President Donald Trump asked Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) to call the state legislature in for a special session where they could approve new congressional maps that would redraw district lines in favor of Republicans. That began a partisan back-and-forth, with Democratic states such as California and New York threatening to redraw their maps in favor of Democrats. The process of redistricting is complicated and time-consuming, and not every state that has floated mid-decade redistricting is legally allowed to do so. This Washington Examiner series, “Power Lines,” will investigate the process, its local implications, and the hurdles the mid-decade redistricting effort helmed by national political figures will face in court. Part 1 is an in-depth look at how redistricting works in different states. Part 2 investigates why Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting after the 2010 midterm elections. Part 3 covers the legal considerations of Republicans’ efforts to rewrite Texas’s map.
A looming legal battle over Texas Republicans’ proposed mid-decade congressional map could stretch well past the 2026 midterm elections, casting doubt on whether the state’s altered district lines will be in effect before voters head to the polls next November.
The map, which is still only on paper, could add up to five GOP-leaning seats, but any partisan gains may be delayed as Democrats are likely to challenge the plan in court. As with most redistricting lawsuits, the litigation process takes years, often originating with state court fights that head into federal court and sometimes resolving with final review by the Supreme Court.
Texas previously conducted a mid-decade redistricting in 2003, when Republicans redrew the map after gaining control of the legislature. The Supreme Court upheld most of the plan in LULAC v. Perry (2006), but struck down one district as violating the Voting Rights Act.
However, even if a legal challenge is filed against Lone Star State’s new plan, the timeline is uncertain. A federal judge in Texas would need to rule quickly to block the map from taking effect before 2026. Appeals would go to the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and potentially to a divided Supreme Court.
And with the Supreme Court poised to rehear a pivotal Voting Rights Act case out of Louisiana this fall, the outcome of that dispute could serve as a guidepost for any future lawsuits targeting the Texas plan.
Experts wary over potential Section 2 Voting Rights Act challenges
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Washington Examiner that a standard Section 2 challenge under the Voting Rights Act may not be the strongest path for Democratic litigators.
“Section 2 doesn’t protect majority-minority coalition districts, which are primarily what are being eliminated,” Olsen said. He noted that Texas’s proposed plan would add two new Hispanic-majority districts and convert two Black plurality seats into majority seats, making it harder to argue that minority voting power is being diluted.
“Unless they can show that there should be like a third Black majority seat, which is difficult to show given the location of where Blacks live in Texas,” Olsen said, “I’m not convinced that [a Section 2 challenge] is going to succeed.”
Could mid-decade redistricting violate the Constitution?
Instead, Olsen predicted Democrats might pursue a novel legal theory: that the U.S. Constitution implicitly prohibits mid-decade redistricting unless a court has ordered it.
“That would be the inference that one can draw from the Reapportionment Clause — that reapportionment is done once every decade,” he said, though he believes the 2006 LULAC decision narrows that possibility.
Atiba Ellis, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, described Texas’s mid-cycle move as “virtually unprecedented” and noted it disrupts the constitutional and political tradition built around the decennial census.
“There’s a sense of fairness,” Ellis said, “knowing that we get five congressional elections with these new maps, and then we look at the numbers again. That brings a kind of order to the political process.”
Ellis said the absence of a clear federal statute prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, combined with states’ primacy over election structures under Article I, Section 4, would make it difficult for Democrats to construct a compelling constitutional challenge.
The Section 2 dilemma and potentially shifting SCOTUS precedent
That leaves Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as the most likely litigation vehicle, but Ellis cautioned it would be a “high-risk” strategy, particularly with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority poised to revisit its precedent in the pending Louisiana case.
The Callais v. Landry case out of Louisiana will be reheard this fall. The justices are signaling interest in whether the intentional creation of a second majority-minority district violates the Constitution.
“The court itself is, one way or another, not clear where that balance should fall,” Ellis said. “The fact that the court reset it for argument tells me it’s reevaluating the long-standing tension between the Voting Rights Act and race neutrality under Shaw v. Reno,” a 1993 high court case that established districts cannot be drawn solely based on racial demographics without risking a violation of constitutional protections.
Ellis also noted that more recent decisions — such as Alexander v. South Carolina Conference and Brnovich v. DNC — show the court leaning toward presumptions of legislative good faith and raising the bar for proving alleged racial discrimination in map drawing.
Democrats brace for political consequences
With the legal path uncertain, the structural consequences could be just as significant.
