The structural question beneath the map

The Supreme Court has ordered Missouri to abandon its 2025 congressional map and revert to the 2022 version for the 2026 elections, according to Fox News. The headlines will speak of partisan advantage won or lost. My interest is in the mechanism — and the mechanism here is one the convention debated with great seriousness: who controls the boundaries within which the people's representatives are chosen?

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution grants state legislatures the power to prescribe the times, places, and manner of elections for Congress — but reserves to Congress itself the authority to alter those regulations. The Court's intervention is therefore not an intrusion on state sovereignty so much as an exercise of the very superintending role the compact assigned to the federal judiciary when lower arrangements are contested. That is how the balance is supposed to work.

The deeper concern — and here I reason by inference from the facts reported, not from personal recollection of Missouri's internal deliberations — is the timing. A legislature that redraws its districts in 2025 for elections beginning in 2026 invites the suspicion that it is engineering outcomes rather than correcting genuine malapportionment. The decennial census is the constitutional anchor for reapportionment; departures from that rhythm demand clear justification.

In Federalist No. 10, I argued that the extended republic would guard against faction by making it difficult for any single interest to capture the machinery of government. Gerrymandering — the deliberate carving of districts to predetermine results — is precisely the machinery-capture I feared. It does not matter which party wields the pen; the structural damage is the same. A district drawn to guarantee a seat is a district that has severed the representative from accountability to a genuinely contested constituency.

The Court's remedy — restore the prior map — is conservative in the best constitutional sense: it returns the parties to the arrangement already in force rather than imposing a novel design of the justices' own devising. Whether that 2022 map is itself equitable is a question the reported facts do not answer, and I will not pretend to know. What I can say is that the principle is sound: when a legislature acts to entrench itself against the voters it is meant to serve, the bench must act. That is not judicial overreach. That is the check the framers placed there on purpose.