Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Suspends Ruling That Exposed ‘Racially Gerrymandered’ Map, Giving GOP One More Shot to Grab Five Seats
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily paused a lower court ruling barring the use of a new voting map approved by Texas legislators in August that could add five more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. His order gave the challengers to the state's new map, including several civil rights groups, until Monday to respond to Texas officials' emergency request earlier on Friday to revive the map, and also provided the high court with a bit more time to consider the matter.The Dec. 8 filing deadline for congressional candidates in Texas is fast approaching, and the court-mandated flip-flopping of electoral maps is causing chaos among candidates of all parties who are deciding where, and whether, to run. A voter looks at a map to understand the new redistricting maps approved by Texas lawmakers for the 2026 midterm elections, at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas, on August 27, 2025. (Photo by MOISES AVILA / AFP) (Photo by MOISES AVILA/AFP via Getty Images) Last week, a panel of federal judges in Texas sided with the plaintiffs and blocked the state’s newly redrawn congressional map, ruling that Texas lawmakers had illegally racially gerrymandered the map last summer in their effort to pick up five Republican seats in the House at the demand of President Donald Trump. In a 2-1 ruling on Nov. 18, the court ordered Texas to drop the 2025 map and revert to the congressional map created by the Texas Legislature in 2021, immediately bolstering the 2026 election prospects for Democratic candidates in the five majority minority districts that had been eliminated by Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature. “This is a victory for the voters of Texas and for the fight to preserve democracy nationwide,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., one of several plaintiffs in the lawsuit, along with the League of United Latin American Citizens. ‘Move all the Black People to This Weird-Shaped Blob Thing’: Texas Judge Boldly Declares He Wants More Republicans In County, Pushes Redistricting Plan to Do it The decision was a significant setback for Trump and for Republicans in Texas and nationally, who sought to expand control of the state’s 38 congressional districts from 25 to 30, and to protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. When Democratic lawmakers fled the state in August, temporarily but ultimately unsuccessfully denying Republicans a legislative quorum needed to adopt the new map, Trump criticized them for shirking their duty and insisted that the GOP voters in Texas who elected him were “entitled to five more seats.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to arrest the Democratic legislators if they didn’t return to cast their votes. Among the holdouts was Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu, a Democrat from Houston, who said in a statement Tuesday, “A federal court just stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen. Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing.” While Texas had argued that its redistricting process was based on a partisan political goal to flip seats in Democratic districts, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is legal, the three-judge panel found that Texas lawmakers had instead redrawn its districts in response to a demand from Trump to change their “racial makeup.” “The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority in his 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” The majority opinion (also supported by U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee) relied heavily on a letter that Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, sent to Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on July 7 that made “the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were ‘unconstitutional’ because they were ‘coalition districts’ — majority non-white districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority.” In that letter, “the DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn’t immediately dismantle and redraw these districts, a threat based entirely on their racial makeup,” Brown wrote, noting that the DOJ targeted only majority-non-white districts. “If its aims were partisan rather than racial,” he observed, majority-white Democratic districts presumably would also have been targeted. Just two days after receiving the letter, Brown noted, Abbott added a redistricting session to the session’s legislative agenda and explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve the DOJ’s concerns. “In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote, noting that in press appearances, Abbott “plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.”The end result: “The Legislature dismantled and left unrecognizable not only all of the districts the DOJ identified in the letter, but also several other ‘coalition districts’ around the State,” said Brown. “For these and other reasons, the Plaintiff Groups are likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Texas immediately appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. But candidates only have until Dec. 8 to file for the upcoming congressional election, and primary elections are scheduled for March. Abbott said in a statement that any claims that the newly drawn maps are discriminatory are “absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings. This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.” In his fiery, 100-page dissenting opinion issued on Wednesday, 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, called Brown’s opinion “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism I have ever witnessed.” He faulted Brown and Guaderrama for rushing to issue their majority opinion before he had finished his dissent, writing that “it sets a horrendous precedent that ‘might makes right.’” On the substance of his disagreement, Smith said Brown “commits the grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political. I dissent.” He said the “’ obvious reason’” behind the decision to redraw the state’s congressional maps “’ of course, is partisan gain. … The plaintiffs’ theory is both perverse and bizarre. They actually contend that if the Republicans are sincere about gaining more seats, they could have drawn not five, but six, seven, or eight additional seats, and that the reason they did not is racial animus. The absurdity of that notion speaks for itself. Yet it’s all that the plaintiffs and Judge Brown have to offer to defeat the State’s claim that the 2025 lines were drawn for the sake of politics and not race.“ Chad Dunn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said last week he felt the state would have limited success in overturning the opinion at the high court. “Everyone involved said they were drawing the lines on the basis of race,” he said. “I don’t see how the Supreme Court sets that aside.” The Texas ruling comes two weeks after California voters approved the state’s retaliatory map that aimed to offset Texas’ GOP gains by carving out five new Democratic congressional districts in the Golden State, reported the Texas Tribune. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spearheaded the plan, traveled to Houston earlier this month to celebrate his state’s passage of Proposition 50, which cleared the way for the California Legislature to approve new congressional boundaries. “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom said in a statement last week. “This ruling is a win for Texas and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.” Without the Texas map in place, Democrats’ five-seat pickup in California fully thwarts the GOP’s gains in other states so far, noted Politico, though other red states are still being pressured by the White House to take up the issue ahead of next year’s midterms.
