Conflicting court orders issued on the same day threw the congressional elections in Missouri into chaos on Tuesday, two months before an election in which a handful of races could decide control of the House.
First, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
Soon after, a District Court judge in Missouri ruled the other way, ordering the state to rely on that map, which had been used in last month’s primary election.
Taken together, the dueling court orders left Missouri where it began, with no agreement about which congressional map should be in effect in November and no immediate route to resolving that question. Missouri’s Republican attorney general and governor quickly said that the state intended to use the redrawn map that favors Republicans. Their opponents immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and said they would also appeal to Justice Kavanaugh, meaning the issue will be resolved only after additional legal twists.
Early Tuesday evening, it seemed Missouri Democrats had prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. Justice Kavanaugh deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.
Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning, as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.
But soon after Justice Kavanaugh acted, word spread that Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, had separately ordered the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request in an attempt to flip a seat in Kansas City. That ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines.
The secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the Federal District Court ruling “halts a full-on constitutional crisis.”
What happens next still seemed unclear on Tuesday night. The decision from Judge Clark, who like Justice Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump, was based in part on concerns that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.
The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. But Justice Kavanaugh refused to intervene on Tuesday, leaving in place a unanimous ruling from Missouri’s highest court on state law, suggesting he did not think there was a federal issue that warranted Supreme Court action.
Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to act quickly and allow use of the new map, given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had voted in the August primary using the new map.
The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.
But she argued that the state should continue with the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”
The new map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at Mr. Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the state Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, Mo., the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Mr. Hoskins, the secretary of state, said he did not believe that redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.
Lawyers for Mr. von Glahn told the justices in a filing on Monday that Mr. Hoskins had waited until the last possible day to object to the referendum, doing so only after implementing the new map for the August primary. The state’s predicament, they said, was a “timing problem of his own making.”
Missouri’s Constitution has long granted citizens the power to override congressional redistricting legislation through a statewide vote, according to referendum proponents. Last December, Mr. von Glahn and People Not Politicians submitted 691 boxes of referendum petitions to the secretary containing more than 300,000 signatures — more than twice the required number.
“This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting” the state’s emergency request, Mr. von Glahn’s lawyers said in a Monday filing.
In its ruling last week, the Missouri Supreme Court’s seven judges agreed that a referendum on the new district lines had been improperly denied a spot on the November ballot, and that the redrawn map should have been paused until voters weighed in.
The redrawn map “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters,” Judge Ginger K. Gooch, who was appointed by a Republican governor, wrote in the opinion. The prior map, she added, “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”
The post Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos appeared first on New York Times.
