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MAGA Republicans Challenge Supreme Court Over Redistricting
Developing
In Short: The U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed Missouri's 2022 congressional map, rejecting a new Republican-drawn map that would have shifted one House seat to the GOP.
With the 2026 midterms just over a month away, the chaotic redistricting battle in Missouri has come to a head.
Opponents of the new pro-GOP map argue that the appeals court ruling effectively defied an earlier Supreme Court decision.
The Supreme Court’s decision requires Missouri to use the map enacted in 2022 for the general election, leaving in place the September 3 Missouri Supreme Court ruling.
This ruling mandates that the state place a veto referendum on the November ballot to uphold or repeal the 2025 map.
The new pro-GOP map was used for primary elections in August, but the Missouri Supreme Court ruled these lines never went into effect due to a successful petition drive requiring voter approval.
The Supreme Court's decision is the third time the issue has reached the High Court in the past few weeks.
In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court lifted a stay on Wednesday night that delayed the execution of a female inmate on death row in Tennessee.
The Court vacated the stay in a 6-3 decision, allowing the execution to proceed if carried out before midnight local time.
The Supreme Court also agreed to hear a challenge to ICE's mandatory detention policy after the Trump administration asked the justices to review the case.
The district court ruled Barbosa da Cunha was entitled to a bond hearing because his detention was governed by a different provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Nine federal appeals courts have rejected the Trump administration's interpretation of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
What this adds
The Supreme Court's decision on Missouri's redistricting map is consistent with its previous rulings, upholding the 2022 map which favors Republicans in six of the eight districts but preserves a key seat for Democrats.
The case before the Supreme Court on ICE's mandatory detention policy could have significant implications for criminal noncitizens held in detention while awaiting deportation.
Background
The Supreme Court, with no dissents, upheld a state court order requiring Missouri to use the 2022 election map, which favors Republicans in six of the eight districts but preserves a key seat for Democrats.
The Supreme Court could act at any time on a case involving Missouri's Republican-drawn 2025 congressional map, which is currently the subject of legal disputes.
What's still developing
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 12, 2025.
- And MAGA Republicans are continuing to fight a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the state's congressional map.
- REUTERS/Leah Millis With the 2026 midterms less one and one-half months away, a chaotic redistricting battle rages on in deep red Missouri.
- On Sept. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a lower court ruling that blocked the federal government from using an expanded version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system for voter registration and list maintenance.
- On June 22, 2026, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked DHS from allowing states to access the expanded version of SAVE.
- The U.S. Department of Justice appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled 2-1 to deny the request to stay the decision.
- In an unsigned order, a majority of justices said that, on the merits, they would likely reverse the district court's ruling that the modified version of SAVE violated federal law.
- Christa Pike, who was 18-years-old in 1995 when she murdered former classmate Colleen Slemmer, was scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning, but it was delayed after an appeals court stayed the execution.
- "That the courts would allow her execution to proceed without giving full weight to these facts is unfathomable." The Tennessee Attorney General's Office argued that Slemmer's family had waited long enough for justice to be carried out and the execution should be allowed to be carried out as planned.
- "The Court should vacate the stay of execution to avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics, to prevent further trauma to Colleen’s family, and to protect Tennessee’s grave sovereign interest in the execution of its exhaustively reviewed judgment." Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News.
- The man at the center of the administration’s latest petition, identified in court papers as D.C., is a 62-year-old Dominican citizen who illegally entered the United States and has four criminal convictions, according to court records.
- The district court later ordered that D.C. receive a bond hearing under binding Second Circuit precedent but denied his separate request for immediate release.