Missouri asks Supreme Court to allow congressional map with extra GOP seat ahead of midterms

By John Fritze, Ethan Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Missouri officials urged the Supreme Court on Friday to reinstate a congressional map that includes an additional seat for the Republican Party, the latest emergency case tied to President Donald Trump’s nationwide redistricting fight to reach the high court.

The emergency appeal comes a day after the state’s top court blocked that map for the November midterm election.

“A federal-election-administration disaster is unfolding in Missouri,” the state told the Supreme Court in an emergency appeal that warned of “unprecedented chaos” if the justices decline to intervene.

The state asked the Supreme Court to resolve the case by September 14, relying in part on a federal law that dictates the timing for mailing overseas and military ballots.

“Missouri cannot run a timely, lawful federal election absent a stay,” Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, told the Supreme Court. “This court has long recognized that last-minute judicial alterations can upend and inflict chaos on federal elections.”

The court ordered the plaintiffs who sued over the map to respond by midday Monday.

Missouri’s new map, which was enacted last year, was used in the state’s primary election last month. But the state’s highest court ruled Thursday evening that officials in Missouri wrongly dismissed a petition with more than 300,000 signatures to let the state’s voters decide on the map via a referendum before it took effect.

At Trump’s behest, GOP-led states have embarked on an unusual mid-decade redistricting to give Republicans an advantage in this year’s midterms. That has prompted some Democratic states to respond with their own redistricting in the hopes of offsetting that advantage.

Overall, Republicans have benefited most from that effort.

And the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has played a significant role, potentially shaping the outcome of the midterms. The court’s landmark decision earlier this year gutting a significant part of the Voting Rights Act led to new redistricting in several Republican states in the South. Meanwhile, the court allowed Texas to use a Republican-friendly map and permitted California to use a map that benefits Democrats.

In May, the court rejected a request from Virginia officials to implement a congressional map that would have benefited Democrats.

The Missouri Supreme Court, on which five of seven judges were appointed by Republican governors, unanimously sided against the Republican-friendly map late Thursday.

In doing so, the judges explicitly rejected the state’s arguments that it was too late to change the map and criticized Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, for dragging the process out.

“These arguments are particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains,” Judge Ginger Gooch wrote.

Opponents of the new map submitted their petition in December, but Hoskins waited until August 4, the last possible date, which happened to be the day of the state’s primary, to declare that, in his view, the state constitution’s right for voters to weigh in on legislation doesn’t apply to redistricting measures.

The court rejected that argument, and Gooch noted in her opinion that Hoskins could have made that determination as early as last year, which would’ve allowed the process to play out earlier. Trump slammed the state court ruling in a social media post on Thursday, saying that it had “ridiculously ruled in favor of changing the maps back to what they were a long time ago.”

The state’s map targets the 5th Congressional District, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, by breaking up its Kansas City base and stretching it into rural and Republican-leaning parts of the state.

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