Wow, that was quick.

At 10:03 am ET, according to the Supreme Court’s docket, a group of Republican plaintiffs filed a brief asking the Court to bless a GOP gerrymander in Missouri. Less than half an hour later, the Court issued a brief order telling these Republicans no — a rare scolding from this Court for the Republican Party, and a rejection of the party’s latest effort to skew elections in its favor.

The decision is notable for this Court, but it isn’t particularly surprising. Earlier this week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied a similar request from another set of Republican litigants. But, minutes after Kavanaugh did so, a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge issued a new order that would have forced Missouri to use the Republican Party’s maps anyway. 

The Court’s new decision in People Not Politicians v. Onder places that judge’s decision on hold. As a practical matter, this means that, in the upcoming midterm elections, Missouri will almost certainly use the same maps it used in the 2024 election — which elected six Republicans and two Democrats to the US House — rather than the new maps, which were designed to give Republicans an extra seat. 

Reading between the lines of the Court’s order in People Not Politicians, it appears that the justices were quite frustrated by the Republican Party’s tactics in this dispute. When Kavanaugh previously denied the GOP’s request to use its new gerrymandered maps, he did so using a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process the justices rarely use unless they view a matter as so one-sided that it’s not worth formally involving their colleagues.

Similarly, the Court’s new order was issued almost immediately after the Republican plaintiffs filed their brief — so fast, in fact, that it’s unclear whether the justices even had time to read that brief. And the order also appears to be unanimous. No justice indicated that they dissent (although it is possible that one or more justices disagree with the order but decided not to make that disagreement public).

This is how the Court behaves when they want to send a clear signal that a litigant’s arguments are entirely without merit. It’s the judicial equivalent of a spanking.

More broadly, the litigation over the Missouri gerrymander should give some assurance to Democrats, and to supporters of liberal democracy more broadly, that this Court isn’t wholly subservient to President Donald Trump or his Republican Party. The Court has a 6-3 Republican majority, and it often hands down decisions benefiting the GOP that cannot be defended using the traditional tools of legal reasoning — such as its 2024 decision holding that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. 

But it appears that there are some lines that this Court won’t allow the Republican Party to cross.

Republicans created a “disaster” in Missouri and then demanded that the Supreme Court fix it

It is likely that the Supreme Court’s decision in People Not Politicians will lead to some serious short-term chaos in Missouri, although all of that chaos should be blamed on Republican officials within Missouri.

In September of 2025, the state’s Republican legislature enacted the new maps, as part of a broader Republican Party effort to gerrymander red states in order to give the GOP an edge in the upcoming midterm elections. But Missouri’s constitution permits opponents of a new law to put the law on hold if they collect enough signatures to trigger a ballot referendum — if a referendum is triggered, the state constitution provides that the law will not take effect unless it is approved by voters in the next election.

Opponents of the new maps submitted their petitions seeking a referendum in December of 2025, but Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, sat on those petitions for months — and then rejected them on the last possible date permitted under state law, August 4, 2026. As it happens, this was the same date that Missouri held its congressional primaries. So one consequence of Hoskins’s delay tactic is that many voters who voted in one district during the primary will vote in a different district in this November’s general election.

Hoskins was able to delay litigation over whether the petitions seeking a referendum are valid because a state law provides that lawsuits concerning such a referendum must be filed within 10 days after the secretary of state rules on whether a referendum should take place.

In any event, because of Hoskins’s delay, the Missouri Supreme Court did not rule on the referendum until September 3, when it determined that Hoskins was wrong to reject the petitions. That means that the law enacting the new maps is not in effect and Missouri must use its old maps in the 2026 general election — even though that means that election officials must scramble to sort voters into their proper districts before November.

In an extraordinary act of chutzpah, Hoskins argued in both the Missouri Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court that the state court’s decision came too late and should not take effect because reimplementing the old maps would be too disruptive. He even told the federal justices that “a federal-election disaster is unfolding in Missouri.” 

But, as the state supreme court said in its opinion, this argument is “particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains.”

Given this background, the most surprising part of this case may be that a federal district judge then attempted to put the new maps in place, despite Hoskins’s tactics and despite the fact that Kavanaugh had already ruled against Missouri Republicans once. The Supreme Court’s new order technically only puts that district judge’s decision on temporary hold, but the hold should last through the 2026 election — thus ensuring that the old maps will be used in that election.

The GOP’s legal arguments in People Not Politicians were weak

Setting aside Hoskins’s bad behavior, Republicans made very similar arguments in both Hoskins and Onder, and those arguments were weak. I lay those arguments out in more detail here, but the short version is that they asked the Supreme Court to revive a discredited doctrine that it has rejected many times over the course of more than a century. And they also asked the justices to create a new right to vote in the same congressional district during both a primary and general election.

In light of the Court’s new order in People Not Politicians, it appears that none of these arguments persuaded the justices.

Again, that’s a reassuring sign for Democrats that this Court will not give Republicans literally anything that they ask for in an election-related case. Although it remains to be seen how the Court will rule on several other major election cases that are currently pending before the justices, including one that could potentially shut down voting by mail in many US states.

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