Supreme Court allows Texas to use Trump-backed congressional map in midterms

[LetMyPeopleVote]

I was afraid of this. The filing deadline is Monday, Dec 8. The gerrymandered maps will be used.

Link to tweet

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/politics/supreme-court-allows-texas-to-use-trump-backed-congressional-map-in-midterms

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.

The decision could have significant consequences for next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of the House for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Had Texas been blocked from using its new map, it would have upended Trump’s nationwide push to avoid a Democratic House majority.

The court issued a brief unsigned opinion granting Texas’s request over the objection from the court’s three liberal justices.

In its brief order, the Supreme Court said that a lower court that ruled against the map likely did so in error, in part because it failed to honor “the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.”

...The legal battles over Trump’s mid-decade congressional redistricting strategy will continue to play out in coming weeks. Last week, the Justice Department sued officials in California over new maps meant to give Democrats in the Golden State an edge next year. A court is set to hear arguments in that case next month.

[SSJVegeta]

1. Its perplexing watching bad people do bad things to themselves.

But I will allow it!

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. Scathing dissent from Justice Kagan:

Link to tweet

Scathing dissent from Justice Kagan:

"[T]his Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record. We are a higher court than the District Court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision. That is why we are supposed to use a clear-error standard of review—why we are supposed to uphold the District Court’s decision that race-based line-drawing occurred (even if we would have ruled differently) so long as it is plausible. Without so much as a word about that standard, this Court today announces that Texas may run next year's elections with a map the District Court found to have violated all our oft-repeated strictures about the use of race in districting. Today's order disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right. And today's order disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race. Because this Court's precedents and our Constitution demand better, I respectfully dissent."

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Here is a good explanation of this ruling by Prof. Hasen

Last edited Fri Dec 5, 2025, 12:59 PM - Edit history (1)

I have been following Prof. Hasen for a long time

Breaking: Supreme Court on 6-3 Party Line Vote, Allows Texas to Use Its Re-redistricting Maps for 2026 Congressional Elections electionlawblog.org?p=153359

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social) 2025-12-04T23:11:29.191Z

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=153359

The majority opinion is short and unsigned. It makes essentially two points:

The district court made two legal errors in preliminarily evaluating the merits. First, the district court should have presumed more good faith on Texas’s behalf when they drew the maps, and the failure of the plaintiffs to produce alternative maps (that could achieve the same partisan goals without as much racial sorting) was a “dispositive” or “near dispositive” reason to lose on the merits.

In looking at the other factors for granting a stay, including balancing the hardship of the parties, the Court, without naming Purcell, invokes the Purcell principle on timing. “The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Justice Alito, for himself and Justice Gorsuch briefly concurred to respond to two points in the dissent. It is interesting that he characterizes California’s gerrymander also as a partisan gerrymander, which seems to send a signal to the lower court in that case: “the dissent does not dispute—because it is indisputable—that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.” (Disclosure: I have filed this amicus brief in the California case).

The dissenters make a number of arguments on the merits, and on the proper deferential standard of review that is says should apply to a finding of racial predominance, but the timing point is surely right, and I fear that even more re-redistricting will be on the way, perhaps even later in the year if the Supreme Court waters down or kills Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the Callais case.

h