The Supreme Court just handed Republicans a surprisingly decisive midterm loss

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For the second time this week, the Court rules against Missouri’s Republican gerrymander.

At 10:03 am ET, according to the Supreme Court’s docket, a group of Republican plaintiffs filed a brief asking the Court to bless a GOP gerrymander in Missouri. Less than half an hour later, the Court issued a brief order telling these Republicans no — a rare scolding from this Court for the Republican Party, and a rejection of the party’s latest effort to skew elections in its favor.

The decision is notable for this Court, but it isn’t particularly surprising. Earlier this week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied a similar request from another set of Republican litigants. But, minutes after Kavanaugh did so, a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge issued a new order that would have forced Missouri to use the Republican Party’s maps anyway.

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

The Court’s new decision in People Not Politicians v. Onder places that judge’s decision on hold. As a practical matter, this means that, in the upcoming midterm elections, Missouri will almost certainly use the same maps it used in the 2024 election — which elected six Republicans and two Democrats to the US House — rather than the new maps, which were designed to give Republicans an extra seat.

Reading between the lines of the Court’s order in People Not Politicians, it appears that the justices were quite frustrated by the Republican Party’s tactics in this dispute. When Kavanaugh previously denied the GOP’s request to use its new gerrymandered maps, he did so using a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process the justices rarely use unless they view a matter as so one-sided that it’s not worth formally involving their colleagues.

Similarly, the Court’s new order was issued almost immediately after the Republican plaintiffs filed their brief — so fast, in fact, that it’s unclear whether the justices even had time to read that brief. And the order also appears to be unanimous. No justice indicated that they dissent (although it is possible that one or more justices disagree with the order but decided not to make that disagreement public).

This is how the Court behaves when they want to send a clear signal that a litigant’s arguments are entirely without merit. It’s the judicial equivalent of a spanking.

More broadly, the litigation over the Missouri gerrymander should give some assurance to Democrats, and to supporters of liberal democracy more broadly, that this Court isn’t wholly subservient to President Donald Trump or his Republican Party. The Court has a 6-3 Republican majority, and it often hands down decisions benefiting the GOP that cannot be defended using the traditional tools of legal reasoning — such as its 2024 decision holding that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.

But it appears that there are some lines that this Court won’t allow the Republican Party to cross.