The Texas Office of the Attorney General on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow the state to use a newly redrawn, Republican-friendly congressional voting map for the 2026 midterm elections.
Texas sought the justices’ intervention after a panel of federal judges in El Paso on Tuesday blocked the map from going into effect in time for the elections, a setback for an aggressive push by Texas Republicans and President Trump to flip Democratic seats in the state.
By a vote of 2 to 1, the divided panel had sided with civil rights organizations that had challenged the map, arguing it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In the court’s ruling, Judge Jeffrey V. Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, wrote that “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
In the 160-page ruling, the judges blocked the use of the new map while litigation continues over its legality. In the meantime, they ordered the state to use a map enacted by the Texas Legislature in 2021 for the November 2026 elections.
Texas’ Republican-controlled State Legislature redrew its map this summer, creating five new Republican-favored seats as part of a strategy by Mr. Trump to block Democrats from taking control of the House of Representatives.
After the appeals court ruling, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced that the state would appeal to the Supreme Court. In a statement, Mr. Paxton said he fully expected “the court to uphold Texas’ sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting.”
The Texas legal loss was the latest challenge for the president’s effort to redraw state congressional maps to favor Republicans in the lead-up to the midterms. Last week, Indiana Republicans rejected the president’s request that they redraw congressional districts.
The fight over the Texas map is also the latest in a string of voting and elections-related challenges facing the justices. In October, they heard a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional voting map. In that case, a group of white voters argued that the state’s new map, redrawn after the latest census to include a second majority-Black district, was an illegal racial gerrymander that violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
A decision in the case is expected by the end of June or early July, and it could shape how the court views the Texas challenge. In Texas, challengers have argued that even as lawmakers sought to create new districts to achieve a partisan advantage, they in fact gerrymandered based on race.
The nationwide push to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms is highly unusual, breaking from decades of settled norms around the process for carving up legislative districts. The drive by the president has set off a race in states throughout the country. This month, California voters approved an aggressive plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts, potentially flipping five Republican seats, a major victory for Democrats. That map has also been challenged in court.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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