by Jordan Rubin | Sep 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections, Supreme Court
The Supreme Court on Friday refused yet again to back Missouri Republicans’ preferred congressional map, marking the high court’s third action this month against the state GOP’s bid to further increase its partisan control in the midterm elections.
It’s the latest Supreme Court order ensuring that Missouri’s congressional delegation will be decided this fall with the state’s existing map, which is poised to favor Republicans over Democrats by a 6-2 margin, rather than with a map passed last year that could have widened that gap to 7-1.
Voting is already underway with the existing map, which was passed in 2022.
“In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map — not the2025 map — must be used in the 2026 congressionalelection,” the justices said Friday, without any noted dissents, in an opinion that should definitively settle the matter.
“At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map inthe midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos,” the court said in an unsigned “per curiam” opinion, which is the sort of opinion that the court has been using to resolve emergency rulings lately.
Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled in early September that the 2022 map is the lawful one for the midterms and that voters will decide with a November ballot measure whether to approve the 2025 map going forward. In reaching that conclusion, the state court sided with Richard von Glahn, who backed the referendum with his group, People Not Politicians. It was a loss for the state, which had sought to use the 2025 map for November while trying to block the ballot measure from going to voters.
In its first
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court, White House
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been calling out her colleagues in public remarks over their use of the shadow docket, through which the GOP-appointed majority has granted emergency relief for the Trump administration to quickly carry out policies that lower courts have blocked. The Biden-appointed justice has also been refusing to defer to this administration in her actions on the bench.
Those two phenomena were both in play on Thursday as the justice spoke out in public against the court’s fast-track moves while declining to give the administration instant relief in its latest urgent application.
In her remarks at a law school in Washington, Jackson reportedly told the crowd of her “serious concern” that the high court’s handling of its emergency docket is “having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the court system.
That same day, the administration brought its latest bid for speedy relief on deportation powers to Jackson. The application went to Jackson because it had to, not because the administration wanted to bring it to her. The justices are assigned to field emergency motions from different geographical regions in the nation’s lower courts, and Jackson is assigned to the Northeastern circuit that has been ruling against the administration on the immigration issue.
It’s not unusual for this administration to seek such emergency relief. In these applications, it will not only ask for a “stay” (or pause) of a lower court action but also for an immediate “administrative stay” that instantly halts the lower court action while the justices consider whether to grant a longer-term pause.
But this latest application from Solicitor General John Sauer contained an unusual request.
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections, White House
“If Donald Trump were perverse enough to run a write-in campaign for 2028 president, and, as unlikely as it would be, he won, would he be able to take up a third term?” — Dave
Hi Dave,
No.
The 22nd Amendment says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has already been elected twice (in 2016 and 2024). Therefore, he cannot be elected a third time.
Running a write-in campaign, as opposed to running as the official GOP nominee, wouldn’t change that. If anything, due to the long-shot nature of write-in campaigns, he would just be doing something unlawful in a more convoluted way. Some states don’t even allow write-ins.
To be clear, your question and my answer thus far are about Trump being elected to the presidency again. On that note, another scenario I have seen floated is that he returns to the White House as vice president and the president (say, JD Vance) resigns and Trump becomes president a third time.
At first glance, such a gambit might seem to evade the 22nd Amendment’s prohibition on being elected president more than twice. But even if that provision were no longer an impediment, there’s still another barrier: the 12th Amendment. That one says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.” Because the 22nd Amendment disqualifies him from the presidency in 2028, the 12th Amendment would appear to disqualify him from the vice presidency, too.
Of course, this is all hypothetical, though it is fair to wonder in light of the president’s antidemocratic actions to date. As for whether he
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 22, 2026 | Civil Rights, Deadline: Legal Blog, News, Science
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday declined to intervene in a contentious surrogacy and custody dispute, rejecting an emergency application from surrogate McKenna West, who asked the high court to halt a California court order that backed the child’s biological parents.
The denial is the latest in a series of legal wins for the biological parents and losses for West. Tuesday’s order declined to provide her with what the parents said would have been a chaotic, confusing and needless judicial intervention.
As is typical for such orders, there was no explanation accompanying the denial from Kagan, who is assigned to field emergency litigation from California.
West gave birth in August to the child at the center of the dispute. The Alaska woman did so in Texas, which bans abortion. She said the California couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, pressured her to have one after learning that the baby faced a life-threatening heart condition.
The surrogate argued at the Supreme Court that the California court order backing the couple’s parental rights violated her due process rights because, she said, the state court didn’t have jurisdiction over her. Among the firms representing her was Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal group that has had success at the high court.
The parents opposed West’s application on both the facts and the law. In their partially redacted response, they said there was no emergency to resolve because they had been providing the care that West said she wanted. They said they had been with the child, whom they named Rumi, “around-the-clock in a hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit,” and so, they said, Supreme Court intervention would
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 22, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued emergency orders twice in one week against Missouri’s GOP-friendly congressional map. The high court could soon issue a third such order before the month ends.
Here’s how — and why.
Missouri Republicans’ first loss came Sept. 8 from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is the justice assigned to handle emergency litigation from that region of the country.
State officials had sought urgent relief in Washington after Missouri’s Supreme Court blocked their desired map from being used in the November midterm elections. The state court said the proper map for November is the existing one that was passed in 2022, not a new one passed last year amid the Trump-backed nationwide gerrymandering push. The state court said that whether the new map can be used in future elections is up to voters to decide on a November ballot measure.
But soon after the justice’s order came out, a Trump-appointed federal district judge in Missouri, Stephen Clark, issued an order in a separate case brought by GOP congressional candidates, which said the state had to use the new map. That led challengers to the map, People Not Politicians and its executive director, Richard von Glahn, to seek to halt Clark’s order, which the full Supreme Court agreed to do on Sept. 10. Justices can choose to handle emergency applications themselves or refer them to the full court.
That order from the full court seemed to settle the matter — and perhaps it did, in reality — but there is now a third round of emergency litigation making its way to the justices.
8th Circuit revives Missouri GOP’s map bid
The latest round stems
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 18, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court, White House
President Donald Trump’s bid to revive his defamation case against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” regarding his 2020 election claims is now at a critical juncture at the Supreme Court.
When the president filed his petition to the justices last month, the network’s opposition brief became due Sept. 21. But ahead of that deadline, CNN this week waived its right to respond to the petition.
There are two basic routes that the high court can take in light of the network’s waiver.
It can call for a response, in which case CNN would file one and the justices would evaluate it before deciding whether to grant review of Trump’s petition.
Or it can do nothing and let the petition proceed to be scheduled for one of the justices’ upcoming private conferences at which they consider pending matters; if the petition is conferenced without the court calling for a response from CNN, then the denial of Trump’s petition is a near certainty. It would amount to the network saying there is nothing worth responding to and the justices effectively agreeing via their silence.
A single justice can call for a response. It takes four justices to grant review.
The court issues order lists after the justices’ conferences, listing which petitions are granted and which are denied. The lists mainly comprise denials, because the court only grants review in a relative handful of cases compared with the thousands of petitions it receives annually.
We do not yet know which route the court will take in Trump v. CNN, and the court is not on a firm deadline to decide. Even if the court
