A federal appeals court has ordered Missouri to use its contested 2025 congressional map in November, directly defying two prior Supreme Court interventions and setting up a high-stakes constitutional standoff with a hard deadline looming.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled Monday that Missouri must run its general election under the same seven-district-to-one-Democrat map used in the state's August 4 primary, finding that switching voters back to the older 2022 districts between the primary and general election would violate the U.S. Constitution. The court paused its own order until September 28, 2026, giving the Supreme Court a narrow window to weigh in, again, on a dispute that has already landed on the justices' doorstep multiple times this month, Fox News Digital reported.
More than 1.2 million Missourians cast ballots in the August primary under the 2025 map. The Eighth Circuit concluded that forcing those voters into different districts for the general election would effectively disenfranchise them, particularly in races where primary candidates ran unopposed, meaning the primary was the only meaningful contest.
But the ruling puts the Eighth Circuit on a collision course with both the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court itself. The state high court unanimously ruled in early September that the Republican-drawn map could not be used in the midterms until voters weighed in through a referendum, Reuters reported. And the Supreme Court has already blocked the map twice, once on September 10, with no justice publicly dissenting.
The legal mess traces back to Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, and a series of decisions that multiple courts have now called into question. Opponents of the 2025 map submitted more than 300,000 petition signatures in December 2025, seeking a voter referendum on the new districts. Hoskins argued in separate federal litigation that same month that a redistricting referendum was not authorized by the state constitution.
Yet he did not formally reject the petition. Instead, he spent months verifying signatures, a process that dragged on until August 4, 2026, the very day of the primary. Alicia Bannon, senior director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote for State Court Report that the delay was central to the chaos:
"As early as December 2025, Hoskins asserted in separate federal litigation that a referendum on redistricting was not authorized by the state constitution. But he held off on issuing a certificate on that basis, which would have triggered judicial review, instead going through a lengthy process of verifying petition signatures."
Bannon added that the approach "can also incentivize shenanigans to evade judicial review while harming voters' rights." The Missouri Supreme Court was blunter. In its ruling roughly a month after the primary, the court said Hoskins had "created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains."
That state court ruling blocked the 2025 map, left the older 2022 districts in place for November, and ordered a statewide referendum on whether to keep the new lines, a vote that will appear on the November ballot regardless of what the Supreme Court does next. Missouri officials then filed a federal lawsuit to reinstate the 2025 map after failing to appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Federal District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order requiring Missouri to use the 2025 map. That order came minutes after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to take up an emergency appeal from Missouri GOP officials, as the New York Post reported.
The Supreme Court then stayed Clark's TRO, restoring the 2022 map. No justice publicly dissented.
Monday's Eighth Circuit ruling effectively overrode that stay. The three-judge panel, which included two Trump-appointed judges, upheld Clark's underlying reasoning and directed the lower court to enter a permanent injunction requiring the 2025 districts. The panel found that the Purcell principle, a legal doctrine cautioning courts against changing election rules too close to an election, actually supported using the newer map rather than switching back to the old one mid-cycle.
Abhishek Kambli, a partner at the law firm Holtzman Vogel and former deputy associate attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, told Fox News Digital that the Eighth Circuit's reasoning flipped the usual application of that doctrine:
"The Eighth Circuit said that the Purcell principles support the injunction, not go against it."
The ruling immediately drew an emergency response. Opponents vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, and the justices agreed to review the case for a third time in a single month, even as early voting had already begun under the 2022 map, Just The News reported. Justice Kavanaugh directed Secretary of State Hoskins and two congressional candidates to file arguments by Wednesday afternoon.
The logistical reality on the ground makes the legal dispute even messier. Absentee ballots have already been sent to overseas and military voters under the 2022 map. Missouri county clerks have warned that changing districts now would be "practically impossible" and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Breitbart reported.
Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, said the Eighth Circuit ruling "demands a new map after votes have already been cast. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed, and absentee voting, both by mail and in-person, began today. Those ballots cannot be reassigned to new districts now."
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, however, argued the opposite disruption was worse. "Changing the congressional map in between the primary and general elections is simply not feasible and profoundly unjust to Missouri voters," she said, backing the Eighth Circuit's position that the August primary locked in the 2025 districts.
Rep. Bob Onder, a Missouri Republican who sued to restore the 2025 map after the state court blocked it, was more direct: "The idea that somehow there are conflicting rulings here, sure, the Missouri Supreme Court got it egregiously wrong, and Judge Clark stood for the rule of law and the Constitution and ruled correctly."
UC Davis law professor Vikram Amar argued on SCOTUSblog that the entire premise of the Eighth Circuit's ruling is flawed, because the 2025 map, passed as HB1, never carried the force of law once the referendum process was triggered:
"HB1's district lines lack the force of law, full stop. These lines cannot be used wrongly in November just because they were previously used wrongly in the primary. Two wrongs do not make (or vindicate) a right (to vote)."
Yale law professor Akhil Amar agreed with that analysis. If the justices accept that reasoning, the Eighth Circuit's constitutional argument, that voters who cast primary ballots under the 2025 map must vote in the same districts in November, collapses.
Kambli acknowledged the uncertainty. "It's unpredictable how they'll rule, mostly because we didn't get their reasoning in the last order," he said. "So, we don't know the precise reason why they decided to stay at that time."
But he was clear about the stakes for Missouri voters who already participated in the August primary under the 2025 lines:
"You would have had a large number of Missourians who would have been disenfranchised because they voted for one set of candidates in the primary and will be voting for another set in the general. And what's even more concerning is sometimes those candidates are unopposed so that they miss their only chance to vote as a result of what the Missouri Supreme Court did here."
Redistricting fights have become a recurring feature of the midterm cycle. In a separate case, a Louisiana Democrat abandoned his re-election bid after the Supreme Court struck down a gerrymandered district, a reminder that court-ordered map changes carry real consequences for candidates and voters alike.
If the Supreme Court does not act before the Eighth Circuit's pause expires on September 28, the 2025 map becomes the operative election map for November. Kambli laid out the binary:
"If the Supreme Court does not stay the Eighth Circuit injunction, there's no doubt that the 7-1 map is what will be in effect for this election. There's still going to be a referendum on the ballot deciding that issue for future elections, but for this one, that's how it'll be decided."
The 2025 map expanded the 5th Congressional District, anchored in the Kansas City area, into more Republican-leaning rural territory, a redraw that stands to benefit the GOP. The referendum on that map will still appear on the November ballot no matter what the Supreme Court decides, meaning Missouri voters will simultaneously vote under whichever map the courts impose and vote on whether to keep or reject those very lines.
Bannon, the Brennan Center scholar, suggested that earlier action by courts or by Hoskins himself could have avoided the entire crisis, including moving the primary date or setting a firm deadline for the referendum petition process. Instead, months of delay produced a situation where every available option now disrupts somebody's vote.
Missouri's voters did not create this mess. A secretary of state who sat on a petition for eight months, a state supreme court that intervened after the primary, and a federal appeals court that defied the nation's highest court, those are the authors. The voters are just the ones stuck living with the result.