GOP judges ripped at Supreme Court for pro-Trump midterm hijinks: 'Electoral disorder’

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh listens to remarks at U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s residence during a visit by Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin, ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 12, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis

Missouri’s Map Fight Is a Contest Over Who Gets to Create Electoral Chaos

The Power Sits With the Courts

Missouri officials had printed ballots using the state’s 2022 congressional map. Military and overseas ballots went out on September 18, and in-person absentee voting began the following Tuesday. Then a three-judge federal appeals panel ordered the state to use districts favored by President Donald Trump for the November election—even though Missouri’s Supreme Court had invalidated that map under state law.

The institutional hierarchy matters. Local election officials administer the vote, but they do not control the legal terrain. The federal appellate panel exercised the decisive power: it ordered 116 local jurisdictions to change course after voting infrastructure was already in motion.

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Disorder Was Imposed From Above

Attorney Abha Khanna, representing the group behind a referendum challenging the new map, told the U.S. Supreme Court that officials in all 116 jurisdictions considered a late switch “impossible.” The appeals panel nevertheless deemed it feasible. According to Khanna’s filing, that conclusion rested on the judges’ own assessment rather than the administrators’ account of what election machinery could actually bear.

That is not a story about bureaucratic confusion. It is a conflict between people responsible for running an election and judges willing to override their operational judgment. The foreseeable consequences included ballot reprinting, conflicting district lines and voters casting ballots under a map the panel sought to replace.

Republicans defending the order argued that reprinting would cost only a few hundred dollars in smaller jurisdictions and between $15,000 and $30,000 in larger ones, with some jurisdictions needing no new ballots. But cost estimates do not resolve the more basic problem: ballots had already been distributed, and voting had begun.

A Supreme Court Stay, Repackaged Relief

The sharpest allegation in Khanna’s emergency filing concerns judicial authority. The U.S. Supreme Court had stayed an earlier district-court order requiring use of the new map on September 10. Khanna argued that the appeals panel then directed the same district judge to issue a permanent order in nearly identical language.

Her accusation is specific: the panel treated the Supreme Court’s stay as an obstacle to reformat, not a command to respect. She also contended that the panel lacked jurisdiction because federal law assigns congressional-redistricting challenges to a special three-judge district court.

Those remain arguments presented to the justices, not established findings of misconduct. But they identify the central power struggle more accurately than partisan complaints about which map is “favored.” The dispute concerns whether appellate judges can reconstruct substantially similar relief after the Supreme Court has blocked it—and do so at the point of maximum administrative disruption.

Procedure Becomes the Weapon

The litigation also shows how procedural doctrines can decide whose interests count. Judge David Stras wrote separately that the referendum group and its executive director lacked a legal right to appeal because their asserted injury was a grievance shared by citizens generally. The Republicans who sued advanced the same position.

That argument turns public injury into legal powerlessness. The broader the disruption, the easier it can become to characterize any one citizen’s injury as insufficiently personal. Richard von Glahn had already voted under the 2022 map, yet the procedural fight centered on whether he and the referendum group were entitled to contest an order that could replace the map governing that ballot.

The panel also imposed a September 28 deadline rather than allowing the ordinary December 21 filing period. Republicans said this prevented the challengers from running out the election clock. The practical effect was to compress an already urgent Supreme Court challenge into days.

The Framing Lets Decision-Makers Disappear

Coverage that presents this episode primarily as judges “defying” Justice Brett Kavanaugh risks reducing an institutional conflict to courthouse insubordination. Kavanaugh is not the injured constituency, and judicial etiquette is not the principal consequence.

The material actors are identifiable. Republican plaintiffs sought the disputed map. The appellate panel ordered its use. State election administrators said a switch was no longer possible. Voters had begun casting ballots. The conflict is not between personalities but between judicial intervention and the basic requirement that election rules remain administrable once voting starts.

The article’s emphasis on who appointed the judges supplies relevant background, but appointment pedigrees do not prove motive. The stronger indictment lies in the reported conduct itself: a court imposed a late electoral change despite unanimous warnings from Missouri’s local jurisdictions and despite the Supreme Court’s stay of an earlier, substantially similar order.

Electoral Instability Can Be an Exercise of Power

The larger pattern is the conversion of election administration into litigation-driven instability. Courts invoke procedural categories, standing rules and competing descriptions of feasibility; local officials inherit the deadlines, expenses and contradictory instructions. Voters inherit the uncertainty.

The Purcell principle is supposed to discourage federal courts from changing election rules near an election. Khanna’s filing argues that the panel produced precisely the disorder that principle exists to prevent. Whether the Supreme Court accepted that argument is not provided here. What the reporting does establish is that the disorder did not emerge spontaneously. It followed a judicial decision made after ballots had gone out—and the officials with the least power were left to absorb its consequences.

Thanks to Raw Story

Source: GOP judges ripped at Supreme Court for pro-Trump midterm hijinks: ‘Electoral disorder’

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We warned them.We told them.We shouted from the rooftops.We plead.We begged.They didn’t listen.Now, we all will suffer.Y’all know what to do, right?VOTE BLUE! 💙Vote as if your life — nay, our country — depend on it.Because, this time, and every time, it does.