The Supreme Court granted an emergency petition on Thursday to reinstate Missouri’s previous congressional map, marking the third time the map has changed in the past week and likely costing Republicans a seat in the House of Representatives.
The high court issued a brief, unsigned ruling halting a federal district court’s Tuesday order, which had restored a congressional map drawn in 2025 that would have likely given Republicans a 7-1 advantage over Democrats in the Show-Me State’s congressional delegation. Now, the state must revert to a map passed in 2022 that gave the GOP a 6-2 advantage. The 2025 map was used for Missouri’s primary elections in August, but the 2022 map was reinstated by the Missouri Supreme Court last week when the state’s high court ruled that a left-wing group had gathered enough signatures to put the 2025 map up for a referendum in November and halted use of the new map in the meantime.
A federal district court judge then paused the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling reinstating the 2022 map, ordering state officials to use the same 2025 map for the November general election that they had used for the primaries. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit declined to block the district court’s order. People Not Politicians, the left-wing group that successfully fought to put the 2025 up for a referendum in November, filed an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday, urging the justices to reinstate the 2022 map.
Missouri officials had urged the Supreme Court in a filing early Thursday to reject that emergency effort, warning of the chaos that would ensue if the congressional districts were changed for the third time in a week and after the deadline to finalize ballots had passed.
SUPREME COURT URGED TO WADE INTO LEGAL MESS OVER MISSOURI CONGRESSIONAL MAP
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said on Tuesday, after the federal district court’s ruling, that the state would use the 2025 map for the November election, leading People Not Politicians to ask the Missouri Supreme Court to hold him in contempt. The state Supreme Court set a contempt hearing for 10 a.m. local time on Thursday to determine whether to take the extraordinary step of holding Hoskins in contempt.
The Supreme Court’s Thursday order is the second time the high court has had to wade into the legal mess over Missouri’s congressional map this week alone, after the justices declined to reinstate the 2025 map in a direct emergency appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling.