{"id":80664,"date":"2026-09-11T08:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T12:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/?p=80664"},"modified":"2026-09-12T09:08:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T13:08:15","slug":"supreme-court-rejects-missouri-map-80664","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/supreme-court-rejects-missouri-map-80664\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Rejects Missouri GOP’s Illegal Map"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe it was a coincidence of the news cycle, or maybe it was a portrait of the moment. In the same compressed stretch of time, the Supreme Court rejected Missouri Republicans’ illegal map, the Department of Justice announced that a premier public university’s admissions system impermissibly favors Black applicants at a campus where Black students barely register on the enrollment chart, a senior Justice Department official spoke at a partisan political rally in open defiance of a federal ethics statute, and America’s richest law firm crowned itself the new king of the Lone Star State. Each of these stories is significant on its own. Read together, they describe a legal and political culture in which the rules are still on the books, but the enforcement is increasingly optional.<\/p>\n

That is a dangerous position for any system of self-government to reach, and the details matter more than the headlines.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court Rejects Missouri GOP’s Illegal Map, Again<\/h2>\n

What did the Supreme Court decide about Missouri’s congressional map? The Court turned away Missouri Republicans’ latest attempt to keep a congressional map that lower courts had ruled could not stand, leaving the GOP’s redistricting strategy in the state in tatters. The practical effect is that the map is dead, and Missouri must produce new district lines before the next federal election cycle.<\/p>\n

The phrase “Show Me State” has never felt more apt. Missouri Republicans were shown a legal boundary, crossed it, and were told by the highest court in the country to stop trying to make the map happen. The Court’s decision did not necessarily reach the merits of every argument, but its refusal to let the map stand amounts to a firm judicial rejection of both the district lines and the strategy that produced them.<\/p>\n

To understand why this is such a stinging defeat, it helps to remember how Missouri arrived at this point. In 2018, voters approved a landmark redistricting reform known as “Clean Missouri,” which created a nonpartisan state demographer and moved district-drawing authority out of the hands of the legislature. Two years later, Republican lawmakers engineered a rollback of that reform, with voters approving Amendment 3 in 2020 and returning map-drawing power to the General Assembly. The stage was set for the 2022 redistricting cycle, in which the Republican-controlled legislature adopted a congressional map that critics immediately attacked as a partisan power grab and, more seriously, as a dilution of minority voting strength.<\/p>\n

Federal litigation followed. Civil rights organizations and individual voters argued that the map packed and cracked Black communities in ways that violated the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. At various stages of the proceedings, the lower courts sided with the challengers. The Supreme Court’s<\/a> refusal to accept the Republicans’ appeal, or to allow the map to remain in effect pending review, effectively sealed the outcome. The GOP’s congressional map for Missouri is now a case study in overreach \u2014 a map that tried to squeeze every ounce of partisan advantage out of the redistricting process and, in doing so, crossed lines that the courts are still willing to enforce.<\/p>\n

The decision arrives amid intense legal activity around redistricting nationwide. Since its 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause<\/strong>, the Supreme Court has refused to hear partisan gerrymandering claims in federal court, declaring that those disputes belong to state courts and legislatures. But that same Court, in its 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan<\/strong>, reaffirmed that the Voting Rights Act remains a powerful constraint on how states draw their lines, particularly when race and partisan advantage become entangled. Missouri’s map, which combined aggressive partisan line-drawing with an alleged disregard for minority voting strength, sits at that precise intersection. The result is a warning to every state legislature banking on a permissive Court: the VRA still bites.<\/p>\n

What happens next? Missouri will need to adopt a new congressional map, with the 2026 midterms<\/a> serving as the first real-world test. The longer the state delays a lawful map, the more likely the courts are to draw the lines themselves or appoint a special master to do so. That possibility \u2014 a map drawn by a court-appointed expert rather than by the party in power \u2014 is precisely the outcome the legislature was trying to avoid. Missouri Republicans now face a choice between negotiating a genuinely more competitive map or watching the courts take the pencil out of their hands entirely.<\/p>\n

Kirkland & Ellis Takes the Crown in Texas and Reshapes Big Law’s Center of Gravity<\/h2>\n

If the Missouri decision is a reminder that the old rules of politics still exist, the legal industry’s infatuation with Texas is a reminder that commercial reality has its own set of rules \u2014 and those are being enforced mercilessly. The richest law firm in America, Kirkland & Ellis, has now taken the crown in the Lone Star State, cementing its position as the firm to beat in the country’s most dynamic legal market.<\/p>\n

Kirkland & Ellis has topped the Am Law rankings for years, generating more than $7 billion in annual gross revenue and profits per equity partner that make compensation at even elite rival firms look modest by comparison. Its rise to the top of the Texas market was not a single dramatic move but a relentless campaign of expansion: strategic laterals, new office space in Dallas and Houston, and an inexorable gravitational pull on the state’s best partnership talent. What was once a boutique battlefield dominated by homegrown Texas institutions has become a headline market in which the nation’s largest firms come to fight.<\/p>\n

