Supreme Court revives pro-Republican Texas voting map sought by Trump

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By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court revived on Thursday a redrawn Texas electoral map designed to add more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives, boosting President Donald Trump’s quest for his party to keep control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.

The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump, issued the ruling amid a nationwide battle unfolding in Republican-governed and Democratic-led states involving the redrawing of electoral maps to change the composition of congressional districts for partisan advantage.

A lower court that had blocked Texas from using the map concluded it likely was racially discriminatory in violation of U.S. constitutional protections.

The reinstated map  – sought by Trump, approved in August by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott – could flip as many as five currently Democratic-held U.S. House seats to Republicans. Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Texas Republicans cheered the ruling. Texas Democrats called it an affront to democracy, and the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented from the court’s action, which came in an unsigned order.

Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress. Ceding control of either the House or Senate to the Democrats in the November 2026 elections would endanger Trump’s legislative agenda and open the door to Democratic-led congressional investigations targeting the president.

‘DELICATE FEDERAL-STATE BALANCE’

The Supreme Court granted a request by Texas officials to lift the lower court’s ruling blocking the map.

“The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the court said in a brief opinion explaining the decision.

The court in the order, acknowledging the political aims of Texas to benefit the Republican Party, also said the lower court mistakenly did not fault the new map’s challengers for not themselves producing “a viable alternative map that met the state’s avowedly partisan goals.”

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan criticized the court’s majority, saying it disrespected the work of the lower court, whose ruling actually was authored by a judge appointed by Trump. 

“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 wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“This court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution,” Kagan wrote.

CALIFORNIA REACTS

Democratic-governed California reacted to the Texas redistricting by initiating its own effort targeting five Republican-held districts in the state. California voters in November overwhelmingly approved a new map beneficial to Democrats. The Trump administration has sued California to try to stop its new congressional map from taking effect.

Republicans in the Indiana state House of Representatives are expected on Friday to approve a new map targeting the state’s only two Democratic U.S. House members. It is unclear whether the map has enough support to pass the Republican-controlled state Senate.

Other states including Republican-led North Carolina, Missouri and Florida and Democratic-led Virginia and Maryland have either passed new maps or are considering doing so.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, lauding the Supreme Court’s ruling, said that “Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state.”

“This map reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits,” Paxton said.

Democratic lawmakers in Texas expressed anger.

“The Supreme Court failed Texas voters today, and they failed American democracy. This is what the end of the Voting Rights Act looks like: courts that won’t protect minority communities even when the evidence is staring them in the face,” said Gene Wu, the Democratic State House minority leader, referring to the landmark 1965 U.S. law that barred racial discrimination in voting. 

“Latino and Black voters are being punished for how we vote, plain and simple,” State Representative Ramón Romero Jr. said.

Redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a state is a process called redistricting. There have been legal fights at the Supreme Court for decades over a practice called gerrymandering – the redrawing of district boundaries in order to marginalize a certain set of voters and increase the influence of others.

The Supreme Court in a 2019 ruling declared that gerrymandering for partisan reasons – to boost the electoral chances of one’s own party and weaken one’s political opponent – cannot be challenged in federal courts. Gerrymandering driven primarily by race remains unlawful under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law and 15th Amendment prohibition on racial discrimination in voting.

Many Texas Republican lawmakers have said the new map was devised in response to Trump’s request to redraw electoral maps for a partisan advantage in House races. But the El Paso-based court ruled 2-1 on November 18 that the map likely amounted to an unlawful racial gerrymander, siding with civil rights groups that sued to block it.

Each of the 50 U.S. states is represented in Congress by two U.S. senators, with representation in the 435-seat House based on population. California, the most-populous state, has the most House members with 52, while Texas is second with 38. Republicans currently hold 25 of 38 U.S. House seats in Texas.

‘RACIAL CONSIDERATIONS’

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who authored the lower court’s ruling, wrote that “what ultimately spurred” Texas to redraw its map was a letter from the U.S. Justice Department urging state officials to “inject racial considerations into what Texas insists was a race-blind process.”

Brown, a Trump judicial appointee, wrote that the Justice Department’s analysis was based on the “legally incorrect assertion” that the racial composition of four Texas congressional districts in the state’s previous electoral map was unconstitutional and that they must be redrawn.

Justice Samuel Alito on November 21 had temporarily paused the lower court’s ruling as the Supreme Court weighed how to proceed with the case.

The NAACP civil rights group noted in a statement after the lower court’s ruling that “the state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats.”

Redistricting generally occurs to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted each decade, though this year’s redistricting has been motivated by securing partisan advantage.

(Reporting by John Kruzel additional reporting by David Morgan, Jarrett Renshaw and Jasper Ward in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)