By Tom Hicks | September 13, 2026
Editorial Note
There’s been no shortage of court rulings against the Trump administration lately. Read enough headlines, and you could come away believing the system is working exactly the way your eighth-grade civics teacher promised: government overreaches, somebody sues, a judge says no, and the constitutional machinery clicks neatly back into place. The problem is that courts can stop what happens next. They’re considerably worse at giving yesterday back.
MISSOURI FOUND THE LOOPHOLE
Missouri Republicans passed a new congressional map in September 2025 that broke apart the Kansas City district represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver and was designed to give Republicans a shot at winning seven of the state’s eight House seats. Opponents responded with a referendum petition, gathering enough signatures to put the map before voters. Under Missouri’s Constitution, a sufficient referendum petition suspends the challenged law until voters decide whether to approve it. The fight should have become fairly straightforward at that point. Missouri Supreme Court opinion
It didn’t, because Secretary of State Denny Hoskins decided congressional redistricting couldn’t be challenged by referendum at all. He waited until August 4, the statutory deadline, to issue a certificate declaring the petition legally insufficient even though its signatures and timing weren’t disputed. That happened on the same day Missouri conducted its congressional primaries using the new map. By the time the courts finally sorted out whether Hoskins was right, about 1.2 million Missourians had already voted under districts that the state’s highest court would later say had never legally taken effect. Federal court record in Onder v. Missouri
On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court answered the underlying question unanimously in von Glahn v. Hoskins, No. SC101805 (Mo. Sept. 3, 2026). The state constitution says voters may challenge “any act of the general assembly” by referendum, the court held, and congressional redistricting isn’t one of the exceptions. Because the petition was legal, timely, and sufficient, House Bill 1 never took effect, meaning Missouri was supposed to use its 2022 congressional districts for the November election unless voters later approved the new map. von Glahn v. Hoskins
And then came the part that makes this a Blind Spot instead of another redistricting story. Opponents of returning to the lawful map argued that changing districts now would create chaos because candidates had campaigned under the new districts, voters had already cast primary ballots under them, and election officials would have to undo months of preparation. In other words, the disruption created by using a map that never legally took effect became an argument for continuing to use it. The government had managed to turn the consequences of getting the law wrong into evidence that correcting the mistake would be too disruptive. Missouri’s emergency Supreme Court filing
That argument wasn’t theoretical. On September 8, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark issued a temporary restraining order in Onder v. State of Missouri, No. 4:26-cv-01424-SRC (E.D. Mo. Sept. 8, 2026), ordering the state to keep using the new map for November. The Missouri Supreme Court had already said that map had never become law, but Clark focused heavily on what had happened while everyone behaved as though it had, including the August primary and the disruption that switching back could cause. The clock had created its own legal argument. Federal TRO in Onder v. Missouri
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THE CHAOS WASN’T AN ACCIDENT OF THE COURTS
Two days later, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and stayed Clark’s federal order in People Not Politicians v. Onder, No. 26A326 (U.S. Sept. 10, 2026), putting Missouri’s 2022 districts back in place for November while the federal litigation continues. There was no noted dissent and no explanation, which is common with emergency orders. By then, however, candidates, voters and local election officials had endured another round of uncertainty about which congressional districts actually existed. U.S. Supreme Court docket and September 10 order
The Missouri Supreme Court had already anticipated the excuse. Its opinion explicitly rejected the idea that confusion, expense or practical difficulty caused by Hoskins’ delay could justify continuing to use HB 1, because those problems flowed from his incorrect assumption that the referendum wasn’t valid. That point deserves more attention than it got: the mess created by ignoring the legal process doesn’t become a license to keep ignoring the legal process. Missouri Supreme Court ruling and remedy
Hoskins nevertheless directed local election officials to use the new map after Clark’s federal order, despite the Missouri Supreme Court’s injunction. The state court hauled him back on September 10 and found that he had been in contempt of its September 3 order, although he purged the contempt by reversing course after the U.S. Supreme Court acted and instructing officials to use the 2022 districts. Missouri will now hold the November election under those districts, while voters separately decide Proposition A and the future of the Republican-drawn map. Missouri Independent: Hoskins contempt hearing
That’s a hell of a lot of institutional machinery required to arrive at something the Missouri Constitution had already answered. Legislators passed the map, citizens gathered the signatures, the secretary rejected the petition, a primary happened under the disputed map, the state Supreme Court ruled, the U.S. Supreme Court declined one emergency request, a federal judge issued a conflicting order, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened again, and the state Supreme Court convened a contempt proceeding. Eventually, the courts got Missouri back to where the law said it should have been months earlier. Nobody can give those months back.
