Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied Missouri's emergency stay application on 8 September, acting alone and without referring it to the full Court1. Each justice supervises one federal appeals circuit as Circuit Justice, and Kavanaugh holds the Eighth Circuit, which covers Missouri. The application asked the US Supreme Court to lift the state Supreme Court's suspension of HB 1 so that Missouri's new congressional lines could govern the 3 November election.
Kavanaugh had set a 7 September deadline for responses when the state filed four days earlier. He then disposed of the application himself rather than putting it to his eight colleagues, and his order records no referral and no dissent. A Circuit Justice may pass an emergency application to the whole Court, and Kavanaugh did not.
The practical effect was to leave Missouri's 2022 lines in place, the outcome the state court had reached five days earlier in Von Glahn v. Hoskins. Litigants who lose on the state track usually have one federal argument left, which is that the state court's reading of federal law is wrong. Kavanaugh's denial closed that route without a written explanation of why, so nothing in the order tells the next state contemplating a mid-decade map what the Court thinks of the underlying question.
