Missouri redistricting clash lands back at Kavanaugh after federal judge and state supreme court issue dueling orders

Missouri's secretary of state faces a contempt hearing before the state supreme court for following a federal judge's order to use a Republican-drawn congressional map, and now the U.S. Supreme Court must untangle the mess.

The legal fight over Missouri's congressional districts spiraled into a multi-court collision this week, with a federal district judge, the Missouri Supreme Court, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh all issuing orders or demands within hours of each other. At the center sits Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, caught between two conflicting court commands and facing the possibility of contempt sanctions from the state's highest court.

The sequence of events moved fast. On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court issued an injunction requiring the state to use its 2022 congressional district lines for the November election, not the new map passed by Republican lawmakers in 2025. But shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, Kavanaugh denied Hoskins' request to stay that state court ruling. He gave no reasons. Minutes later, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, sitting in St. Louis, issued his own order: no map except the 2025 Republican-drawn plan could be used for November. The two rulings pointed in opposite directions.

Hoskins chose the federal order, and the state supreme court responded

Hoskins moved quickly after Clark's ruling. He emailed local election officials certifying the November election and directing them to use the 2025 map, stating that Clark's order "takes precedence over the Missouri Supreme Court's order." People Not Politicians, the political action committee that had forced a referendum on the map, immediately asked the Missouri Supreme Court to hold Hoskins in contempt.

The state court obliged. It scheduled a contempt hearing for 10 a.m. Thursday and ordered Hoskins to appear in person.

That set off a third track. Hoskins, through attorney Lou Capozzi of the Missouri attorney general's office, asked Clark to order the Missouri Supreme Court to cancel its hearing. Capozzi's filing argued bluntly:

"This court should bar the Missouri Supreme Court's attempt to punish Secretary Hoskins for complying with this court's order."

Clark refused. Late Wednesday, he denied the request, writing that "[n]o profit would be gained by upsetting the federalism and comity principles at hand." In plain terms, the federal judge declined to tell a state supreme court what to do with its own contempt proceedings, even though his own order had created the conflict.

People Not Politicians took the fight straight to Kavanaugh, again

Earlier Wednesday, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis had also declined to stay Clark's ruling. With that avenue closed, People Not Politicians filed a second emergency application with Kavanaugh. Their attorneys framed the situation as an end-run around the justice's own decision:

"Minutes after Justice Kavanaugh denied a request to stay the Missouri Supreme Court's decision in this redistricting case, a district court chose to deliver the relief this court withheld based on the exact same manufactured emergency."

The filing pressed further, noting that Clark's order never mentioned the Missouri Supreme Court's September 3 ruling or Kavanaugh's denial. "At no point in its discussion of either the merits or the equities did the district court mention, let alone explain its conflict with, the Missouri Supreme Court's September 3 ruling and injunction," the attorneys wrote.

Kavanaugh responded by ordering Hoskins and the federal lawsuit's plaintiffs, U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin, and two unnamed voters, to file responses by 9 a.m. Thursday, just one hour before the Missouri Supreme Court's contempt hearing was set to begin. The Supreme Court has been active on major legal disputes this term, but the compressed timeline in this case stood out even by recent standards.

Capozzi accused the state supreme court of acting out of spite

The filings from both sides grew sharper as Wednesday wore on. Capozzi, representing Hoskins, took direct aim at the Missouri Supreme Court's motives. He argued that People Not Politicians director Richard von Glahn had filed a motion asking the state court to declare that Hoskins must comply with its injunction "regardless of other orders (except from the United States Supreme Court)."

Capozzi called von Glahn's motion "a blatant attempt to frustrate this court's order." He went further, suggesting the state supreme court was motivated not by law but by institutional grievance:

"Reading between the lines, what seems to have driven the Missouri Supreme Court's disinterest in federal law was its displeasure with the secretary's processing of respondent's referendum petition."

In a separate filing to the Missouri Supreme Court itself, Capozzi argued Hoskins had no choice. "So long as the district court's order stands, the secretary must obey it," he wrote, adding that the court "must not take the radical step of holding the secretary of state in contempt for following a federal court order."

The legal clash echoes other recent state supreme court interventions in politically charged cases, where courts have had to weigh procedural regularity against fast-moving political calendars.

Attorneys for People Not Politicians fired back on jurisdiction

Jeremy Root, representing People Not Politicians before Clark, argued the federal judge had no business interfering with the state court's contempt proceedings in the first place. "A state court conducting a contempt proceeding is not interfering with the federal court's jurisdiction; it is exercising its own jurisdiction over its own case and its own orders," Root wrote.

Root also raised a procedural objection: the Missouri Supreme Court sits outside the Eastern District of Missouri, where Clark presides. "This geographic division creates a serious venue and personal jurisdiction issue," Root argued. "Even for an actual party to an action, a federal court must have personal jurisdiction."

Before the Missouri Supreme Court, attorney Chuck Hatfield made a different argument. He contended Hoskins had manufactured his own dilemma. A straightforward reading of both orders, Hatfield wrote, showed the secretary could have complied with both "by doing nothing until he hears from a higher authority."

"Instead he presents the false, binary choice between two orders rather than trying to, in good faith, comply with both," Hatfield wrote. He cited what he described as a dozen instances in which filings on Hoskins' behalf had belittled the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling.

Hatfield also laid out the stakes of the contempt hearing directly. He noted the court had "broad discretion in fashioning relief, so long as the sanction is designed to compel compliance rather than to punish," and that "Hoskins retains the ability to purge the contempt by obeying this court's injunction."

Nearly one in four Missouri voters could face different districts

The practical consequences of this fight are enormous. AP News reported that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected the Trump-backed Missouri congressional map unanimously, with no justices publicly dissenting. The ruling means over one million potential voters, nearly one in four Missourians, could face significantly different congressional districts between the primary and general elections.

Missouri Chief Justice W. Brent Powell acknowledged the difficulty of the situation. "We're in a precarious situation," Powell said.

Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians, framed the outcome in plain terms. "The law is the law, the Missouri constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court," von Glahn said. In a separate statement after the Supreme Court's final ruling, he added: "Today the law won."

The dispute drew national attention in part because of its political stakes. Breitbart reported that President Trump had backed the new map and called the Missouri Supreme Court's decision "horrible, ridiculous and unconstitutional." Kavanaugh issued his initial denial without explanation, a move that left Republicans without the legal foothold they had sought.

The case fits a broader pattern of high-stakes legal battles reaching the Supreme Court on compressed timelines, where procedural maneuvering matters as much as the underlying merits.

Three courts, two maps, one secretary of state

The core problem is structural. The Missouri Supreme Court says use the 2022 map. A federal district judge says use the 2025 map. The Eighth Circuit refused to intervene. And the U.S. Supreme Court, or at least Justice Kavanaugh, now holds the deciding hand.

Hoskins chose to follow the federal order. His critics say he could have waited. His defenders say a federal court order left him no room. The Missouri Supreme Court set a contempt hearing. The federal judge refused to stop it. And the Supreme Court, which has been willing to wade into election disputes this term, now has a Thursday morning deadline to decide whether to act.

What remains unclear is whether Kavanaugh will intervene before the contempt hearing begins, or let the state court proceed while the federal questions remain unresolved. The two deadlines sit one hour apart: responses due at 9 a.m., contempt hearing at 10 a.m.

When a secretary of state can be held in contempt by one court for obeying another, the system is not working the way it was designed to. Someone in a robe needs to say so, clearly and fast.