congressional

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The U.S. Supreme Court again rejected a push to use Missouri congressional maps backed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, a loss for Republicans trying to maintain control of the House in the fast-approaching midterm elections.

The decision appears to clear the way for use of the old maps.

It comes after a pitched court battle shortly before ballots begin going out for the pivotal November elections. The maps were drawn to help Republicans gain an additional U.S. House seat.

It’s the second time the high court has refused to intervene to keep the Trump-backed maps in place.

Lieb writes for the Associated Press.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Missouri Supreme Court has unanimously blocked new congressional districts backed by President Trump from being used in the November election and ordered a statewide vote on whether to uphold or reject the new map.

The decision Thursday marks a rare setback for Republicans in a national redistricting battle. Republicans had hoped Missouri’s new gerrymandered congressional boundaries could help them win an additional seat and hold on to their slim House majority in the midterms.

Missouri Atty. Gen. Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, said she would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the decision “has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis.”

Missouri’s new districts were used in the August primaries. But the state Supreme Court said they cannot be used in the November general election — or ever again, unless voters first uphold the new districts passed by the Republican-led Legislature.

The court ruled that the new districts were effectively placed on hold last December, when opponents submitted more than 300,000 petition signatures seeking to put the map to a vote of the people. Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until primary election day in August to reject the petition. He asserted that the referendum process cannot be used for congressional redistricting. A lower court agreed, but the Supreme Court overturned Hoskins’ decision.

“The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” the court said in its ruling. The legislation containing the new districts “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters.” As a result, the congressional map adopted after the 2020 census “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”

Hanaway, whose office represented Hoskins, called the ruling an unprecedented violation of federal law. So did Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe, who proposed the new congressional map to lawmakers to favor the GOP.

“Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election,” Hanaway said in a statement.

Court ruling hinged on referendum rights

The Missouri Constitution does not specifically say a referendum petition can be used for a congressional redistricting law passed by the Legislature. But the Supreme Court ruled that a constitutional provision allowing a referendum on “any act” of the Legislature encompasses congressional redistricting.

It rejected assertions from Hanaway’s office that federal law prohibits referendum petitions on congressional redistricting.

“This is what democracy looks like,” said Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, which sponsored the referendum petition. “The people of Missouri demanded a voice, and the court just confirmed what we’ve been saying all along. People, not politicians, will have the final say.”

Hoskins, acknowledging the loss, vowed to continue “the war to preserve our constitutional republic.”

The ruling, which capped a year of political maneuvering and legal wrangling, was one of two to go against Republican officials Thursday. The Supreme Court also ruled that Hoskins had wrongly rejected a petition for a ballot proposal making it difficult for politicians to change measures enacted by voters through ballot initiatives. The court also ordered that measure to be placed on the November ballot.

Missouri redistricting targeted longtime Kansas City lawmaker

Missouri currently has six Republicans and two Democrats in the U.S. House.

After Trump urged Republicans to redraw congressional districts to their advantage, Kehoe called lawmakers into a special session last year to reconfigure the 5th Congressional District, held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.

Cleaver, who was unopposed in the August primary, has carried the Kansas City-based district with at least 60% of the vote in each of the last two elections.

Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin won an August primary in the gerrymandered 5th District, which had been stretched eastward to include rural Republican areas. About 59% of the district’s voters were new under the revised map, according to an Associated Press estimate.

Cleaver had not posted campaign signs in many of the new rural areas, explaining that he was waiting for the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision. But he had vowed to continue his reelection campaign regardless of the outcome.

“Despite the cynical and deeply shameful attempt to silence many of our neighbors, the people fought back and won,” Cleaver said in a social media post Thursday.

Brattin, a Marine veteran and founding member of the conservative Missouri Freedom Caucus in the state Legislature, said the decision disenfranchises thousands of primary voters who now will be shifted to different districts with candidates they didn’t get to choose.

The court “handed Democrats a decision they desperately needed in their effort to help national Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives,” Brattin said in a statement.

Redistricting battle spread to over a quarter of states

Congressional districts typically are redrawn at the start of each decade, based on new census data. But Trump’s quest for a midterm election advantage triggered an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle that spread to more than a dozen states, including California — and triggered a dozen lawsuits in Missouri alone.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruling was one of only a few nationally to go against Republicans’ redistricting efforts.

Prior to its latest ruling, Missouri’s top court already had rejected claims that the special session was illegal, mid-decade redistricting isn’t allowed and the new districts aren’t compact enough.

After the Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday, a few hundred people chanted, “Let us vote!” while rallying outside the courthouse. Grant Christensen, of Jefferson City, said he had signed the referendum petition to put the map to a vote.

“Gerrymandering is the same as voter suppression,” Christensen said. “Cutting up districts in order to steer them to vote one way or the other is not fair.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press.

