Fox News: a map "rejected twice by Supreme Court" is ordered into use. SCOTUSblog: the court "refuses to become partisan"

What we hold. Two reports, published two hours apart on 22 September 2026, both on Missouri's congressional map. They describe opposite things.

Fox News reports an order. Its headline says "Federal appeals court orders Missouri to use congressional map rejected twice by Supreme Court". Its own first sentence says "A Missouri appeals court ordered use of a GOP-drawn congressional map that splits Kansas City's district". Federal or state — one report, two answers, and nothing else we hold settles it.

SCOTUSblog does not describe that order. It uses the Missouri fight, with a challenge to a Postal Service rule on mail ballots, as evidence about the court itself: "two recent and significant cases on the court's emergency docket refute that complaint" — the complaint being that the six Republican appointees decide on partisan lines.

Not settled. Which court issued the order. Whether the Supreme Court rejected this map twice: the phrase sits in the Fox News headline and not in its own text, and SCOTUSblog records no such rejections. Whether ballots are printed: attributed to opponents, with no date and no answer from the state. Neither report names a judge, gives a vote, or quotes anyone challenging the order.

In one sentence: Missouri's congressional map — the lines that decide which voters elect which member of the US House of Representatives — is in court weeks before a national election, and the two reports we hold disagree about what just happened to it.

How it got here. Every state divides itself into congressional districts, redrawn after each ten-year census. In Missouri the state legislature draws them. Fox News describes the map now at issue as "GOP-drawn" and says it "splits Kansas City's district" — Kansas City being the large city in the state's west. Splitting a city between districts changes who its voters can elect. Those who lose a redistricting fight can ask the Supreme Court for emergency relief: applications decided quickly, often unsigned, without full argument. SCOTUSblog treats the Missouri map as one of two such cases. The other, it writes, is a suit to stop a US Postal Service rule "adopted at President Donald Trump's direction, to block the delivery to voters of vote-by-mail ballots unless they appeared on a list" — that is SCOTUSblog's account of the rule, not a finding of ours.

Who is in it. The state, defending the map it drew. The map's opponents, unnamed in both reports. An appeals court, which Fox News names two different ways in one piece. The Supreme Court, which one report casts as twice overruled and the other as deliberately staying out. And the voters of the district being divided, quoted by neither.

What is at stake. The US House is elected every two years and control of it turns on individual seats, so redrawing one district can decide one seat. There is also the calendar: courts have long been wary of changing election rules close to voting day, which is what would make the claim that ballots are already printed matter, if it holds.

Where it stands. One report says an order is in force. The other, on the same fight on the same day, does not mention it. We hold nothing that resolves the two.