A Trumpy Supreme Court justice has defied the president’s will and sparked a feeding frenzy among the MAGA faithful.
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, 61, on Tuesday shot down an emergency bid to hold onto new district boundaries in Missouri that could hand Republicans an extra seat in the House at November’s midterms.
He did not explain why.
Trump’s supporters are livid. A raft of MAGA accounts immediately shared versions of the same post on X featuring Kavanaugh’s official SCOTUS headshot and the caption: “Brett Kavanaugh is a TRAITOR.”
Pro-Trump pundit Eric Daughtery called it “SERIOUSLY disappointing.” Conservative outlet RedWave Press called it “unbelievable!” while MAGA influencer SteveLovesAmmo said it showed how “SCOTUS is severely compromised.”
Donald Trump, 80, nominated Kavanaugh for the SCOTUS job in July 2018. The GOP-controlled Senate confirmed him that October despite him facing accusations of sexual assault and misconduct in office.
Kavanaugh has since backed Trump on certain issues, including immigration and tariffs, but refused to hand him victories on others, like birthright citizenship and the president’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board of governors earlier this year.
The Missouri redistricting push forms part of a nationwide map-drawing war Trump pushed the GOP to kick off last summer.
The party has likely since secured itself new seats in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama, but will need every edge it can get as Democrats prepare to go into the November polls with an 8-point lead on the generic congressional ballot.
A lower court in Missouri blocked Republican efforts to bank themself an extra seat in the state last week. Kavanaugh’s Tuesday ruling on an appeal against that decision effectively told the state to keep using its old maps, rather than the new ones drawn up by the GOP.
In a late-night twist, a federal judge in a separate but related case ordered Missouri to do the opposite and use the Republican-leaning map that Kavanaugh had just shot down.
That second ruling will likely now go to the Supreme Court on appeal, but it means the redistricting effort isn’t dead just yet, and that candidates may still run their midterm races on the same lines as their primaries last month.
Denny Hoskins, Republican Missouri secretary of state, posted a response on Facebook not long after that second ruling was announced, making a thinly veiled jab at Kavanaugh for not helping the party out.
“This victory halts a full-on constitutional crisis,” as Hoskins put it.
