So let\u2019s take a look at this live constitutional crisis. <\/p>\n
The state\u2019s highest court has ruled that the gerrymander \u201cis not the law and has never been the law.\u201d A single federal district judge has now forbidden state officials from using the only map their own state Supreme Court says is legal. Hoskins promptly told local election officials that Clark\u2019s order \u201ctakes precedence over the Missouri Supreme Court\u2019s order.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a Tuesday-night order<\/a>, Chief Justice W. Brent Powell directed Hoskins to appear in person Thursday and show cause why he shouldn\u2019t be held in contempt for violating the court\u2019s September 3 injunction \u2014 which predates Clark\u2019s TRO by five days. Powell wants him to explain, among other things, why his September 8 email telling clerks to use the gerrymandered map wasn\u2019t a flat violation, and how that injunction somehow stopped being in effect the moment the U.S. Supreme Court declined to touch the case. And the order hands Hoskins a pointed third option: if he won\u2019t comply, he is to take no action on the congressional map at all until a court with actual jurisdiction to review a Missouri Supreme Court judgment \u2014 the U.S. Supreme Court, not a rando district judge in the Eastern District \u2014 says otherwise.<\/p>\n The legal commentariat was not charitable. Chris Geidner called the ruling \u201cvery bad on law\u201d<\/a> and described Clark as spreading chaos across Missouri the day after the Supreme Court pointedly refused to. Election law scholar Travis Crum was drier about it: Clark heard the Supreme Court\u2019s message and \u201cdecided to plow ahead anyways.\u201d<\/a> Crum\u2019s bet is that the Eighth Circuit will relay that message a second time, and that if the panel somehow misses it, Kavanaugh will be glad to repeat himself. Rick Hasen, who had already pronounced Missouri\u2019s Supreme Court argument \u201cweak,\u201d greeted the whole spectacle by noting that the night was still young<\/a>.<\/p>\n And of course it is a Trump-appointed, FedSoc-approved judge trying to make the MAGA midterm wishlist real. We\u2019ve spent months watching Trump\u2019s true-believer judges<\/a> rule for the president at rates their merely conservative colleagues never approach and Clark just supplied the most vivid illustration yet.<\/p>\n Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The post The Supreme Court Wouldn\u2019t Save Missouri\u2019s Gerrymander, A Trump Judge Did It Anyway<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n On Tuesday afternoon, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did something that in almost any other timeline but this current hellscape would be unremarkable. Acting as circuit justice for the Eighth Circuit, he denied Missouri\u2019s emergency bid to reinstate the congressional gerrymander that the state\u2019s own Supreme Court had just tossed. <\/p>\n And if you, like most legal observers, assumed that was the end of the story, boy, oh boy, were you wrong! Because a Trump district court judge just told Brett Kavanaugh to hold his beer.<\/p>\n After Kavanaugh declined to intervene, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee sitting in the Eastern District of Missouri, did the intervening himself.<\/a> Because when the Supreme Court says no, it is obviously up to a district court judge to meddle! Clark granted a 14-day temporary restraining order in a separate longshot suit brought by Republican Rep. Bob Onder and a couple of GOP-friendly voters, barring Secretary of State Denny Hoskins from using any map other than the gerrymandered one for the November election. Clark\u2019s ruling has, pretty obviously at this point, been appealed<\/a> to the Eighth Circuit.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s take a look at this live constitutional crisis. <\/p>\n The state\u2019s highest court has ruled that the gerrymander \u201cis not the law and has never been the law.\u201d A single federal district judge has now forbidden state officials from using the only map their own state Supreme Court says is legal. Hoskins promptly told local election officials that Clark\u2019s order \u201ctakes precedence over the Missouri Supreme Court\u2019s order.\u201d<\/p>\n In a Tuesday-night order<\/a>, Chief Justice W. Brent Powell directed Hoskins to appear in person Thursday and show cause why he shouldn\u2019t be held in contempt for violating the court\u2019s September 3 injunction \u2014 which predates Clark\u2019s TRO by five days. Powell wants him to explain, among other things, why his September 8 email telling clerks to use the gerrymandered map wasn\u2019t a flat violation, and how that injunction somehow stopped being in effect the moment the U.S. Supreme Court declined to touch the case. And the order hands Hoskins a pointed third option: if he won\u2019t comply, he is to take no action on the congressional map at all until a court with actual jurisdiction to review a Missouri Supreme Court judgment \u2014 the U.S. Supreme Court, not a rando district judge in the Eastern District \u2014 says otherwise.<\/p>\n The legal commentariat was not charitable. Chris Geidner called the ruling \u201cvery bad on law\u201d<\/a> and described Clark as spreading chaos across Missouri the day after the Supreme Court pointedly refused to. Election law scholar Travis Crum was drier about it: Clark heard the Supreme Court\u2019s message and \u201cdecided to plow ahead anyways.\u201d<\/a> Crum\u2019s bet is that the Eighth Circuit will relay that message a second time, and that if the panel somehow misses it, Kavanaugh will be glad to repeat himself. Rick Hasen, who had already pronounced Missouri\u2019s Supreme Court argument \u201cweak,\u201d greeted the whole spectacle by noting that the night was still young<\/a>.<\/p>\n And of course it is a Trump-appointed, FedSoc-approved judge trying to make the MAGA midterm wishlist real. We\u2019ve spent months watching Trump\u2019s true-believer judges<\/a> rule for the president at rates their merely conservative colleagues never approach and Clark just supplied the most vivid illustration yet.<\/p>\n On Tuesday afternoon, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did something that in almost any other timeline but this current hellscape would be unremarkable. Acting as circuit justice for the Eighth Circuit, he denied Missouri\u2019s emergency bid to reinstate the congressional gerrymander that the state\u2019s own Supreme Court had just tossed. And if you, like most legal observers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":162465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"