THE COURTS AREN’T A TIME MACHINE
We tend to describe judicial review as a tidy sequence in which government acts, somebody challenges it, judges determine whether the government crossed the line, and everyone adjusts accordingly. That description leaves out the most important variable in the process: government can act this afternoon, while litigation can take months or years. Policies don’t sit politely in a hallway waiting for lawyers to finish arguing about them. People make decisions around them because they have no choice.
Employees leave jobs, applicants change their behavior, companies spend money, defendants hire lawyers, and agencies reorganize around policies that may eventually be struck down. Some of those consequences can be repaired. Others become part of the permanent history of what happened while the lawsuit crawled toward an answer. A judge can stop tomorrow’s action far more easily than a judge can reconstruct yesterday.
That’s why the familiar headline TRUMP SUFFERS ANOTHER LEGAL DEFEAT can tell the truth while still missing half the story. If an administration gets twelve months of policy before a court finally says the policy was unlawful, calling the outcome simply a defeat gives the litigation result more weight than the real-world result. There is no constitutional Ctrl-Z key. Sometimes losing late is close enough to winning.
70,000 JOB LISTINGS LATER
Consider what happened to federal hiring. In American Federation of Government Employees v. Kupor, No. 25-13305-GAO (D. Mass. Sept. 11, 2026), U.S. District Judge George O’Toole blocked the administration from continuing to ask applicants for career civil-service positions to identify presidential policies or executive orders significant to them and explain how they would help implement them. O’Toole concluded that the unions challenging the practice were likely to succeed on their claims that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act and burdened applicants’ First Amendment rights. Reuters: federal hiring ruling
By then, the question had appeared on more than 70,000 federal job listings, covering positions from air traffic control to nuclear-materials transportation. The administration argued that applicants didn’t have to answer and that the responses weren’t supposed to operate as ideological screening, but one applicant told the court she answered because she feared refusing could hurt her chances. That’s the trouble with calling something optional when the person asking the question also controls whether you get the job. Bloomberg Law: AFGE v. Kupor ruling
Now look at what the court can actually repair. O’Toole can stop the question from appearing on tomorrow’s application, but he cannot identify every engineer, scientist, investigator, accountant, or cybersecurity specialist who saw it during the previous year and decided federal employment suddenly looked like more trouble than it was worth. Those people never entered the hiring system, so nobody can count them or invite them back. There is no government spreadsheet labeled QUALIFIED PEOPLE WE SCARED OFF.
FEMA CAN’T REHIRE EXPERIENCE
On Friday, another federal court reached a similar endpoint after the damage had already begun. In American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump, No. 25-cv-03698-SI (N.D. Cal.), U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in directing FEMA toward a 50 percent workforce reduction, including restrictions affecting temporary disaster-response personnel. Illston found that DHS had usurped FEMA’s statutory authority and that the drastic reduction lacked a rational basis in the agency’s actual staffing needs. Reuters: FEMA workforce ruling
The administration never got FEMA all the way down to half strength, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened while the case moved through court. The Government Accountability Office found that FEMA lost about 17 percent of its workforce during 2025, taking institutional experience with it even as the agency remained responsible for responding to hurricanes, floods, fires and other disasters. Some workers have since returned, but restoring a headcount and restoring experience aren’t the same thing. Associated Press: FEMA ruling and workforce losses
A judge can tell the government that another round of cuts violates the law. She can order remedies and put boundaries around what happens next. What she cannot do is recreate the relationships, knowledge and experience that disappeared when people left an agency whose entire job depends on knowing what to do when plans collide with catastrophe. Once again, the ruling matters, but the ruling doesn’t make the intervening time disappear.
