On Friday, the Supreme Court conclusively slapped down an attempt by the state of Missouri to gerrymander its maps for the midterm elections. State Republican officials failed to replace the lawful original map, under which early voting in Missouri had already begun, with a new, more-Republican-favorable map voted on in an emergency legislative session last year. The Supreme Court’s echoed what the Missouri Supreme Court had already ruled, that the state’s new last-minute map could not be used, at least not until Missouri voters have had the chance to vote on the gerrymandered map in a referendum. But as a new Supreme Court term begins in less than a week, this case says less about the state of Missouri or even the broader GOP, and more about the natural consequences that come from a court that encourages destructive election interference at a greater scale with each passing year.

As of the last House races for the congressional term starting in 2025, Missouri has six Republican and two Democratic representatives. Then President Donald Trump issued a nationwide call for Republicans to rewrite their congressional maps, during the unusual mid-decade mark, so that his GOP congressional majority might stand a chance in an unfavorable midterm environment. The governor of Missouri called an emergency special session in September 2025 during which state legislators voted to draw a new map to try to expand Missouri Republicans’ footprint by adding a seventh seat. This 2025 map tried to reach its goal by picking off parts of Kansas City, Missouri—a city with a 40 percent nonwhite population—and dispersing those voters into nearby whiter, rural districts.

The state’s effort to force the 2025 map onto the Missouri public was illegal. Invoking their state’s constitution, over 300,000 Missourians signed a petition to require a statewide referendum in November 2026 to vote on whether the voters wanted to be governed by the new 2025 map in future elections. Before that referendum, however, the legally required map would be the 2022 map. A Missouri voter promptly sued to make sure the state would respect the original map and referendum procedure. But in the first of a series of brazenly undemocratic moves, Missouri Secretary of State Denny L. Hoskins went ahead and ordered the Missouri primaries to be held under the new 2025 map anyway. Hoskins later tried to block certification of the referendum question altogether by claiming that state legislator decisions like this gerrymander were somehow entirely immune from voter review. The dispute eventually made its way to the Missouri Supreme Court, where a court filled with five Republican appointees to two Democratic appointees ruled a couple of weeks ago that the voters had submitted all the legal requirements to put the 2025 map on the ballot. Perhaps most importantly, this meant that the original 2022 map was the proper one for November’s elections.

The Missouri GOP ran from state to federal court to try to keep its preferred 2025 map alive, an effort that officially failed with last week’s order at the Supreme Court. In an unsigned opinion with no noted dissent, the court made it crystal clear that Missouri was to use the 2022 map, if for no other reason than because early voting in the general election had already begun with the 2022 map after the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling.

There’s an unusual air of frustration throughout the Supreme Court’s five-page opinion in the Missouri case, as the opinion made clear to spell out how the justices had already ruled in favor of the 2022 map twice in the past few weeks, only for a lower court to find a new reason to try to keep the 2025 map alive. The 8^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals especially had a field day mangling this area of the law. That court bought Missouri’s argument that the federal constitution required a state to reuse its primary map in the general election even if the primary map was illegal. But, as the high court said, “given this Court’s two prior orders in this litigation, our conclusion that this [8^th Circuit decision] was [in] error should come as no surprise.”

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There’s also a distinct Kavanaugh-ness to the court’s opinion here. Most obviously, Justice Brett Kavanaugh acts as the circuit justice who is assigned primary responsibility for reviewing petitions from the 8^th Circuit. Literally minutes after Kavanaugh refused to allow the 2025 map in the first order, the federal district court issued a new ruling signing off on that map anyway. For its part, Missouri’s petition read like a , seemingly citing every opinion it could find with Kavanaugh’s name on it. This included widely unrelated cases from gun litigation and administrative law opinions from when Kavanaugh was a judge on the D.C. Circuit. The attempt to pander to Kavanaugh’s views was likely never going to work—the court had already denied Missouri’s requested relief twice. But here, it arguably backfired with an opinion that effectively scolded the state for claiming eleventh-hour unfairness when “the Missouri Secretary of State was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks.”

But can the Supreme Court really blame Missouri for trying? After all, Missouri wouldn’t have been the first state majority to gerrymander its way into a more favorable map for the 2026 midterms. By some counts, it would have been the eighth. Missouri was this close to joining the seven Republican-led gerrymanders in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and the Utah GOP’s effort that ended with a court-ordered map that actually favored Democrats. These gerrymanders likewise led California Democrats to gerrymander their map in response.

Given this trend, it makes sense why Missouri thought it could illegally gerrymander here, especially after this past summer, when the court greenlit a gerrymander in Texas even after a Republican-appointed lower-court judge had found evidence of intentional racial discrimination. Or maybe the state noticed how the court finished hollowing out all Voting Rights Act jurisprudence to let Louisiana to delete a majority-minority district in Louisiana v. Callais. Or perhaps how the court allowed Alabama to discriminate in this way with its map, again, after a panel of three lower-court judges issued a 268-page opinion carefully detailing the illegal racial gerrymander. Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama—each of these cases involved the Supreme Court second-guessing one or several lower-court judges who carefully reviewed the on-the-ground issues and found discrimination against voters of color. Adding Missouri into this list thus paints a bigger picture, especially in light of the lower court’s effectively ignoring Kavanaugh’s first two orders. What we see is a court that is quite comfortable allowing slip after slip away from democracy, but that will slow down the antidemocratic trend only when it sees its own authority challenged by lower courts.

It’s genuinely a good thing that Missourians, after fighting tooth and nail in litigation, are going to get to decide for themselves which congressional map they want to use for future elections. But before we start patting Kavanaugh and the court on the back for preserving democracy in this one election, we should remember why Missouri felt so emboldened to bring these uniquely weak arguments to begin with. States feel emboldened to try and subvert democracy because the Supreme Court has enabled them to.

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