In Texas case, it’s politics vs. race at the Supreme Court

WASHINGTON— The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court raises a question that often divides the justices: Were voting districts determined by politics or race?

The response, likely within days, could flip five congressional seats and change political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, who is overseeing appeals from Texas, temporarily put on hold a judicial order branding the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racist gerrymander.”

State lawyers stated that the deadline for candidates to apply for the election was December 8 and requested a decision by Monday.

They said judges were violating so-called rules Purcell’s principle By making major changes to the electoral map “in the middle of the candidate filing period” and this alone warrants blocking the map.

Texas Republicans have reason to be confident that the court’s conservative majority will side with them.

“We begin with the assumption that the legislature acts in good faith,” Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority last year. South Carolina case.

That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters into or out of newly elected congressional districts, and they said they did so not because of their race but because of the likelihood they would vote as Democrats.

In 2019, conservatives supported partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that determining electoral districts was a “political question” left to states and lawmakers, not judges.

The justices, conservative and liberal, say that drawing districts based on voters’ race violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.

They also seemed ready to limit the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Pending case from Louisiana.

For decades, civil rights law sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their own choosing.”

The Trump administration rallied in support of Republicans in Louisiana in October, claiming the voting rights law was “implemented as a form of affirmative action based on electoral race” that should be ended.

If so, election law experts have warned that Republican-led states in the South could wipe out the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats serving in Congress.

Texas’ redistricting case in the middle of the decade appeared unlikely to trigger a major legal conflict because the partisan motivations were so clear.

In July, President Trump called on Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.

At stake was control of the House, which was deeply divided after the 2026 midterm elections.

Governor Greg Abbott agreed, and in late August signed into law a map redrawing Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio and surrounding areas.

But last week, federal judges blocked the new map from going into effect in a 2-1 decision, ruling it unconstitutional.

“The public perception of this case is that it is about politics.” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown wrote In the opening of a 160-page opinion. “Of course, politics played a role,” but “substantial evidence suggests Texas is racially shifting its 2025 map.”

He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights attorney at the Justice Department. On July 7, he sent a letter to Abbott threatening legal action if the state did not dissolve four “coalition districts.”

This term, foreign to many people, referred to areas where no single racial or ethnic group was a majority. In one targeted Houston district, 45 percent of voters were black and 25 percent were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.

The Trump administration considers them “unconstitutional racist gerrymanderers,” he said, citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Texas governor later cited “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when calling for a special session of the Legislature to redraw the state’s map.

Voting rights advocates saw a violation.

“They said their goal was to get rid of coalition districts. And to do that, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” to believe those coalition districts were unconstitutional and said it was wrong to rely on his advice as the basis for redrawing the state’s electoral map.

He was joined by a second district judge in suspending the new map and requiring the state to use the 2021 map drawn by the same Texas Republicans.

The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, who issued a furious 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals like 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“In my 37 years as a federal judge, I have served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “According to Judge Brown, the real winners are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the Texans.”

“The obvious reason for redistricting in 2025 is, of course, partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding: “Judge Brown makes a serious mistake in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”

Most federal cases go before a district judge and can be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then to the Supreme Court.
Election-related situations are different. A three-judge panel evaluates the facts and makes a decision, which goes directly to the Supreme Court to be confirmed or overturned.

Texas lawyers late Friday made an urgent appeal and asked the justices to delay Brown’s decision.

In the first paragraph of the 40-page call, it was stated that Texas was not alone in gaining political advantage by redrawing electoral maps.

“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset Texas’ new districts, even though Democrats currently control 43 of California’s 52 congressional seats,” they said.

They argued that “the last-minute disruption to state election procedures and the resulting candidate and voter confusion demonstrates the need to block the lower court decision.”

Election law experts question this claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The state opted for rapid redistricting in the middle of the decade at Trump’s behest.

On Monday, Texas voting rights attorney Dunn responded to the state’s objection and told the justices they should reject it.

“The elections are more than a year away. Using the map that has determined congressional elections in Texas for the last four years will not confuse anyone,” he said.

“The governor of Texas called for a special session to dissolve districts because of their racial makeup,” he said, and the justices heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.

But in recent election debates, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to spare states from new judicial decisions too close to an election.

Granting the stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP-friendly map for the 2026 election.

The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal issues early next year.