“It’s clearly a scorched earth tactic [by Texas] to change the maps in light of higher risk that the polling might project,” Ellis said. “Creating that tradition might create short-term political advantage for the party that can game it, but might have long-term ramifications that might not be what anyone today might intend.”
And while no lawsuit has yet been filed, Ellis warned that the political effect is already playing out: “I think the metaphor of the arms race is apt, because what the Republicans can do in Texas, the Democrats can do in California.”
That warning echoed arguments made by Democratic election attorney Marc Elias, who fed the growing partisan escalation last week without offering any practical remedies to disrupt Texas Republican plans in court other than playing the same political game.
“Democrats should make the problem of partisan gerrymandering an even bigger one for Republicans. Put simply: If Republicans threaten five Democratic seats in Texas, Democrats should threaten fifteen, twenty, or even thirty Republican seats in states they control,” Elias, who is suing Texas over its 2021 map, said late last month.
Ironically, now both the Trump administration and Elias find themselves up against the state’s 2021 map, but for entirely separate reasons.
In short, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent a July 7 letter to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) informing him that four congressional districts are unconstitutional gerrymanders because race was considered when drawing the districts. Texas initially defended its maps against Elias’s suit, which claims legislators drew district boundaries to minimize the number of majority-minority districts. However, Abbott responded to Dhillon’s letter by convening a special session to redraw the map, leading to the current standoff.
Amid rising tensions from both sides of the aisle, Ben Michael, attorney at Michael & Associates, offered a note of caution, saying he doesn’t believe “there is reason to believe that mid-decade redistricting is becoming normalized.”
“Texas Republicans haven’t been successful yet in their efforts — we are still in the middle of all of this,” Michael told the Washington Examiner. “The fact alone that there is so much legal and ethical opposition means that even if more states try to follow Texas’s actions, if successful, they may not succeed.”
State-by-state domino effect kicks in
Texas Republicans introduced their proposed map on Wednesday, aiming to grow their House delegation from 25 to 30 seats. The lines most directly affect Democratic Reps. Marc Veasey, Julie Johnson, Greg Casar, Lloyd Doggett, Al Green, Vicente Gonzalez, and Henry Cuellar.
The new districts were drawn in coordination with GOP leaders in the state House, who hold a vast majority — part of a larger trend that has left Democrats locked out of redistricting control in most battleground states.
Nationwide, Republicans control 28 state legislative chambers compared to Democrats’ 19. And in most states, the party in charge of the legislature also controls the redistricting process.
Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, recently warned: “Looking at the state-by-state math, it is crystal clear Democrats must prioritize building and securing more state legislative majorities across the map if we want to go toe-to-toe with the GOP on redistricting now and in 2030.”
The DLCC has launched a renewed strategy to strengthen Democrats’ narrow control in state senates in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Virginia, and to regain the Michigan House, which flipped to Republicans in 2024.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has floated a November ballot measure to dismantle the state’s independent redistricting commission. In New York, legislation to enable mid-decade redistricting is in the works, but constitutional rules mean no changes could take effect before 2026. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has said she’s “tired of fighting with our hands tied behind our back.”
In Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, and New Jersey, governors or state lawmakers have voiced interest in drawing new maps. Illinois and Maryland face fewer legal hurdles than other blue states.
Final legal outlook: Will courts intervene before 2026?
Olsen said Texas looks poised to use the DOJ’s letter to justify redrawing the map, despite the state’s previous contention that its existing map was not violating.
“They say, ‘Great DOJ, we’ve done that. We’ve removed it. There’s no more coalition districts. We’ve got majority districts.” He added, “Partisan gerrymandering does not violate the Constitution per Supreme Court authority.”
If a Democratic-backed lawsuit is filed against the Texas redistricting effort, court watchers will likely pay close attention to the basis for the challenge.
The outcome of the Louisiana redistricting case pending before the Supreme Court, not expected until 2026, will loom large, a fact that will give Democratic lawyers room for consideration now as they consider the correct approach to challenging the Republican-backed plans in Texas.
DEMOCRATS TAKE INSPIRATION FROM REPUBLICANS’ 2010 PLAYBOOK TO COUNTER REDISTRICTING EFFORTS
However, as Olsen pointed out, if Section 2 is struck down or narrowed, Republicans may have more opportunities to reclaim seats in places like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, complicating the political calculus further.
“So if you get into this war, if Section 2 of the VRA is held unconstitutional [by the Supreme Court], Republicans then have more weapons to gain,” he said.