Why is Kirkland & Ellis expanding so aggressively in Texas? Because Texas has become the engine of the American economy, and the legal work has followed. Private equity firms need lawyers to close record-breaking deals. Energy companies, from traditional operators to the new class of power-hungry data center developers, need counsel who understand both regulation and finance. The state’s exploding population has generated an endless stream of litigation, from complex commercial disputes to personal injury battles to intellectual property fights. Texas is no longer a regional add-on for Big Law; it is a profit center that can define a firm’s national standing.<\/p>\n

The significance of Kirkland’s coronation extends beyond the firm itself. When the richest firm in America decides that Texas is the place to invest, it changes the economics of legal hiring across the state. Associate salaries at top Texas firms have been pushed upward for years, and partner recruiting has become an arms race. Traditional Texas powerhouses such as Vinson & Elkins, Baker Botts, and Haynes and Boone now compete not just among themselves but against an influx of New York- and Chicago-based giants with enormous balance sheets and national client relationships. The result is a more competitive market, a more expensive one, and arguably a better one for clients, who can now choose between local institutional depth and the full-service scale of the world’s most profitable law firm.<\/p>\n

The cultural implications are just as important. For decades, Texas lawyers took pride in a distinctive regional ethos: loyalty to homegrown institutions, a handshake culture, and a professional environment that felt a little less frantic than New York or Washington. That culture is not gone, but it is being reshaped. As Kirkland and its peer firms acquire larger footprints in the Lone Star State, the old distinction between “Texas firm” and “national firm with a Texas office” has begun to blur. In a few years, that distinction may not matter at all. The crown has moved, and the whole state’s legal ecosystem will continue to reorganize around that fact.<\/p>\n

The DOJ’s Berkeley Admissions Case: A Rigged System That Barely Admits Black Students<\/h2>\n

Few stories this year have captured the strange state of American civil rights enforcement better than the Justice Department’s case against the University of California, Berkeley. The DOJ claims that Berkeley’s undergraduate admissions process impermissibly favors Black applicants. The twist, which almost defies belief, is that Berkeley enrolls only a tiny fraction of Black undergraduates \u2014 so few that the claim of systematic favoritism strains credulity. If Berkeley is rigging its admissions to favor Black students, the evidence is not visible in the demographic makeup of its classrooms.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department’s allegation stems from an investigation into whether Berkeley violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race by institutions receiving federal funding. The DOJ’s position is that Berkeley has effectively engaged in race-conscious treatment of applicants, even as the University of California system has insisted that its admissions decisions are race-neutral. The investigation was part of a broader federal effort to scrutinize university admissions practices after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in higher education in the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard<\/strong>. That decision held that colleges and universities may no longer consider race as a factor in admissions. The DOJ’s action against Berkeley is a direct application of that new legal reality to one of the country’s most prestigious public institutions.<\/p>\n

What are the details of the DOJ’s claim against Berkeley? The federal government contends that Berkeley’s admissions process runs afoul of federal law by giving preferences to Black applicants in ways that survive despite the Supreme Court’s prohibition on race-conscious admissions. The university, which has denied any wrongdoing, has argued that its admission decisions comply with both federal law and California law.<\/p>\n

Here is where the case becomes genuinely paradoxical. California has banned affirmative action in public higher education since 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209. That state constitutional provision outlaws discrimination and preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting. In other words, Berkeley has been operating under a state-level ban on race-conscious admissions for nearly three decades. If the DOJ’s allegations are accurate, Berkeley was quietly disregarding not only the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling but its own state’s constitutional commands for years.<\/p>\n

Yet the numbers tell a very different story from the one the DOJ suggests. Black students make up a strikingly small percentage of Berkeley’s undergraduate population \u2014 a student body of tens of thousands in which Black enrollment remains in the low single digits. The university has spent decades attempting to address this very problem, and its own data shows how difficult that project has been. The idea that Berkeley is simultaneously favoring Black applicants and producing Black enrollment rates so low they draw political scrutiny creates a credibility gap that is hard to reconcile with the government’s framing.<\/p>\n

The practical stakes are enormous. If the DOJ succeeds, Berkeley could be forced to redesign its admissions system, face the loss of federal funding, or both. For universities across the country, the case represents a new front in the post-SFFA enforcement landscape. The Supreme Court may have banned race-conscious admissions, but it left open the question of what “race-neutral” actually means in practice. The DOJ is now seeking to draw that line in Berkeley’s case, and the outcome will determine whether universities can continue to pursue diversity through indirect mechanisms or whether they must abandon those efforts entirely. Given California’s demographics, the gap between the public mission of the university and the composition of its student body is a wound that will not heal easily. And the federal government’s intervention, rather than resolving that wound, may simply inflame it.<\/p>\n

Todd Blanche, the Hatch Act, and a Partisan Rally in Plain Sight<\/h2>\n

If the Berkeley case shows how institutions can be bent to political purposes, the Todd Blanche matter shows how the most basic ethical guardrails are being treated as optional. Last night, at a Republican midterm rally, Blanche \u2014 the sitting Deputy Attorney General of the United States \u2014 spoke about the work of the Department of Justice. It was the kind of performance that federal law exists to prevent, and the fact that it produced only a shrug is itself a significant story.<\/p>\n

