It took a little under 45 minutes for the United States Supreme Court to tell Missouri Republicans to sit down and shut up. With no noted dissents, SCOTUS stayed the dubious district court order that Republicans hoped might allow them to ramrod a new legislative map to erase one of the state’s two Black representatives. Along the way, the redistricting effort took us on a wild ride befitting a civil procedure issue-spotter exam, with state Republicans and their coterie of nitwit Federalist Society lawyers playing procedural shell games and even threatening to impeach any state judge who disagreed with them.
Following today’s decision, Missouri’s Secretary of State filed a letter with the state supreme court acknowledging that he will finally agree to follow Missouri law and stick with the existing map for the upcoming election. All it took was a Missouri Supreme Court opinion, TWO U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and the threat of a contempt charge to get Republicans to this point.
They call themselves the Show Me State, and apparently they need to be shown multiple times for it to sink in.
This saga began when Donald Trump floated that Republican states might salvage the party’s doomed midterms by redrawing maps mid-cycle. Missouri obliged in September 2025 with a map carving up Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district. In December, People Not Politicians duly submitted 300,000 signatures calling for a referendum to veto the new map legislation. Under Missouri law, that was enough to get the matter on the ballot, and freeze the old map in place until that statewide vote.
Republicans would, probably, win that vote. But, it would prevent them from using the new map in this election. Realizing that they might not be able to hand Trump an additional gerrymandered seat in time for the midterms, state Republicans chose to JUST IGNORE THE LAW. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins sat on the petition for almost eight months, then magically declared it insufficient on August 4. That marked the statutory deadline and also happened to be primary day. So the primaries ran on the new map. Attorney General Catherine Hanaway explained back in January that the plan was to drag it out until the last minute. “As long as the status quo is the new maps, delay works in our favor,” she said, explaining a conspiracy to circumvent state law, which is not usually how lawyers operate, but to each their own.
As soon as the Republicans actually rejected the petition, opponents went to court. On September 3, a unanimous Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the new map “is not the law and has never been the law.” Hoskins then took it to the U.S. Supreme Court — the only court with the legal authority to review that judgment — and on Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the application.
In the world of procedure you learned in your first year of law school, that marked the end of it. But, conservatives had other ideas! Based upon legal research collected from a 3-year-old, Missouri Republicans tried to ask Dad after Mom said no.
On the same day Hoskins filed at the Supreme Court, Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin, and two voters filed a federal lawsuit against Hoskins, seeking a ruling to force Hoskins to use the new map. The next day, Hoskins filed a statement supporting the lawsuit against himself. On Tuesday, the plaintiffs alerted Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark of the Supreme Court’s ruling refusing to disturb the Missouri supreme court’s state law ruling barring the use of the new map, and less than 15 minutes later Clark, a Trump appointee, issued a 13-page TRO barring Hoskins from using any map other than the new one. He did not even bother to hear argument.
The strategy — using the word very loosely — was to force the issue by presenting the Supreme Court with impossibly conflicting orders.
Though, if you want a laugh, there are conservatives on social media actually trying to claim that the orders did not conflict. Alas, being ordered to NOT use the map and to simultaneously USE that same map only avoids conflict in the world of Schrödinger’s injunctions.
It is a hot take in that it’s incredibly stupid. The Supreme Court doesn’t want to settle constant conflicts between state and federal courts, which is why they created the Rooker-Feldman doctrine in the first place. The Supreme Court has explicitly rejected the idea that litigants can run to a district court to get a second bite after losing at the state court level. This is why Hoskins isn’t the named plaintiff in the federal lawsuit — the Supreme Court has also ruled that Rooker-Feldman technically only binds the exact same parties. BUT, employing Potemkin plaintiffs was never a move that the Supreme Court was likely to reward for the effort.
But it gets worse! Federal law requires a three-judge court for any action “challenging the constitutionality of the apportionment of congressional districts.” A single judge can issue a TRO to hold the fort until the panel convenes, but Clark never asked for a panel. Then his “temporary” order ran past the date the state already represented that it needed a final map to mail overseas ballots, making this less a TRO than final decision in a trench coat.
Clark’s decision admitted that voters had the right to take the decision to a referendum, he just ordered the state to use the challenged map anyway. Isn’t this what Purcell exists to forbid:
Admittedly, courts normally invoke the Purcell principle to caution against federal-court intervention in the election decisions of state legislatures, and no federal court has ordered the use of the 2022 map. But Purcell does not cut against injunctive relief here. This case presents Purcell in reverse, but with no less weight.
What the hell does that mean? While perfectly acceptable as an Uno tactic, the Reverse card doesn’t enjoy robust support in constitutional jurisprudence. Clark’s ruling suggested that the new map represented the status quo, but it couldn’t be the status quo because it legally never existed. The decision amounted to “well, since you already broke the law, you may as well keep breaking the law.”
Which, of course, was the bumbling plan AG Hanaway outlined in January.
This should’ve died immediately upon appeal, except Missouri resides in the Eighth Circuit, an appellate court currently in a “hold my beer” contest with the Fifth Circuit to spit out and rewrite American law into the Trumpeonic Code. With a panel of Trump appointees David Stras and Justin Smith plus George H.W. Bush appointee James Loken, they rubberstamped the district court with a single sentence:
The motion for a stay pending appeal is denied because we either lack jurisdiction over the appeal or, based on the briefing we have so far, the stay factors have not been met.
In other words, denied because… well, we don’t have to be bothered with those details.
Meanwhile, Hoskins told county clerks that Clark’s order “takes precedence.” Then the Missouri Supreme Court fired off an order to show cause why Hoskins shouldn’t be held in contempt for flagrantly violating the state law order. Hoskins responded by respectfully posting to X that “The Show Me State will not be run into the ground like the communists running NYC on my watch.”
Then he asked Clark to block the Missouri Supreme Court from holding him in contempt. Even Clark said no to that one, seemingly realizing that he’d thrown himself into a legally questionable pissing match against a state supreme court and hadn’t brought an umbrella.
All this brings us back to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They’re patriots to the extent they ill-advisedly lobbed up a turnover. That’s Missouri’s solicitor general, who graduated from law school in 2019.
With apologies to Meat Loaf, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said, “we’ll do anything for Trump… but we won’t do that.” And by that, they mean allow lower court judges to act like they get to second-guess Supreme Court rulings by playing fast and loose with Civ Pro. The Court stayed Clark’s order Thursday morning, effectively ruling for the second time in a week that the Missouri Supreme Court decides Missouri law. No noted dissents. By early afternoon, Hoskins was telling election officials to use the 2022 map and wrote the state supreme court that he planned to follow the law so there’s no more reason to hold him in contempt for attempting an end run around the law.
The Missouri Supreme Court… disagreed:
Hoskins avoids consequences for contempt, but the state justices were not letting it get swept under the rug.
What a week, huh?
Earlier: The Supreme Court Wouldn’t Save Missouri’s Gerrymander, A Trump Judge Did It Anyway
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post Supreme Court To Missouri Republicans: Shut Up appeared first on Above the Law.