$259 MILLION FOR AN “EMERGENCY”
The damage is considerably easier to count in Michigan. The J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant was supposed to close in May 2025 after years of planning by Consumers Energy, state regulators and regional grid authorities, but Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked emergency powers under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act and ordered it to remain open. Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota and environmental groups challenged the order, arguing there was no genuine emergency justifying federal intervention. Associated Press: Campbell plant case
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed. In Michigan v. Department of Energy, No. 25-1159 (D.C. Cir. Sept. 11, 2026), Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous panel that Section 202(c) is a narrow emergency backstop and that the conditions surrounding Campbell didn’t qualify. The court found that DOE had exceeded its authority by using an emergency statute to override a long-planned retirement that state regulators and the regional grid had already accounted for. D.C. Circuit opinion
By the time the court said so, keeping Campbell open had produced roughly $259 million in net operating costs, according to utility filings. Those costs are expected largely to be borne by customers, and Consumers Energy continued operating under the government’s latest order while reviewing the ruling. The administration lost the case, but Midwest ratepayers don’t get to send the previous year’s bill to the judges. Associated Press: Campbell costs and ruling
That number turns the time problem into something you can put on an invoice. Government exercised the power first, lawyers argued about the authority afterward, and the meter ran the entire time. When the judges finally ruled, they could say what the statute permits going forward. They could not make the previous year free.
THE CHARGE IS PART OF THE PUNISHMENT
The same pattern gets uglier when the currency is somebody’s life. The Associated Press examined 102 felony assault cases brought against protesters accused of assaulting federal authorities in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and Washington. Only ten defendants pleaded guilty to felony assault, about 41 percent of the cases were dismissed, roughly 34 percent were reduced to misdemeanors, and all 12 cases that reached trial ended in acquittals, mistrials or dismissals. Associated Press investigation of protest prosecutions
That doesn’t mean every protest arrest was illegitimate or every federal prosecutor acted in bad faith. AP separately noted serious cases involving conduct such as arson, Molotov cocktails and shootings that produced substantial prison sentences. The problem is what happens when the government reaches for a serious felony charge and later proves unable to sustain it. Acquittal is a legal remedy, not a refund for what happened on the way there.
An indictment begins doing damage long before a jury sees the evidence. You hire a lawyer, miss work, explain the situation to your family and watch your name become searchable beside the words “felony assault,” all while the possibility of prison hangs over every decision you make. Maybe prosecutors later reduce the charge, maybe they dismiss it, or maybe jurors tell the government no. None of those outcomes returns the months spent living under the accusation. Associated Press: outcomes in 102 cases
That’s why “the defendant won” doesn’t always tell us who paid the price.
DELAY IS BECOMING PART OF THE POWER
The cases are different enough that pretending they’re one coordinated legal strategy would be sloppy. Missouri involves election law and a state referendum, FEMA involves administrative authority, federal hiring raises civil-service and First Amendment questions, Campbell involves emergency energy powers, and criminal prosecutions bring an entirely different set of legal protections. What connects them isn’t doctrine. It’s time.
Executive power can move faster than the institutions designed to restrain it. That arrangement works reasonably well when officials treat uncertain legal authority as a reason for caution, because everyone understands that a later ruling can’t cleanly reverse everything done in the meantime. It works considerably less well when the operating philosophy becomes do it now and make somebody stop us. At that point, the delay built into the legal system starts becoming useful.
