Republicans suffered a stunning Supreme Court loss. It lasted minutes.

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For several minutes on Tuesday evening, Democrats thought they’d actually scored an important legal victory — and in an election case to boot! But then a single Trump-appointed judge cast a cloud of doubt over that victory, and potentially threw Missouri’s upcoming congressional elections into chaos.

Last Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court effectively halted a 2025 state law that would have redrawn the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans an extra seat in the US House. Republicans, along with Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, immediately ran to the US Supreme Court, hoping that the Court’s 6-3 Republican majority would order the state to use the new, more GOP friendly maps.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

But the Court didn’t just reject the GOP’s request, it did so in the most dismissive way possible. The Court’s order was exactly six words long — “Application (26A304) denied by Justice Kavanaugh” — and it notably was only attributed to one justice, Brett Kavanaugh. The Court’s procedures sometimes allow a single justice to dispose of a case, but the justices rarely invoke this process unless they view the matter as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally involve their colleagues.

But then, just minutes after the ruling, Judge Stephen Clark, a federal district judge in Missouri, ordered the state to use the GOP-friendly maps after all. Though Clark’s case involves different parties — the lead plaintiff in Clark’s case is a Republican member of Congress, not Hoskins — the legal issues in both cases are virtually identical. And Clark’s opinion even acknowledges that, shortly before he ruled, Kavanaugh denied Republicans the very same victory that Clark wants to give them.

Clark’s case, which is currently on appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, is known as Onder v. Missouri.

It’s the latest round of chaos to emerge from what is likely to be an unusually chaotic round of preelection litigation. Both Missouri cases arise out of the Republican Party’s decision to launch a gerrymandering war in advance of those midterms, a war that Democrats have fought back against with limited success. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and his administration have also implemented several new policies that appear designed to skew the election toward the GOP, including Trump’s attempt to sabotage voting by mail, which is currently pending before the Supreme Court.

The glaring error in the Virginia Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision

It’s a terrible time, in other words, to be an election official. State election administrators should expect to spend the next two months buffeted by competing court orders, uncertain rules, and new policies that cannot possibly be legal. They should expect both Trump administration officials and state and federal judges to bombard them with commands that a ballot must be altered, or voters must be denied their right to vote — only to have those commands contradicted by new court orders that may themselves be tossed out on appeal.

For now, for example, it’s unclear which maps Missouri is supposed to use in the upcoming midterms. And the final result in this case will likely turn on why Kavanaugh issued such a dismissive order in the Hoskins case.