The Supreme Court's Own Permissiveness Toward Gerrymandering Emboldened Missouri's Defiance
Source: Alexis Romero. "The Supreme Court is furious at defiant judges. The justices should look in the mirror.." September 29, 2026. slate.com
The Gist
The author argues that the Supreme Court is being hypocritical when it expresses frustration at lower courts and Missouri Republicans for defying its rulings on an illegal gerrymandered map. The real problem, the author says, is that the Supreme Court itself created this mess by repeatedly allowing gerrymandering and racial discrimination in redistricting cases in other states, which emboldened Missouri to try the same thing—and the Court only got angry when its own authority, not democracy itself, was challenged.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court's frustration with lower courts and states defying its rulings in the Missouri map case is hypocritical, because the Court itself created the permissive environment that emboldened states to attempt illegal gerrymanders in the first place, only cracking down when its own institutional authority was directly challenged rather than when democracy itself was being undermined.
Premises
- Missouri Republicans attempted to force through an illegal gerrymandered map, and lower federal courts (the 8th Circuit) repeatedly defied clear Supreme Court orders rejecting that map, requiring the Court to intervene multiple times.
- Missouri was not an outlier: it would have been the eighth state to attempt a gerrymander for the 2026 midterms following a wave of similar Republican-led efforts in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah (which also prompted a retaliatory Democratic gerrymander in California).
- In prior cases (Texas, Louisiana v. Callais, Alabama), the Supreme Court overruled or hollowed out lower-court findings of intentional racial discrimination in redistricting, effectively greenlighting gerrymanders despite careful lower-court fact-finding.
- Given this pattern of permissiveness, Missouri had rational grounds to believe it could similarly get away with an illegal gerrymander, which explains why the state pursued 'uniquely weak arguments' with confidence.
- The Court's angry, frustrated tone in the Missouri opinion emerged only because a lower court defied its direct, repeated orders (an affront to its own authority), not because of the underlying anti-democratic harm of gerrymandering itself.
- This reveals that the Court prioritizes protecting its own institutional authority over consistently protecting democratic and voting rights principles.
Assumptions
- The Supreme Court's prior rulings in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama meaningfully signaled to other states that aggressive gerrymandering attempts would likely succeed or face minimal consequences.
- The Court's institutional behavior (siding with lower-court authority) can be fairly characterized as being about self-protection rather than legitimate legal reasoning specific to each case.
- There is a meaningful causal link between the Court's rulings in unrelated states' cases and Missouri's specific decision-making calculus.
- The Court could have ruled differently in the earlier cases (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama) in ways that would have deterred rather than encouraged further gerrymandering attempts.
- State legislators' redistricting decisions are appropriately understood as part of a national 'trend' rather than isolated, state-specific legal disputes.