Supreme Court Conservatives Reinstate Texas’ Gerrymandered House Map

The Supreme Court, in a Thursday evening order, put on hold a lower court ruling that blocked Texas’ aggressive gerrymander, a maneuver the state legislature carried out on orders from the Trump administration and the president himself, hoping to preserve Republicans’ majority in the U.S. House in 2026.

In a brief order, the Court argued, among other things, that the District Court had intervened to block the maps too close to next year’s midterm election.

Justice Sam Alito authored a short concurrence in which he was joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. 

The court’s three liberals authored a far more substantial dissent.

The ruling suggests that the heavily gerrymandered maps will govern Texas’ midterm election.

Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, took issue with the assertion that the challenge to the maps was unfolding so close to the election that the Supreme Court had no choice but to intervene. “And even supposing it is now the ninth or tenth hour, whose choice was that?” she wrote. “It was of course the Texas legislature that decided to change its map six months before a March primary.”

“The majority calls its ‘evaluation’ of this case ‘preliminary.’ The results, though, will be anything but,” Kagan concluded later in her dissent. “This Court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this Court’s stay 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.”

Texas was the first red state to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s redistricting pressure campaign, which kicked off an effort to coerce red states with Republican-dominated state legislatures to redraw maps mid-cycle. Texas’ approval of new maps also kicked off a scramble among blue states officials to offset the impact of the administration’s gerrymandering assault. 

This past June, the Trump administration began pressuring Texas Republicans to approve new congressional district maps that are expected to flip five congressional seats currently held by Democrats in the U.S. House. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to respond to Trump’s demands, and in August signed a bill to approve the new Republican-favoring maps for the 2026 election. 

One of the key issues at stake in the legal dispute is whether the gerrymander was partisan — a motivation the Supreme Court has deemed acceptable — or racial — a motivation that the Supreme Court seems to still find to be an unacceptable violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, though that has in recent years become less clear. 

The District Court found the Texas legislature’s work to be, clearly, racial in both motivation and impact. The lower court cited what it described as “substantial” evidence to this effect, noting that a letter from the Trump Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division pressuring Texas Republicans to carve the state up “commands Texas to change four districts for one reason and one reason alone: the racial demographics of the voters who live there.”

Alito, in his concurrence, waved that aside, claiming “that the impetus for the adoption map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

Kagan, in her dissent, noted the majority’s convenient elision of the question of whether the map was a racial gerrymander. “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,” she wrote. 

The new maps will likely give Republicans five new seats in the House. In response, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom worked with Democratic state lawmakers to bring about a ballot proposition known as Prop 50, which asked California voters for permission to temporarily bypass the state’s independent map drawing commission and approve new congressional district lines in a handful of swing and Republican-led districts in the state. The new configuration is expected to give Democrats an advantage in these districts and will likely flip five Republican-held seats to Democratic seats in the U.S. House.

California voters approved Prop 50 in November, a major speedbump in Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering blitz. Despite early redistricting wins in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, the effort has lost some steam since Election Night last month outside of California, too. 

Kansas GOP House Speaker Dan Hawkins announced on November 4 — Election Day — that Republicans did not have the votes needed to approve new congressional maps there. Similarly, last month a Utah judge rejected a new congressional map that gave Republicans an advantage in the state. And the future of Indiana’s gerrymandered maps remains in limbo until the Senate convenes on December 8. It’s unclear whether there are enough Republican votes in the state Senate to approve the maps. For months now, the Trump administration has been pressuring and threatening Indiana Republicans to approve new maps.

Correction: This article originally stated that Thursday night’s order was 6-3. Though the three liberals dissented and three conservative concurred, the alignment of the remaining three is unclear.