A federal appeals panel ruled Monday that Missouri must use its Republican-drawn congressional districts in the November midterms, a decision that now heads to a U.S. Supreme Court that has twice ruled the other way.
The three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directed a lower court judge to issue a permanent injunction blocking any map other than the one Missouri's Republican legislature passed last September and President Donald Trump backed. The panel wrote that switching maps between a primary and a general election would violate the U.S. Constitution, the Associated Press reported.
But the ruling does not settle the fight. The appeals court itself ordered a one-week delay before the injunction takes effect, giving opponents time to file an emergency appeal. And they intend to do exactly that, taking the case to a Supreme Court that has already blocked the new map twice.
Missouri's redistricting saga is now the longest and most tangled among roughly a dozen states that sought to redraw their U.S. House districts over the past year. The new map, passed last September, would reshape several districts and give Republicans a realistic shot at winning seven of the state's eight congressional seats, one more than they currently hold.
The biggest target: Kansas City's 5th District, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Under the revised lines, roughly 59 percent of the district's potential voters would be new. Cleaver ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. More than a million Missouri voters, nearly one in four statewide, sit in districts affected by the changes.
Opponents gathered thousands of petition signatures in December calling for a statewide referendum on the new map. Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins rejected the petition on the same day Missouri held its August primary, a primary conducted under the new districts. Hoskins argued that state law does not allow referendum petitions for congressional redistricting.
The Missouri Supreme Court disagreed. Earlier this month, the state's high court ruled Missouri must use the districts approved in 2022 for the November election. When Hoskins directed local election officials to use the 2025 map anyway, following a federal district court order favoring it, the Missouri Supreme Court temporarily held him in contempt.
Then the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, blocking enforcement of that federal district court order pending a potential appeal and eventual decision by the justices. As of Monday morning, Missouri was set to run its November election under the same congressional map it used in 2022 and 2024. The Washington Examiner reported that the Supreme Court's move effectively kept the older map in place while the legal fight continued.
Monday's 8th Circuit ruling upended that status quo.
The panel's core reasoning was direct. Because Missouri already held its August primary under the new districts, reverting to the old map for the general election would create a constitutional problem. Voters who won primaries in one set of districts would face a general election in different ones.
The panel put it plainly in its written decision:
"The Constitution does not permit Missouri to use a different congressional district map in the November 2026 general election than it used in the August 2026 primary election."
The judges also pointed to other cases in which courts ordered map changes after absentee ballots had already gone out to overseas citizens and military voters, suggesting the logistical objections, while real, are not insurmountable.
The panel's majority wrote that "any confusion stems from the last-minute decision by a state court to switch the congressional map", placing blame on the Missouri Supreme Court for ordering the reversion to the 2022 lines after primaries had already been conducted under the new ones.
The three judges on the panel were James Loken, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush, and David Stras and Justin Smith, both appointed by Trump. Smith, the newest member, was appointed to the bench in June. Before his appointment, he served as an attorney who represented Trump in the appeal of a $5 million jury verdict in a lawsuit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll.
The Supreme Court has been active on election-related disputes heading into the midterms. The justices recently blocked Trump-backed mail-in voting restrictions, leaving states to run elections under existing rules, a reminder that the Court has not been a reliable backstop for every Republican priority this cycle.
On the ground, Missouri's election administrators are caught between competing court orders. Miller County Clerk Clinton Jenkins mailed an absentee ballot Friday to a Missouri voter living in Australia and sent ballots to other overseas voters, all using the 2022 district lines, as the Missouri Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court had required.
State law requires absentee ballots to be available to all other voters by Tuesday. Jenkins suggested that some voters "wait a little deeper into the absentee period, just in case" the congressional district boundaries get swapped again.
That kind of uncertainty is exactly what the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities warned about. In a legal filing submitted to the appeals judges, the group said changing districts at this late date would be "practically impossible" and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
State Sen. Rick Brattin, a congressional candidate who won a multi-way Republican primary under the new map and was one of the Republicans who sued to preserve it, praised Monday's decision. He framed the opposition's position as the real source of chaos, saying that switching districts after the primary "defies common sense and undermines the entire electoral process."
U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, another Republican plaintiff in the lawsuit, has also pushed for the new map's use. After a subsequent federal district court ruling reinforced the 8th Circuit's direction, Onder told the New York Post, "I think the 2025 map that was legally passed by the Missouri General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Kehoe will be the map we'll be using in November."
Missouri's governor, Mike Kehoe, expressed similar confidence, stating, "With today marking the deadline for changes to the November ballot, the Missouri First Map will be used in the general election."
Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, the group that spearheaded the referendum petition, announced plans to take the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court immediately. His statement made clear the group views the 8th Circuit's ruling as an overreach that ignores the reality on the ground:
"Ballots have been printed, and Missourians have already voted. Thousands more will vote before this order seeks to take effect. Officials should stop wasting taxpayers' money on pointless legal action and instead focus on administering our elections."
The appeal will land before justices who have already acted twice against the new map. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked enforcement of a lower court order favoring the Republican-drawn districts. Before that, the Court had separately declined to intervene on behalf of the new map. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the one who declined to take up a previous emergency appeal on the matter.
Whether the full Court will now reverse course and side with the 8th Circuit, or maintain its earlier posture and keep the 2022 map in place, is the central question. The one-week delay window gives the justices a narrow opening to act before the injunction takes effect and election administrators face yet another potential reversal.
Some Democrats have used the broader pattern of court disputes to push structural changes. Sen. Cory Booker, for instance, has called the Supreme Court "compromised" and pushed 18-year term limits for justices, a proposal that would reshape the institution itself rather than address the merits of any individual case.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's recent handling of election disputes has drawn attention from both sides. The justices left a mail-ballot injunction in place over dissents from Justices Alito and Thomas, a sign that the Court's conservative majority is not moving in lockstep on every election-related question.
The practical stakes are hard to overstate. More than a million Missourians live in districts that look different under the two competing maps. Absentee ballots have already been printed and mailed under the 2022 lines. County clerks say switching now would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and border on the impossible.
And yet the legal machinery keeps grinding. A federal appeals court says one thing. Two state supreme court rulings say another. The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked the new map twice but has not issued a definitive final ruling. The lower court judge who received Monday's directive from the 8th Circuit quickly complied with the one-week delay order, but what happens after that week depends entirely on what the justices in Washington decide to do.
The people stuck in the middle are Missouri's voters and the local clerks trying to run an election. They did not draw the maps. They did not file the lawsuits. They are just trying to cast and count ballots while courts at every level issue contradictory orders on a rolling basis.
When election administrators are telling voters to hold off on their absentee ballots "just in case," the system is not working for the people it is supposed to serve. Missouri's redistricting fight may end at the Supreme Court. It should have been settled long before ballots hit the mail.