By John Fritze

(CNN) — The Supreme Court sided with opponents of a Republican-friendly congressional map in Missouri on Thursday, handing down a quick decision rejecting a plan that could have given the GOP an extra seat in the House of Representatives.

The order, issued without explanation and no noted dissent, will almost certainly mean the state will use a previous map that included six – rather than seven – winnable seats for the GOP.

The brief decision will likely affect only a single seat, however, it is an unusual election-related loss for Republicans at the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. And it undercuts President Donald Trump’s effort to eke an advantage out of state congressional maps across the country to retain Republican control of the House next year.

The emergency appeal was filed by a group called People Not Politicians, which had organized a campaign to put the new GOP-friendly map to a referendum. Missouri’s highest court had backed that effort, effectively requiring the state to revert to an earlier map. And when state officials appealed that ruling to the US Supreme Court last week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to review it.

That decision, it turned out, wasn’t the end of the dispute. Minutes after Kavanaugh issued a brief one-sentence order, a federal judge in Missouri reviewing a different case handed down a temporary order that effectively pushed state officials back to the GOP friendly map. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the state would proceed with the GOP map.

People Not Politicians filed a flurry of appeals seeking to pause that order from US District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump nominee. And on Wednesday evening, the case returned to the US Supreme Court.

But the high court’s quick resolution of the case – without any writing or dissent – suggests that for all the drama and confusion around the litigation, Missouri never stood much of a chance. It’s not clear why the Supreme Court sided with People Not Politicians, but critics noted that much of the dispute around the second map involved questions of state and not federal law.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority – and Kavanaugh, in particular – have frequently also cited a legal doctrine known as the “Purcell principle” that warns federal courts against ruling in election cases that could change the status quo right before an election.

Earlier Thursday, the Trump Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to side with the Missouri Republicans, arguing that the group organizing opposition to the GOP-friendly map lacks the right to sue, known as standing, because it had not demonstrated how it would be harmed by the map. And it backed an argument raised by a Republican congressman in the state that switching maps between the primary and general elections raises equal protection concerns.

“The Constitution guarantees an equal right to vote for one’s own representatives,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top appellate attorney, told the Supreme Court on Thursday morning. “Switching maps at this stage would violate that guarantee: Some voters will have had the opportunity to vote in primaries for the members of Congress who will represent them, while others will not.”

This story is breaking and will be updated.

The-CNN-Wire
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