US Supreme Court revives pro-Republican Texas voting map
By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday revived a redrawn Texas electoral map designed to add more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives, boosting President Donald Trump’s party’s quest to retain control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.
The justices granted a request by Texas officials to throw out a lower court ruling that blocked the state from using the Trump-backed map and could have handed five U.S. House seats currently held by Democrats to Republicans. The lower court concluded that the map likely racially discriminated in violation of U.S. constitutional protections.
Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Giving Democrats control of the House or Senate in the November 2026 elections would jeopardize Trump’s legislative agenda and open the door to Democrat-led congressional investigations targeting the president.
The Supreme Court’s decision comes amid a nationwide fight in Republican-led and Democratic-led states that involves redrawing electoral maps to alter the population composition of congressional districts for partisan advantage.
Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the lower court’s decision on Nov. 21 as the Supreme Court weighed how to proceed with the case.
Redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a state is a process called redistricting. Legal battles have been raging in the Supreme Court for decades over a practice called gerrymandering—the redrawing of district boundaries to marginalize a certain group of voters and increase the influence of others.
In a 2019 decision, the Supreme Court declared that gerrymandering for partisan reasons (to increase one’s own party’s electoral chances and weaken a political rival) cannot be challenged in federal courts. But gerrymandering based primarily on race remains illegal under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendment ban on racial discrimination in voting.
Many Texas Republican lawmakers said the new map was designed in response to Trump’s demand to redraw electoral maps to create partisan advantage in House races. But the El Paso-based court ruled in a 2-1 decision on Nov. 18 that the map amounted to an illegal racial gerrymander, possibly siding with civil rights groups that sued to block it.
Each of the 50 states in the United States is represented by two U.S. senators in Congress and is represented by population in the 435-seat House of Representatives. California, the most populous state, has the most House of Representatives members with 52 members, while Texas ranks second with 38 members. Republicans currently hold 25 of the 38 U.S. House seats in Texas.
‘RACIST THOUGHTS’
The Texas election map at the center of the dispute was adopted by the Republican-led Texas legislature and signed into law by Republican Governor Greg Abbott in August.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who wrote the lower court’s ruling, wrote that what “ultimately spurred” Texas to redraw its map was a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice urging state officials “to introduce racial considerations into what Texas insists is a race-blind process.”
Brown, a Trump judicial appointee, wrote that the Justice Department’s analysis was based on the “legally false claim” that the racial makeup of the four Texas congressional districts in the state’s previous electoral map was unconstitutional and should be redrawn.
“Had the Trump administration sent a letter to Texas urging the state to redraw its congressional map to boost the performance of Republican candidates, plaintiff groups would have faced a much greater burden in showing that race rather than partisanship was the driving force behind the 2025 map,” Brown wrote.
“But nothing in the DOJ (Department of Justice) letter is couched in terms of partisan politics,” the judge wrote. “The letter instead orders Texas to flip four districts for one reason: the racial demographics of the voters who live there.”
“The state of Texas is only 40% white, yet white voters control 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” the NAACP civil rights group said in a statement after the decision.
The court ordered that the state’s previous electoral map, which the Republican-led legislature approved in 2021, be used in the 2026 elections.
U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, broke with the court majority in a dissenting opinion.
“The winners, in Judge Brown’s opinion, are George Soros and (California Governor) Gavin Newsom,” Smith wrote. “The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law.”
Soros, a billionaire financier and major donor to the Democratic Party, has long been viewed as a villain by Trump and his political base. Newsom is a leading Democrat who has said he is considering a presidential run in 2028.
The lower court’s decision marked the latest setback in Trump’s effort to change political maps. Indiana Republicans walked out of the legislative session called for a new congressional map in that state on Nov. 14.
Democrat-run California reacted to Texas redistricting by launching its own effort targeting five Republican-controlled districts in the state. California voters overwhelmingly approved a new map in November that would benefit Democrats. The Trump administration sued California to block the new congressional map from going into effect.
Redistricting is usually done to reflect population changes measured by the national census taken every decade, but this year’s redistricting was done to ensure partisan advantage.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has already heard arguments in another landmark case dealing with race and redistricting during its current term. Conservative justices in a case involving a map of U.S. House districts in Louisiana have signaled they are willing to undermine another key part of the ‘Voting Rights Act,’ the landmark federal law passed by Congress in 1965 to prevent racial discrimination in voting.
(Reporting by John Kruzel)
