In Texas case, it’s politics vs. race at the Supreme Court

WASHINGTON- The Texas redistricting case, currently before the Supreme Court, revolves around a question that often divides judges: Were voting districts drawn on political or racial lines?

The response, likely expected within days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees Texas appeals, temporarily stayed a court ruling that called Texas’ new voting map a “racial gerrymander.”

Attorneys for the state requested a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have until Dec. 8 to file for reelection.

They said the justices violated the so-called Purcell Principle by making major changes to the electoral map “halfway through the nomination period,” which alone calls for it to be blocked.

Texas Republicans have reason to be confident that the court’s conservative majority will be on their side.

“We proceed from the presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote last year by a 6-3 majority in a South Carolina case.

Republican lawmakers in that state moved tens of thousands of black voters in or out of newly designated congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.

In 2019, conservatives supported partisan gerrymandering by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling that drawing voting districts is a “political matter” left to states and their legislators, not judges.

All the justices – conservative and liberal – say drawing districts based on voters’ race violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But conservatives say it’s difficult to separate race from politics.

They also appeared ready to narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a pending case in Louisiana.

For decades, civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect the representatives of their choice.”

The Trump administration joined with Louisiana Republicans in October and claimed that the Voting Rights Act was “deployed as a form of race-based voting affirmative action” that must be ended.

If so, election law experts have warned that Republican-led Southern states could wipe out the districts of more than a dozen black Democrats who serve in Congress.

The mid-decade Texas redistricting case did not appear to spark a major legal conflict because the partisan motivations were so obvious.

In July, President Trump called on Texas Republicans to redraw the map of all 38 congressional districts to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.

At stake was control of a closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and in late August he signed a map into law with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

But last week, federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared unconstitutional.

“The public perception in this case is that this is a matter of policy,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown wrote at the start of a 160-page opinion. “Of course, politics played a role,” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially altered the 2025 map.”

He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. On July 7, she sent Abbott a letter threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”

This term, unfamiliar to many, designated districts where no racial or ethnic group was in the majority. In one targeted Houston district, 45% of eligible voters were black and 25% Latino. In a neighboring district, 38% of voters were black and 30% Latino.

She said the Trump administration considers them “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit court.

The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for a special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.

Voting rights advocates saw this as a violation.

“They said their goal was to get rid of coalition districts. And to do that, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of the Voting Rights Project at UCLA.

Brown, the Trump appointee in Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” to believe those coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on his advice to redraw its electoral map.

He was joined by a second district judge in suspending the new map and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that was drawn by the same Texas Republicans.

The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee to the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

“In 37 years as a federal judge, I have served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most egregious exercise in judicial activism I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “In Justice Brown’s opinion, the main winners are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the people of Texas.”

The “obvious reason for 2025 redistricting is of course partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown makes a grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more sectarian than political.”

Most federal cases are brought before a district judge and can be appealed first to a U.S. court of appeals and then to the Supreme Court.
Election-related cases are different. A panel of three judges weighs the facts and renders a decision, which is then sent directly to the Supreme Court to be upheld or overturned.

On Friday evening, Texas lawyers filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to stay Brown’s ruling.

The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal said Texas was not alone in seeking political advantage by redrawing its electoral maps.

“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to compensate for the new districts in Texas, although Democrats already control 43 of California’s 52 congressional seats,” they said.

They argued that “the last-minute disruption of the state’s election procedures — and the resulting confusion between candidates and voters — demonstrates” the need to block the lower court’s decision.

Election law experts question this assertion. “This is a problem that Texas created itself,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The state opted for accelerated redistricting in the middle of the decade, at Trump’s request.

On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should reject it.

“The election is more than a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.

“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts based on their racial makeup,” he said, and the justices heard clear and detailed evidence demonstrating that that is exactly what lawmakers did.

However, in recent election disputes, conservatives on the Court have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from further judicial rulings too close to elections.

Granting a reprieve would allow Texas to use its new GOP-friendly map for the 2026 elections.

The justices could then choose to hear arguments on the legal issues early next year.