What does the Hatch Act prohibit? The Hatch Act, codified at Title 5 of the United States Code, restricts the partisan political activity of federal employees. It prohibits federal officials from using their official authority or influence to interfere with elections and bars them from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty, in a federal facility, or using government property. For most executive branch employees, the law is unambiguous: you cannot stand at a political rally and talk about your official government work.<\/p>\n

Blanche is not a mid-level bureaucrat. He is the second-highest-ranking official in the Department of Justice, the very institution that is supposed to enforce the nation’s laws impartially. His presence at a partisan rally is not a marginal violation around the edges of the statute; it is the law’s center of gravity. When the Deputy Attorney General takes the stage at a Republican midterm rally and discusses the Justice Department’s work, he is doing precisely what the Hatch Act was written to stop: deploying the authority of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency for partisan advantage.<\/p>\n

The Hatch Act has never been a perfectly enforced statute, but it was never supposed to be a joke. Created in 1939 and amended several times since, it was designed to prevent the coercion of federal employees into political service and to ensure that the immense power of the executive branch is not used to tilt elections. Over the years, the Office of Special Counsel has issued hundreds of warnings and investigated thousands of complaints. High-profile violations have produced resignations, suspensions, and sternly worded letters. During the previous administration, Kellyanne Conway was found to have violated the Hatch Act repeatedly while serving as a senior advisor to the White House, and the Office of Special Counsel recommended her removal. She was not removed. The precedent was set then: the law existed, the violation was documented, and the consequence never arrived.<\/p>\n

That history is the essential context for understanding last night. The machinery of enforcement has not vanished \u2014 the law is still there, the Office of Special Counsel still exists \u2014 but the political will to apply it has eroded to the point of invisibility. No one seriously expects Blanche to face meaningful discipline for a speech so brazenly contrary to the statute. What was once a career-ending scandal is now a talking point, a temporary outrage that is consumed, circulated, and forgotten within the same news cycle.<\/p>\n

The damage is not abstract. The Department of Justice stands at the center of every consequential legal decision in American life, from election integrity to civil rights enforcement to criminal prosecutions. Its credibility depends on the perception that it operates above politics. When the Deputy Attorney General appears at a partisan rally, that perception collapses in real time. The party line \u2014 that the speech was personal, not official, or that the Hatch Act no longer carries the weight it once did \u2014 is precisely the kind of reasoning that transforms a law into a suggestion.<\/p>\n

This is how norms die. They are not repealed, amended, or replaced. They are tested, found unenforced, and then tested again, until the violation becomes routine and the law becomes scenery.<\/p>\n

The Unifying Theme: Rules Without Enforcers<\/h2>\n

Look again at the four stories in front of us. In Missouri, the Supreme Court enforced a rule and a district was dealt a legal defeat. In Texas, the richest firm in America wrote its own rules and won. In Berkeley, the federal government insisted that a university broke the rules, even though the evidence is tangled in irony. And in Washington, a senior official broke the rules on camera, and no one is holding their breath for a consequence.<\/p>\n

The common thread is not that the rules are wrong, or that they have outlived their usefulness, or that the country has somehow become too complicated for clean legal lines. The common thread is that the rules are enforced selectively, at times mercilessly, at times with pity, at times not at all. A legal system that applies itself unevenly is not a legal system; it is a set of weapons and exemptions, distributed according to power.<\/p>\n

The Missouri decision proves that courts can still act as a backstop when legislatures push too far. But it also proves how much depends on the willingness of individuals to bring claims, of judges to hear them, and of the Supreme Court to<\/a> pay attention. The Hatch Act, by contrast, proves how much that willingness has collapsed in other corners. The Berkeley case proves how fertile the ground has become for using enforcement power to advance political narratives. And the Texas legal market proves that the most reliable enforcement in America happens where it has always happened \u2014 in the marketplace, where money moves fast and the rules of competition take no prisoners.<\/p>\n

The next year leading to the 2026 midterms will be the first real test of this arrangement. Whether the courts continue to reject illegal maps, whether the Justice Department’s enforcement agenda survives its own contradictions, whether the Hatch Act is ever enforced again, and whether the great Texas legal migration continues accelerating \u2014 these are not separate questions. They are the same question asked in four different arenas: When the rules are written, can anyone be trusted to follow them, and what happens when the answer is no? The institutions are still standing. The rules are still on the books. What remains to be seen is whether anyone at the top is still willing to defend them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe it was a coincidence of the news cycle, or maybe it was a portrait of the moment. In the same compressed stretch of time, the Supreme Court rejected Missouri Republicans’ illegal map, the Department of Justice announced that a premier public university’s admissions system impermissibly favors Black applicants at a campus where Black students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":83225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/80664.png","fifu_image_alt":"Supreme Court Rejects Missouri GOP's Illegal Map","footnotes":""},"categories":[40657],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-legal"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/80664.png","fifu_image_alt":"Supreme Court Rejects Missouri GOP's Illegal Map","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}