into legal mess over Missouri congressional map from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· Supreme Court denies bid to reinstate new congressional map in Missouri from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Missouri judges press state on map plans after Supreme Court ruling from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Supreme Court blocks Missouri's use of GOP-favored congressional map from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Kavanaugh won't revive Missouri's GOP-friendly congressional map for midterms from the morgue, 8 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.