Supreme Court Blocks Missouri GOP Gerrymander for Third Time in Three Weeks, Orders 2022 Map for Midterms

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an unsigned ruling on September 25, 2026 blocking Missouri Republicans’ gerrymandered congressional map (HB 1, enacted September 2025) for the third time in three weeks, ordering use of the 2022 map for the November 2026 election. The ruling ends, for this cycle, a Republican effort to add a seventh Missouri U.S. House seat via a maximally gerrymandered map. HB 1 had replaced Missouri’s 2022 congressional map; on September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court found a referendum petition suspended HB 1 and ordered a return to the 2022 map, triggering three weeks of back-and-forth between state and federal courts that changed the operative map five times before the U.S. Supreme Court’s final block. Justice Kavanaugh’s role in guiding the Court’s action is reported by Newsweek; Talking Points Memo characterized the ruling as a rebuke — a “slap on the wrist” — to the lower judges who had allowed the new map to take effect.

This is a rare instance in the corpus’s redistricting coverage of a gerrymander being blocked rather than allowed to stand or take effect by default: the corpus otherwise documents a wave of Republican-controlled legislatures racing to redraw maps and eliminate majority-Black districts after the Voting Rights Act was gutted in June (2026-06-12–vra-gutted-southern-states-race-to-redraw-maps-eliminating-majority-black-districts), following an earlier, partial setback to the mid-decade redistricting push in Alabama and South Carolina in May (2026-05-26–trump-mid-decade-redistricting-double-setback-alabama-court-injunction-south-carolina-senate-rejection). Missouri’s outcome is procedural rather than substantive — the state courts’ own referendum-suspension finding, not a federal ruling on the map’s constitutionality, is what restored the 2022 lines.