The Supreme Court dropped a short order Friday evening regarding the Missouri redistricting case. The ruling came down just before the writer signed off for the weekend. It states that at least one of the applicants has standing on appeal. This vague phrasing leaves out a key detail. There were two applicants in the case. One is People not Politicians. The other is Richard Von Glahn.
The court did not say which one of them can proceed. The number of valid applicants could be one or it could be two. The writer notes this feels like a guessing game. The Supreme Court usually tells us exactly who has the right to sue. Here, they used conjectural language instead. The order also stays the District Court’s injunctions from September 21 and 22. It stops the Eighth Circuit’s mandate from September 21 as well.
Reason Magazine reports that the writer found the discussion on standing completely unsatisfactory. The court did not explain why they avoided naming the specific applicant. Perhaps the conservative justices could not agree on who had standing. Or maybe the majority did not care about the technical rules at all. The writer leans toward the idea that the court ignored the issue. When electoral chaos looms, the court seems to decide that jurisdiction no longer matters.
The ruling also sidesteps the actual merits of the case. The applicants needed to show they were likely to succeed. Justice Jackson has made this point many times before. Yet the majority admits the applicants do not come close to meeting that burden. The order suggests that when an election is near, the merits do not matter either. This shifts the focus entirely to the timing of the disruption.
Lower court judges have struggled to read these brief emergency orders. The Eighth Circuit faced criticism for not understanding a previous one-sentence ruling. But the Supreme Court faulted them for missing the point of two prior orders. Judge David Stras offered a sympathetic view at a pre-scheduled event. He told the crowd, “They release these short orders that are sometimes really unclear to the circuit courts,” according to Reason Magazine.
He added that it would have been better to have more detail. He said, “It would have been better to have a little bit more, in terms of tell us what to do,” per the source. The judge also asked, “What’s off limits and what can we look at?” This highlights the frustration among judges trying to apply vague rules. The writer feels some sympathy for the Eighth Circuit given the confusion.
