WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a new congressional district map in next year’s midterm elections, drawn to maximize Republican political power.
By granting an emergency request filed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the conservative majority halted a lower court ruling that said the map was illegal because Republican lawmakers, following the Trump administration’s direction, explicitly considered race when drawing new districts.
The unsigned order said Texas “is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim,” including that the lower court “failed to meet the presumption of legislative good faith” in evaluating the state Legislature’s motives.
The ruling appeared to be 6-3, with all three liberal justices dissenting.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent that the decision “does not respect the work of a district court that did everything one could ask for” and also “deserves the millions of Texans the district court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”
The map was drawn with the goal of adding five additional Republican seats in the House, something no one disputes, but the lower court determined that the map was drawn with the goal of moving certain minority voters to different districts.
In a separate concurring opinion rejecting Kagan, conservative Justice Samuel Alito said the plaintiffs challenging the map needed to do a better job of showing that race was the motivating factor by, among other things, producing their own map that would show that the state’s partisan goals could be achieved by other means.
Failure to do so gave rise to “a strong inference that the state’s map was based on partisanship, not race,” he wrote.
The decision marks a victory for President Donald Trump, who filed a brief urging the court to rule in favor of Texas.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defended the map, welcomed the decision.
“This map reflects the political climate of our state and is a huge victory for Texas and for all conservatives who are tired of seeing the left try to disrupt the political system with false demands,” he said in a statement.
The Supreme Court had provisionally stayed the decision on Nov. 21 while the justices weighed the next step to take, in an order signed by Alito.
Traditionally, states draw new districts once every decade after the census shows how populations have changed. But this year, Trump, concerned about the narrow Republican majority in the House, has repeatedly pressured Republican-led states to draw new maps outside the normal schedule.
A letter from the Trump administration earlier this year said the state could be subject to a federal lawsuit if it did not eliminate “coalition districts” in which nonwhite voters of different races make up the majority.
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in 2019, states are free to redistrict in a way intended to maximize the political power of the majority party, but some restrictions remain in both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act when race is a factor.
Democrats responded to the Texas plan by launching an effort to draw a new congressional map in California to counter potential Republican gains. Litigation in that case could also reach the Supreme Court.
In the Texas case, the three-judge lower court invalidated the new map in a 2-1 vote, with the majority opinion written by Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee.
While politics played a role in the redrawing of the maps, there was “substantial evidence” that it was racial gerrymandering that violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, he wrote.
In asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court’s ruling, Texas lawyers argued in part that it was too late in the election cycle for federal judges to intervene. The lawyers also said the new map was clearly designed for partisan gain and denied there was any racial motive.
“This summer, the Texas legislature did what legislatures do: politics,” they wrote.
The lawsuit was filed by six groups of plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Texas NAACP, and two members of Congress, Texas Democratic Representatives Al Green and Jasmine Crockett.
In a court filing, a group of opponents said the governor’s “entire justification for authorizing redistricting” was to delete and replace coalition districts, meaning the reason was race and not partisan politics.
