The Supreme Court allowed Texas’s redrawn Republican-friendly congressional map to stand on Monday, formally reversing a lower court’s ruling striking down the map as an unlawful racial gerrymander.
The high court allowed the Texas congressional map, passed by the state legislature last summer, to be used for the November elections in an emergency docket ruling late last year. On Monday, the Supreme Court reversed a lower federal court’s ruling striking down the maps by a 6-3 margin on ideological lines, formally ending the legal battle and allowing the map, which could net Republicans up to five seats in the House, to stand beyond the 2026 elections.
In the December emergency docket ruling, the unsigned majority found the lower court “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature” and that it “failed to draw a dispositive or near-dispositive adverse inference against respondents even though they did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals” in its ruling that the new congressional map was an unlawful racial gerrymander.
The three justices who dissented from both the December emergency docket ruling and Monday’s summary reversal were justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Using the logic from its previous emergency docket ruling, the high court summarily reversed the 2025 ruling of a three-judge panel, consisting of two federal district judges and one federal circuit judge, who ruled 2-1 that the newly drawn map was an unlawful racial gerrymander. U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, had been the lone dissenting judge from the panel’s ruling and took aim at the majority opinion and its author, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, an appointee of President Donald Trump, in his 104-page dissent.
Smith called the ruling “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed” and said it was “replete with legal and factual error, and accompanied by naked procedural abuse,” which demanded reversal by the Supreme Court. The high court ultimately handed Smith the reversal he had asked for in his blistering dissent.
Texas’s new congressional map, intended to give Republicans additional seats in the House, started a round of mid-decade redistricting that saw various Democrat-led and Republican-led states enacting new, partisan maps. Across Texas, California, Missouri, Utah, Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia, Republicans are believed to have gained nine new seats compared to Democrats, who are believed to have gained 10.
SUPREME COURT ALLOWS TEXAS TO USE REDRAWN CONGRESSIONAL MAP FOR 2026 ELECTIONS
While Democrats currently hold an advantage of one net seat gained through redistricting, the new Virginia congressional map, which was narrowly passed by voters last week and would net Democrats four seats, is facing a lawsuit at the state’s Supreme Court. During arguments Monday morning, the justices had sharp questions for defenders of the new congressional map, but did not indicate how they will rule in the case.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a new congressional map Monday that would net Republicans up to four new seats and would put Republicans ahead of Democrats in the overall mid-decade redistricting effort, if passed by the overwhelmingly GOP state legislature.