Supreme Court allows Texas to use a congressional map favorable to
Republicans in 2026
[December 05, 2025]
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue
of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under
the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and
pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the
map likely discriminates on the basis of race.
With conservative justices in the majority, the court acted on an
emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the
new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March.
The Supreme Court’s order puts the 2-1 ruling blocking the map on hold
at least until after the high court issues a final decision in the case.
Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily blocked the order while
the full court considered the Texas appeal.
The justices cast doubt on the lower-court finding that race played a
role in the new map, saying in an unsigned statement that Texas
lawmakers had “avowedly partisan goals.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the three liberal justices
that her colleagues should not have intervened at this point. Doing so,
she wrote, “ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will
be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result,
as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the
Constitution.”
The high court's vote “is a green light for there to be even more
re-redistricting, and a strong message to lower courts to butt out,”
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at
Los Angeles law school, wrote on the Election Law Blog.
The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional
redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came
several months before elections.
The Texas congressional map enacted last summer at Trump’s urging was
engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.
The effort to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next
year’s elections touched off a nationwide redistricting battle.
Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an
expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the
state’s new map to give the GOP 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 an additional five seats there.
The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California and Missouri.
A three-judge panel allowed the new North Carolina map to be used in the
2026 elections.
The Trump administration is suing to block the new California maps, but
it called for 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’s unclear how the current round of redistricting would be
affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the Supreme Court's order
"defended Texas’s fundamental right to draw a map that ensures we are
represented by Republicans.” He called the redistricting law “the Big
Beautiful Map.”
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“Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by
district, state by state,” Paxton said in a statement. “This map
reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for
Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try
to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement saying: “We won! Texas is
officially — and legally — more red."
Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said in a
statement that the court's decision “to allow Texas Republicans’
rigged, racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect is wrong —
both morally and legally. Once again, the Supreme Court gave Trump
exactly what he wanted: a rigged map to help Republicans avoid
accountability in the midterms for turning their backs on the
American people.”
In the Texas case, U.S. District Judges Jeffrey V. Brown and David
Guaderrama concluded that the redistricting plan likely dilutes the
political power of Black and Latino voters in violation of the
Constitution. Trump appointed Brown in his first term while
President Barack Obama, a Democrat, appointed Guaderrama.
“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map,” Brown
wrote. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial
evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
The majority opinion provoked a vituperative dissent from Judge
Jerry Smith, an appeals court judge on the panel.
Smith accused Brown of “pernicious judicial misbehavior” for not
giving Smith sufficient time before issuing the majority opinion.
Smith, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, also
disagreed strenuously with the substance of the opinion, saying it
would be a candidate for the “Nobel Prize for Fiction,” if there
were such an award.
“The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and
Gavin Newsom,” Smith wrote, referring to the liberal megadonor and
California’s Democratic governor. “The obvious losers are the People
of Texas and the Rule of Law.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hailed Thursday's Supreme Court
stay, posting on X, “Federal courts have no right to interfere with
a State’s decision to redraw legislative maps for partisan reasons.”
The new map eliminated five of the state’s nine “coalition”
districts, where no minority group has a majority but together they
outnumber non-Hispanic white voters. The total number of
congressional districts in which minorities make up a majority of
voting-age citizens dropped from 16 to 14.
Yet Republicans argued the map is better for minority voters.
There’s a new, eighth Hispanic-majority district, and two
Black-majority districts instead of none.
But critics consider that the Hispanic or Black majority in each
district is so slim that white voters, who tend to turn out in
larger percentages, will control election results.
___
Associated Press writer John Hanna contributed to this report from
Topeka, Kansas.
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