The Supreme Court sided with opponents of a Republican-friendly congressional map in Missouri on Thursday, handing down a quick decision rejecting a plan that could have given the GOP an extra seat in the House of Representatives.
The order, issued without explanation and no noted dissent, will almost certainly mean the state will use a previous map that included six – rather than seven – winnable seats for the GOP.
The brief decision will likely affect only a single seat, however, it is an unusual election-related loss for Republicans at the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. And it undercuts President Donald Trump’s effort to eke an advantage out of state congressional maps across the country to retain Republican control of the House next year.
The emergency appeal was filed by a group called People Not Politicians, which had organized a campaign to put the new GOP-friendly map to a referendum. Missouri’s highest court had backed that effort, effectively requiring the state to revert to an earlier map. And when state officials appealed that ruling to the US Supreme Court last week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to review it.
That decision, it turned out, wasn’t the end of the dispute. Minutes after Kavanaugh issued a brief one-sentence order, a federal judge in Missouri reviewing a different case handed down a temporary order that effectively pushed state officials back to the GOP friendly map. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the state would proceed with the GOP map.
