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📂 Category: congressional maps,congressional redistricting,republicans,Supreme Court,texas
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue for Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s election to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan to favor the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower court ruling that the map was likely to discriminate based on race.
The justices acted on an emergency request from the state of Texas to take quick action because qualifying in the new districts had already begun, with primaries scheduled for March.
Read more: Texas is seeking a Supreme Court order to use congressional map judges that it ruled were likely racially biased
The Supreme Court order suspends the 2-1 ruling blocking the map at least until after the Supreme Court issues a final decision in the case. Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily stayed the order while the full court heard the Texas appeal.
The justices have blocked previous decisions by lower courts in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, which came several months before the election.
Texas’ congressional map, passed last summer at Trump’s request, was designed to give Republicans five additional House seats.
Efforts to maintain a narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives in next year’s elections have sparked a redistricting battle nationwide.
Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expansive national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the new state map to give the Republican Party five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats five additional seats there.
The redrawn maps face challenges in courts in California and Missouri. A three-judge panel allowed North Carolina’s new state map to be used in the 2026 election.
Read more: Judges are allowing North Carolina to use a redrawn map in an effort to give Republicans another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives
The Trump administration is suing to block the new California maps, but has called on the Supreme Court to keep the redrawn Texas districts in place.
The justices are separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It is unclear how the current round of redistricting will be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.
In the Texas case, U.S. District Judges Jeffrey Brown and David Guaderrama concluded that the redistricting plan would likely dilute the political power of black and Latino voters in violation of the Constitution. Trump appointed Brown to his first term, while President Barack Obama, a Democrat, appointed Guadirama.
“Politics certainly played a role in drawing the map for 2025,” Brown wrote. “But it was more than just politics. Substantial evidence indicates that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
The majority opinion drew an offensive dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, the panel’s appellate court judge.
Smith accused Brown of “malicious judicial misconduct” because he did not give Smith enough time before issuing the majority opinion. Smith, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, also strongly disagreed with the content of the opinion, saying he would be a candidate for the “Nobel Prize for Fiction,” if there were such an award.
“The two main winners of Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom,” Smith wrote, referring to the liberal megadonor and Democratic California governor. “The clear losers are the people of Texas and the rule of law.”
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