Missouri supplies the ugliest version because the delay nearly became self-justifying. The disputed map was used long enough to conduct a primary, and then the fact that a primary had already been conducted under it became a reason offered for continuing to use it. The Missouri Supreme Court saw through that circular argument and refused to let problems created by the secretary’s own delay determine what the Constitution meant. Other courts won’t always have a remedy that clean.
WINNING BY LOSING SLOWLY
None of this means judges should start deciding serious constitutional and statutory questions on a stopwatch. Governments are entitled to defend their actions, plaintiffs have to prove their cases, records need to be developed, and appellate review exists because trial judges sometimes get things wrong. A judicial system obsessed only with speed would produce its own collection of disasters. The problem is that the system’s necessary deliberation can itself become something government learns to exploit.
We’ve spent years asking whether the courts will hold. Missouri suggests there’s another question sitting underneath it: what does “holding” mean when the court arrives after voters have already cast ballots under the wrong map? The same question applies when a federal hiring policy has already appeared 70,000 times, an agency has already lost experienced employees or ratepayers have already swallowed hundreds of millions of dollars in costs. A legal victory can be genuine and still be incomplete.
The courts eventually said no in Missouri. The old map is back for November, the referendum will go to voters, and the secretary of state had to reverse himself after being found in contempt. That matters, because the alternative would be considerably worse. It still doesn’t change the fact that the government spent months behaving as though the answer were yes.
A court can declare an action unlawful, vacate an order, issue an injunction or tell government exactly where the boundary sits. What it cannot do is restore every decision, dollar and consequence accumulated while everyone waited for the ruling. A court can stop an unlawful policy. It can’t give the time back. That’s the part of “the system worked” we should probably stop leaving out.
FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
THE CLAIM: “MISSOURI HAD TO KEEP THE NEW MAP BECAUSE CHANGING IT WOULD CREATE CHAOS.”
Bullshit.
The Missouri Supreme Court directly addressed that argument. The confusion and practical problems existed largely because Secretary Hoskins had delayed recognizing a referendum petition that the court later found legal, timely, and sufficient, and the justices refused to let those self-created problems override the Missouri Constitution. Letting government manufacture the emergency and then use the emergency as permission to keep doing the thing that created it would be one hell of a precedent. Missouri Supreme Court opinion
THE CLAIM: “THE FEDERAL JOB QUESTION WAS OPTIONAL.”
Bullshit.
The administration said applicants weren’t required to answer and maintained that responses weren’t supposed to serve as political tests. Judge O’Toole nevertheless found that challengers were likely to succeed because applicants could reasonably understand the question as probing political beliefs, something federal civil-service law is specifically designed to keep out of career hiring. More than 70,000 listings carried the question before the court stopped it. Reuters: federal hiring decision
THE CLAIM: “THE CAMPBELL PLANT HAD TO STAY OPEN BECAUSE THERE WAS AN EMERGENCY.”
Bullshit.
The D.C. Circuit examined the statutory emergency authority and unanimously concluded that the circumstances didn’t qualify. Section 202(c), the court explained, is a narrow last-resort mechanism for an electricity emergency that can’t otherwise be handled through the ordinary state and utility planning process. By the time judges said so, Campbell had been operating beyond its scheduled retirement for more than a year and had accumulated roughly $259 million in net operating costs. D.C. Circuit opinion
THE CLAIM: “IF THE COURTS EVENTUALLY STOP AN UNLAWFUL POLICY, THE SYSTEM WORKED.”
Bullshit.
The courts working and the damage being repaired are two different propositions. Judicial review can prevent tomorrow’s violation while leaving yesterday’s consequences exactly where they landed. Missouri may be the cleanest example because the courts ultimately restored the lawful map, but the primary conducted under the other map still happened. Calling that distinction irrelevant is how we miss the entire story.
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