Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Friday issued a brief pause on a lower court order blocking a new congressional map in Texas that would give Republicans an edge in winning five additional House seats.
The order will give the high court time to consider an appeal by Texas, which is seeking to overturn the ruling by a panel of federal judges. Texas formally asked the Supreme Court to overrule the decision on Friday evening. Alito asked those challenging the map to submit a response by Monday.
The decision is the latest twist in a nationwide battle between Democratic- and Republican-led states that are seeking a partisan advantage ahead of the 2026 midterm elections by taking the unusual step of redistricting between the U.S. Census Bureau’s nationwide survey of the population, which occurs every 10 years.
Trump pushed the Texas legislature this summer to remake its congressional maps to favor the GOP. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio soon after drew new maps favoring the GOP, and California adopted one to help Democrats. Other states are also considering new maps.
A panel of federal judges ruled 2-1 Tuesday that Texas’s map was probably an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and blocked its use for next year’s elections.
That finding was crucial because lawmakers have wide latitude to make partisan calculations when drawing maps but must adhere to strict limits when considering race. Disentangling racial and political motivations can be difficult for courts because race and party preferences are often closely correlated.
By focusing on race instead of politics, Texas lawmakers probably crossed a line, the judicial panel found. In July, the Justice Department sent Texas officials a letter contending that the map the state adopted in 2021 was unconstitutional because it included some “coalition districts” in which Black and Hispanic voters together formed a majority. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) cited that letter in urging GOP lawmakers to draw a new map.
The judicial panel said the Justice Department’s claim that coalition districts are unconstitutional was “legally incorrect.” But because Abbott had used the letter as a reason to put together a new map, the judges said, he had “explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” which is illegal.
“Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote for the panel.
In a statement, Abbott said claims that the map is racially discriminatory are absurd. “The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences — and for no other reason,” he said.
Texas quickly appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.
The justices’ ruling came as the window to act on the map was running out. Candidates face a Dec. 8 deadline to file to run in the Texas races, and the state needs to notify voters of any changes to maps well before voting begins in March primaries.
Republicans have a 219-214 majority in the House, so only a handful of races could determine which party controls the chamber.
Court challenges to redistricting efforts are also pending in California, Missouri and North Carolina that could make their way to the Supreme Court, and more litigation could come. Such cases are often decided by panels made up of three federal judges, whose rulings are directly appealable to the high court.
Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that means “if the court was trying to keep itself out of the political thicket” with the midterms looming, that probably won’t be possible.
“The Supreme Court has mandatory jurisdiction over these cases, so it really has to do something about them,” Hasen said. “I suspect there’s going to be a flood of these cases.”
In a separate case that could also scramble midterm voting, the Supreme Court seemed open during arguments in October to further restricting the use of race when drawing legislative districts.
Such a ruling could knock down the last major pillar of the Voting Rights Act and touch off a bid by states to draw fresh congressional maps that could put Black Democrats in majority-minority districts at risk of losing their seats. It’s unclear if the justices will rule in time for that to happen before the midterm contests.
Problems with the redrawing of Texas’s map can be traced to Trump’s Justice Department, according to the three-judge panel that blocked the map.
Texas Republicans were initially reluctant to redraw their map, and Abbott did not include redistricting in a special legislative session he called during the summer. Soon afterward, the Justice Department sent Abbott the letter threatening to sue the state over the map it drew in 2021 if it didn’t adopt a new one. Two days later, Abbott asked lawmakers to draw a new map, citing the concerns of the Justice Department.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, contended in the letter that some districts in the 2021 map were unconstitutional because they included majorities that consisted of coalitions of Black and Hispanic voters. Such districts are not illegal, and Dhillon appeared to be dramatically misinterpreting a 2024 appeals court decision about such districts, the panel said in its ruling.
Dhillon’s letter is “challenging to unpack” because “it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” the panel said. But the letter’s message was unmistakable, the panel said, because it told the state to alter its districts “for one reason and one reason alone: the racial demographics of the voters who live there.”
Dhillon told the state it needed to make changes to three coalition districts and a Latino-majority district that she inaccurately described as a coalition district. Abbott seized on the letter and said in a media interview that he wanted to eliminate coalition districts and “provide more seats for Hispanics.” Some GOP state lawmakers made similar statements, while others emphasized their partisan goal of making the map better for Republicans.
The map the legislature adopted did much of what the Justice Department sought by reshaping two of the districts so they no longer had coalition majorities and a third so that it no longer had a Latino majority. It reconfigured the other district Dhillon cited until it was “unrecognizable,” but kept its coalition status, the panel found. In addition, the legislature eliminated five other coalition districts that Dhillon did not mention.
The results showed that those bringing the lawsuit “are likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” the panel found.
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