WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Texas and its GOP leaders Thursday, clearing the state's ability to use new 2026 election map this is expected to send five more Republicans to Congress.
The judges put aside for now 2:1 decision of the district judges who called the state map a racial gerrymander. Thursday's vote was 6-3 as usual, with conservative justices in the majority and three liberals dissenting.
The court's five-paragraph ruling said the district judges “failed to uphold the presumption of legislative integrity by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the Legislature.”
“The impetus for passing the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage, pure and simple,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in his concurring opinion.
Texas lawmakers said they acted on partisan, not racial, grounds.
“Today’s order demonstrates disrespect for the work of a district court that has done everything that could be asked to carry out the mandate entrusted to it—which has set aside all considerations other than the correct determination of the issue at hand,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the dissent. “And today's order harms millions of Texans who the District Court found were redistricted based on their race. Because this Court's precedents and our Constitution demand better, I respectfully dissent.”
She was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The decision will support Republicans in their bid to maintain control of the House of Representatives and will be a setback for Democrats and voting rights advocates.
This is consistent with the conservative majority's view that drawing districts is a “political matter” left to the discretion of state legislators, not judges. But the court has also said in the past that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments.
In response to mid-decade redistricting in Texas, California Gov. Gavin Newsom won voter approval to redraw his state's congressional districts with the goal of electing five more Democrats in 2026.
On November 21, Texas prosecutors filed an emergency declaration. appeal to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to act quickly to block the lower court's decision.
They argued that the new electoral map in Texas was drawn based on party advantage rather than the race of voters. And they said further delay could derail the next election, as Dec. 8 is the filing deadline for candidates.
They cited the so-called “Purcell principle” as a basis for overturning the district court's decision as it approached the upcoming election.
Mid-decade restrictions in Texas began in July.
“Texas has also convincingly demonstrated that irreparable harm exists and that the equity and public interest favor it,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling. “This court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts generally should not change election rules on the eve of an election. The district court here violated that rule.”
Acting at the direction of President Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the Legislature to redraw 38 congressional districts with the goal of ousting five Democrats from the House of Representatives.
As justification, he cited “constitutional concerns” raised by Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division.
She argued that the state has several unconstitutional “coalition districts” in which the “nonwhite” majority consists of black and Latino voters.
Voting rights advocates said Texas Republicans followed her advice and redid districts near Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth to eliminate those in which Latino and black voters were in the majority.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown said the evidence shows that “the Texas Legislature enacted redistricting not for the political purpose of appeasing President Trump or winning five Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, but to further the Justice Department's racial goal of eliminating coalition districts.”
If that's the case, he said, the new map should be shelved and the state should use the GOP's 2021 map.
