The US Supreme Court stayed Judge Stephen R. Clark's restraining order in Onder v. State of Missouri on 10 September, with no dissent noted1. Justice Brett Kavanaugh put this application to the full bench instead of ruling on it himself, the opposite of his handling of the state's own application two days earlier. A stay suspends another court's ruling while an appeal proceeds, so Clark's command to use HB 1 stopped operating that day.
Kavanaugh's signature alone sufficed to let a state court's injunction stand on 8 September. Cancelling a federal judge's interference with that same injunction took all nine justices two days later. Whatever the Court thinks of mid-decade redistricting, it treated a district judge overriding a state Supreme Court on election administration as the question deserving nine votes.
Missouri's 2022 boundaries now govern the 3 November vote, which is the result the state Supreme Court reached on 3 September. On that same ballot, Missouri Proposition A asks voters whether HB 1 should take effect at all; approval would bring the map into force 30 days later, around 3 December, too late to touch a single 2026 race. Maryland's highest court put a comparable redistricting question back before its own voters in early September. Two states have now handed the drawing of congressional lines to a referendum after the courts ran out of room.