The high desert is not typically a place you look for a wave. But in the vast expanse between the Sierra Nevada and Utah border, a not-exactly-wide-open race for Congress is testing whether a blue wave, should one come November, is ankle-high or something more akin to a political tsunami.

Nevada’s 2nd District has been represented by just four lawmakers since its creation more than 40 years ago. All those representatives have been Republicans.

November’s contest should be another shoo-in for the GOP and its nominee, David Flippo. The district, which takes in northern Nevada, is overwhelmingly white and rural, which makes it solidly conservative. In 2024, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by a decisive 56% to 42%; only Washoe County, home to Reno, kept things that close. Trump won other portions of the district by 50 percentage points or more.

But inflation, Trump’s sagging approval rating and other factors — northern resentment toward southern Nevada, where Flippo lived until fairly recently, the refusal of the incumbent to support his party’s nominee — offer Democrats the not-entirely-far-fetched hope of a major upset.

“It will be an interesting summer and fall,” Mark Amodei, who has represented the district for 15 years, wrote on social media after the June primary. “But I believe it’s fair to say that CD-2, for the first time in its history, isn’t a Republican guarantee.”

That’s just about the kindest thing the congressman has had to say about his would-be successor.

All of which make the sprawling district in Nevada’s rough and rocky Great Basin an improbable political bellwether. A win on such forbidding terrain would almost certainly mean a nationwide Democratic gain of 30 or more seats in November; they need to flip just three to take control of the House.

Flippo, 63, a 25-year Air Force veteran and Trump stalwart, arrived in the district from Las Vegas. He ran for Congress there in 2024, losing in the Republican primary. He was preparing for a second try in the Democratic-leaning 4th District when Amodei unexpectedly announced his retirement in February. So Flippo hightailed it north to run in the far more hospitable 2nd District.

He took on the favored candidate of Amodei and others in the GOP establishment, James Settelmeyer, a former minority leader of the state Senate. Backed by a constellation of MAGA celebrities, Flippo waged a fiercely negative campaign, accusing “Tampon Jim” of voting to put menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms and coddling undocumented immigrants, among other distortions. With Trump’s endorsement, Flippo handily defeated Settelmeyer and 11 other primary opponents.

“”Absolutely scurrilous campaign against … one of the nicest guys around,” Amodei said afterward, on the program “Nevada Newsmakers.” “The voters are never wrong. But guess what? Mark Amodei’s not endorsing [Flippo.] I wish him all the best. No way. No, thank you.”

Apart from his exceedingly short-term residency in the district, questions have also been raised about Flippo’s opaque finances. He has lent his campaign more than $1.6 million and failed to provide the personal disclosure information required of federal candidates. There is also no record of Flippo filing the required statement during his 2024 campaign, according to the Washington news outlet NOTUS.

In addition, it reported that Flippo was fired from a job in the financial services industry after his company accused him of violating policies and regulations.

So, a carpetbagger with a sketchy history.

Flippo’s main opponent is Teresa Benitez-Thompson, 48, a longtime Reno resident, former member of the state Assembly and a relatively moderate Democrat. Those credentials also buoy Democratic hopes. The party’s congressional campaign committee has, for the first time in decades, added Nevada’s 2nd District to its target list, though it remains to be seen how much time and money national Democrats commit to the race.

To prevail, Benitez-Thompson would have to defy political gravity, which is to say overcome the reflexive partisanship that has typified politics in this age of deep voter polarization.

In the last two midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 90% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters supported GOP candidates for the House. In other words, the kind of crossover voters that Benitez-Thompson needs to win have become rare indeed.

““Trump is a huge liability for Republicans; there is no question that the GOP is going to have huge turnout problems, meaning that in a lot of races, Democrats are going to greatly exceed expectations,” the veteran election handicapper Charlie Cook wrote in a recent midterm analysis. “But converting Republican voters to actually back a Democrat — even for a day — is so much harder now.”

Jon Ralston, one of Nevada’s leading political savants, agreed.

“Some of those rural Nevada voters would rather commit hara-kiri than vote for a Democrat,” Ralston said. (No, Japan’s ancient suicide ritual is not particularly associated with honor or custom in the cow counties, as Nevada’s lightly populated stretches are known. But you get the point.)

“I don’t think it’s impossible,” Ralston, founder and chief executive of the Nevada Independent news site, said of a Democratic upset. “But I remain skeptical.”

Here’s the thing, though, about wave elections — and, to be clear, your friendly political columnist is offering no predictions ahead of November. Like a massive ocean swell, which can bear all kinds of flotsam and jetsam ashore, a political wave that is big enough, broad enough and strong enough can carry all manner of unlikely candidates to victory.

Even in the bone-dry desert.