Missouri does not currently know what its congressional districts are. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the literal legal situation 54 days before the election, produced by one of the strangest afternoons in modern election law. On Tuesday at about 4:30 p.m., Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Missouri’s emergency bid to revive its Trump-backed congressional gerrymander. At 4:58 p.m., twenty-eight minutes later, a federal district judge in Missouri ordered the state to use that same gerrymander anyway. The state’s highest court says the map “is not the law and has never been the law.” A federal judge now bars officials from using any other map. Local clerks, facing printing deadlines, have received directly conflicting orders, and the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, spent Tuesday evening instructing them to use the map his own state supreme court forbade. This morning, that court has ordered Hoskins to appear in person and explain why he should not be held in contempt. When this newsletter wrote on August 20 that the redistricting wars were locked in, Missouri was the last domino. It has come back up off the floor.
How Tuesday Happened
Start with the state ruling that set it off. On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the new map, House Bill 1, which dismantles the Kansas City district held by Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, never legally took effect. The reason is a piece of direct democracy embedded in Missouri’s constitution: when citizens gather enough signatures for a veto referendum, the challenged law is suspended until voters decide. Opponents submitted more than 300,000 signatures last December, enough to put the map on November’s ballot as Proposition A. The court’s conclusion followed: HB 1 “is not the law and has never been the law,” the 2022 map governs, and voters get the final word. Hoskins, who had spent a year resisting the referendum at every procedural turn, raced to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that switching maps after the August 4 primary, which was run under HB 1, would throw the election into chaos. On Tuesday afternoon Kavanaugh, who handles emergency matters from that region, denied the application outright, without even referring it to the full Court and without explanation. The U.S. Supreme Court has long deferred to state supreme courts on the meaning of their own constitutions. “Today the law won,” said Richard von Glahn of People Not Politicians, the referendum campaign.
It stayed won for twenty-eight minutes. In a separate federal lawsuit filed the previous Friday by Republican congressional candidates, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark issued a 14-day temporary restraining order barring Missouri officials from using any map other than HB 1 in November. Clark explicitly noted Kavanaugh’s denial in his order, and, notably, rejected the Republicans’ broadest theory, that congressional maps can never be subject to referendum. His grounds were narrower and all about timing: because the primary was already run under HB 1, he found a “high probability” that switching maps now would violate the Constitution by effectively nullifying primary votes, and would create unequal classes of voters and candidates. He called it “Purcell in reverse,” invoking the principle that courts should not change election rules at the last minute: in his reading, his own order preserves the rules candidates and voters relied on. “Issuing a TRO here would preserve, rather than disturb, the election rules that candidates, election officials, and voters have relied on,” Clark wrote.
The Impossible Position
Which produced the situation Missouri’s clerks woke up to Wednesday. The state supreme court forbids the HB 1 map. The federal district court forbids every other map. As the referendum campaign put it in its emergency filing: “If they use the HB 1 map, they are in contempt of the Missouri Supreme Court; if they use any other map, they are in contempt of the federal district court.” Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced the state would comply with Clark and use HB 1, calling a mid-election map change “simply not feasible and profoundly unjust to Missouri voters.” Governor Mike Kehoe, who signed the gerrymander, praised the federal ruling as “much-needed clarity.” And Hoskins, per an email cited by the state supreme court, directed local election officials Tuesday evening to proceed with the map the court had enjoined him from using, arguing he had no choice: “Unless and until the District Court or a higher court issues a stay, the Secretary cannot disregard that order.”
The referendum campaign’s answer, filed the same night, attacked the federal order on procedure as well as substance: challenges to congressional apportionment, they argue, must be heard by a three-judge panel, which Clark never convened, and a federal district court cannot sit as an appeals court over a state supreme court’s reading of state law. They asked Clark to pause his own order, appealed to the Eighth Circuit, and asked the Missouri Supreme Court to hold Hoskins in contempt, noting that Hoskins had already begun complying with the state ruling, certifying ballots under the 2022 map, before the federal order gave him a reason to reverse. Chief Justice Brent Powell moved within hours, ordering Hoskins to explain himself, and the court has now summoned him to a contempt hearing this morning, in person.
What It Means Beyond Missouri
Two things make this bigger than one state’s chaos. The first is the seat: HB 1 exists, by the administration’s open urging, to eliminate one of Missouri’s two Democratic districts, part of the national mid-decade redistricting push this newsletter mapped across the summer. Whether Missouri elects its House delegation under the 2022 map or the gerrymander could matter to control of a chamber that current forecasts put within a handful of seats. The second is the precedent. Missouri’s referendum is the only place in the country where voters themselves get a direct vote on a Trump-era gerrymander, and Proposition A stays on the November ballot no matter what the courts do about which map governs this election. The spectacle of a state’s chief election officer defying his own supreme court, with a federal order as shelter, is precisely the scenario election law scholars have warned about since 2020: not a stolen election, but a jurisdictional maze in which every actor can claim a court is on their side. Somewhere in Missouri, a county clerk has to send something to the printer.
Where Things Stand
The contempt hearing is this morning at the Missouri Supreme Court, with Hoskins ordered to appear. The Eighth Circuit has the referendum campaign’s emergency appeal of Clark’s order; his TRO runs 14 days, into the third week of September, while he weighs a longer injunction, and whichever side loses next is one filing from putting Missouri back at the U.S. Supreme Court, this time with the federal-state conflict squarely presented. Ballots, meanwhile, are past their finalization deadline and the printing calendar does not pause for briefing schedules. Elsewhere: the August inflation report arrives tomorrow morning, the last major number before the Federal Reserve’s rate decision Wednesday, and the mail voting stay request remains pending at the Supreme Court with the challengers’ response now filed. Fifty four days before the election, the country’s newest constitutional question is one no law school hypothetical ever needed: when two courts order a state to use two different maps, who counts as the government? Missouri is about to find out, one hearing at a time.
Sources: Democracy Docket reporting (September 7 through 9, 2026) on the Kavanaugh denial, Judge Clark’s TRO, the emergency filings, and the contempt proceedings, including the order and filings it links; the Missouri Supreme Court’s September 3 ruling as quoted therein; statements from Attorney General Catherine Hanaway and Governor Mike Kehoe via their public posts as cited by Democracy Docket; Richard von Glahn statement; prior TPP reporting (TPP-113 and the summer redistricting series). Note: the Elias Law Group represents the pro-referendum parties; its chair founded Democracy Docket. Cross-checked against the court documents Democracy Docket links where possible.