Telling the justices that “[a] federal-election-administration disaster is unfolding in Missouri,” Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins came to the Supreme Court on Friday night, asking the justices to intervene in a battle over the state’s congressional maps. Hoskins urged the justices to pause a ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court that would require the state to use the map that it adopted in 2022 rather than a new map which could give Republicans an additional seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that it adopted last year and used in its primary elections in August. “No court in American history has ever given such an extraordinary remedy, which inflicts unprecedented chaos on Missouri,” Hoskins contended.Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency appeals from the region that includes Missouri, has instructed Richard von Glahn, the challenger in the case, to respond by noon EDT on Monday – a federal holiday, which suggests that the court intends to move quickly on the request.The dispute has its roots in a push from President Donald Trump last year for states with Republican legislatures to draw new congressional maps – generally a relatively rare step outside of the normal redistricting that follows the decennial census. In September 2025, the Missouri Legislature passed – and Gov. Mike Kehoe signed – HB 1. If successful, Republicans would hold seven of the state’s eight seats in the U.S. House.On Dec. 9, 2025, organizers submitted boxes containing more than 300,000 signatures in support of a petition to put a statewide referendum on the new maps on the 2026 ballot. On Aug. 4, 2026, the last day on which he could make his certification decision and the day of the state’s primary election, Hoskins rejected the petition, explaining that the state’s constitution “does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting plans passed by the General Assembly.”Von Glahn, one of the proponents of the petition, went to state court, seeking to reverse Hoskins’ decision and block the state from using the new map. On Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court granted that request. In a unanimous ruling, the state supreme court explained that “the plain language of … the Missouri Constitution authorizes a referendum as to ‘any act of the general assembly’ and no exception applies.” As a result, the court concluded, the referendum petition “was legal, sufficient, and timely.”The state supreme court rejected Hoskins’ argument that allowing the referendum to go forward and not using the new congressional map would create “confusion, expense, and practical difficulties,” calling it “wholly unpersuasive.” Among other things, the court suggested, Hoskins himself created these problems by delaying his action on the referendum petition until the last day to do so.Hoskins, the state court said, also fundamentally misunderstood the status of HB 1 pending the vote on the referendum. The new map does not become law unless a majority of the voters approve, the state court stressed; “the 2022 map is the only map in effect.”In his filing on Friday night, Hoskins argued that the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision violates the U.S. Constitution’s elections clause. That provision, he said, gives state legislatures – not a small number of voters who sign a petition – the power to prescribe the “Times, Places, and Manner” of federal elections. The Supreme Court, he said, “has never held that just 3.3% of a State’s voters can unilaterally suspend a disfavored congressional map by submitting a referendum petition.”The state supreme court’s ruling, he continued, also unconstitutionally disenfranchised “hundreds of thousands” of voters by putting them in new districts, where they will be “forced to vote on General Election candidates they had no role in choosing.”Hoskins suggested that the state was “genuinely unsure whether it can switch its governing congressional map in time to run a timely federal election.” By contrast, he emphasized, von Glahn “will get his referendum vote on Missouri’s congressional map regardless of what this Court does. The only question is whether he (joined by a small minority of the State’s voters) can void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”Finally, stressing the importance of “much needed clarity” for “confused election officials,” Hoskins asked the justices to enter an administrative stay – that is, an immediate pause of the state supreme court’s ruling to give them time to consider his request.

The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for political parties and joint fundraising committees, at least for now, to receive favorable advertising rates in the upcoming midterm elections. In a four-page, unsigned opinion, the justices temporarily paused a ruling by a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, that limited the favorable rates to candidates for federal office.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. She would have turned down the request by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee to freeze the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.The dispute began this spring. Under federal election law, candidates for federal office can purchase advertising time at preferential rates during the run-up to elections: 45 days before the primary election and 60 days before the general. On March 30, the Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau issued a “public notice” indicating that political parties and joint fundraising committees would also be entitled to the more favorable rates.Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia and three other Democrats who are candidates for the House or Senate went to the full FCC on April 29, asking it to review the public notice. Approximately six weeks later, before the agency had acted on their application for review, they went to federal court, where they argued that the public notice was inconsistent with federal election laws.A divided panel of the 4th Circuit agreed. Writing for the majority, Judge Robert King held that federal law is “unambiguous”: it gives the preferential rates only to a “candidate” for his or her personal use, which does not extend to a candidate’s “mere authorization of someone else’s use.”Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson dissented. In his view, it was too soon for the court of appeals to weigh in, because the FCC was still deliberating. And in his view, the text of the law is ambiguous: it can “accommodate[], and may indeed favor, the FCC’s view.” Moreover, he added, the court’s decision “restrict[s] political speech in the sensitive period leading up to an election.”The NRSC and the NRCC, which had joined the case, came to the Supreme Court late last month, asking the justices to step in. Like Wilkinson, they argued that the court of appeals did not have the power to consider the candidates’ challenge in the first place because the public notice was merely a “staff-level” document “that is neither final nor an agency action” – an important distinction because the court only has the power to review “final orders of the Federal Communications Commission.” Instead, they contended, the notice “is at most an interpretive guidance document restating the FCC’s longstanding position regarding” the preferential rates.The 4th Circuit’s decision was also wrong on the merits, the committees continued. Whether an entity is entitled to a preferential rate hinges on whether a candidate or “any authorized committee of the candidate” uses a