Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan had a fiery dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to allow GOP-friendly voting maps in Texas for next year’s midterms.
The ruling reversed a lower court decision calling Republican legislators’ moves to appease Donald Trump’s desire for more seats in Congress racial gerrymandering.
Kagan wrote that the court was not giving the district court’s ruling fair consideration.
“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,” Kagan, an appointee of Barack Obama, argued.
“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,“ she continued. ”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.”
The five-paragraph ruling by the Supreme Court, on which three Trump-appointed justices sit, was made in the so-called “emergency docket,” meaning it was unsigned. Kagan dissented, as did Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“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,” she continued. “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.”
Texas’ redistricting push, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in August, created five Republican-friendly seats. In the House, Republicans currently have a 220-213 majority.
Trump has been pessimistic about the GOP’s odds of holding the House in next November’s midterm elections.
“The one thing that I worry about is that, if you look over many, many years—I don’t have the numbers—but the person that wins the presidency always seems to lose the midterms,” he told OANN in October.
In 2018, Democrats gained 41 seats in the House, winning back control of the lower chamber.
In response to Texas’ redistricting, California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched an effort to redistrict his state in Democrats’ favor, and voters approved that ballot measure last month. The Trump administration has sued.
Newsom’s team accused Attorney General Pam Bondi of being hypocritical in how she is responding to California’s and Texas’ redistricting efforts, since she claimed after Thursday’s ruling that “federal courts have no right to interfere with a state’s decision to redraw legislative maps for partisan reasons.”
“So you gonna drop your lawsuit against us right, Pam?” his office wrote on X.
“Not a chance, Gavin — we will stop your DEI districts for 2026,” the DOJ X account responded.
In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared it a “massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tried of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”
Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said in a statement afterward that Trump is “working with his supporters to rig the system to try and steal votes from Black and brown Americans.”
DNC Chairman Ken Martin similarly called the ruling “wrong—both morally and legally.”
The post Supreme Court Justice Issues Blistering Dissent in Trump Redistricting Case appeared first on The Daily Beast.