broadcasting station before the election; who pays for the advertisements is irrelevant, they argued. “Indeed,” they suggested, “a candidate might ‘use’ a broadcasting station by appearing in an advertisement authorized by the candidate.”The Trump administration filed a brief supporting the Republican groups in which it contended (among other things) that the challengers lacked a legal right to sue, known as standing. The public notice, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued, “does not grant favored treatment to one side or the other; instead, the notice’s interpretation offers the same benefit to all sides, including the challengers themselves and the committees and parties supporting them.”Ossoff and the other candidates on Thursday urged the justices to leave the 4th Circuit’s ruling in place. They emphasized that “[n]o court has ever held, or even hinted,” that the preferential rates should be available to anyone other than the candidates themselves. And until it issued the guidance at the center of this case, the challengers added, the FCC itself “had long agreed that ‘only candidates are entitled to’” the more favorable rates.The candidates also contended that they have standing because of the negative effect that a ruling for the committees would have on them. They noted that “the Candidates’ rival party committees have promised that if the Public Notice stands, they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars ‘at the candidate rate’ to ‘obliterate’ Democratic candidates like” the challengers in this case, “characterizing it as ‘a complete game changer.’” The candidates also resisted any suggestion that they had asked the court of appeals to weigh in too soon. Federal law, they said, specifically envisions that federal courts of appeals can review agency actions like the public notice as long as the challenger has filed an application asking the FCC to review the action – precisely what the candidates have done here.On Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court granted the committees’ request and put the 4th Circuit’s decision on hold to give the committees time to seek Supreme Court review. The committees were likely to prevail on their argument that the 4th Circuit did not have the power to review the public notice before the FCC had acted on the candidates’ petition for review, the Supreme Court emphasized. “The Communications Act … contemplates that an aggrieved party will file an application for review with the Commission, that the Commission will resolve that application by order, and that public notice of that order will issue before an aggrieved party may petition for further review in federal court. Because the candidates’ application for review was pending when they filed their petition for review,” the court explained, “the Fourth Circuit likely lacked statutory jurisdiction to address their challenge.”The committees will also suffer permanent harm – another important factor in considering whether to award temporary relief – if the 4th Circuit’s decision remains in place, the Supreme Court said. The committees have indicated that, based on that ruling, “broadcasters are already rescinding favorable rates,” which “will require the party committees to pay more for advertising space, thereby hampering their efforts to reach the electorate in the critical weeks leading up to the midterms. That injury, which implicates their First Amendment rights to speak and coordinate their political activities freely, cannot be remedied after the fact through refunds or reimbursements.”Jackson penned a one-paragraph dissent. In her view, the committees “are not likely to succeed on the merits of their argument that the Fourth Circuit lacked” the power to consider the candidates’ case. She pointed to cases (including the proceedings in the 4th Circuit in this case) standing for the ideas that an agency cannot ward off review of its conduct by a court by failing to act and that the failure to comply with requirements outlined in a statute does not strip a court of the authority to hear a case.

The Supreme Court will hear a pair of challenges to the constitutionality of bans on AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles on Dec. 2. The oral arguments in Viramontes v. Cook County, which has been consolidated with Grant v. Higgins, headline the December argument calendar, which was released on Friday afternoon. Other highlights of the December argument session include cases involving the rights of parents to bring a lawsuit challenging a state law on care for runaway teens and Arizona election laws.The justices will hear seven separate arguments during the six days of the December argument session, which runs from Monday, Nov. 30, until Wednesday, Dec. 2, and then again from Monday, Dec. 7, until Wednesday, Dec. 9.Cutberto Viramontes filed the challenge to the ban on semiautomatic rifles in Cook County, Illinois, while gun owners and gun-rights groups challenged a similar law that Connecticut passed in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. In both cases, the lower courts upheld the bans against arguments that they violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms, prompting the challengers to come to the Supreme Court in 2025. After repeatedly considering the cases at their private conferences, the justices finally agreed on June 30 to weigh in.In International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson, on Dec. 7, the justices will consider whether parents have a right to challenge Washington state laws allowing runaway teens to receive mental health care and treatment (including as to gender transitions of their children) at licensed shelters without parental consent.And on Dec. 8, the justices will hear oral argument in Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, a challenge to Arizona’s requirement that applicants using the state’s voter-registration form provide proof that they are U.S. citizens, which also raises the question whether a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, allows states to remove noncitizens from its voting rolls within 90 days of a federal election.The December argument scheduleCrowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (Nov. 30): Whether employees can bring lawsuits for sex discrimination under a federal law that applies to schools that receive federal funding.Wassily v. Blanche (Nov. 30): Whether noncitizens who receive asylum but whose asylum is later terminated can become lawful permanent residents or are instead always ineligible.Jouppi v. Alaska (Dec. 1): Whether the forfeiture of a $95,000 airplane – because a passenger was bringing beer into an Alaskan village where alcohol is prohibited – violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.Viramontes v. Cook County (consolidated with Grant v. Higgins) (Dec. 2): Whether bans on AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles violate the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson (Dec. 7): Whether parents have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to challenge state laws that (among other things) allow runaway minors seeking gender-transition treatments to be referred for services without parental notice or consent.Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota (Dec. 8): A dispute over (among other things) Arizona’s requirement of proof of U.S. citizenship to vote.Grand v. City of University Heights (Dec. 9): A religious-discrimination lawsuit brought by an Orthodox Jewish man against city officials who told him he needed a permit to host a prayer group in his home.