Texas Redistricting 11-28-25

Alito lets Texas reinstate gerrymandered House map that could give GOP 5 more seats

Alito’s move allowing Texas officials to continue to prepare for primary elections under the new map 

Texas’ redrawn GOP-friendly congressional districts are back, for now.

Justice Samuel Alito temporarily restored the state’s new map — expected to net Republicans up to five seats in the 2026 midterms — while the Supreme Court weighs a lower court’s decision to toss that map altogether.

Alito’s move allowing Texas officials to continue to prepare for primary elections under the new map came just after the state asked the Supreme Court for an urgent ruling to revive the redistricting plan adopted at the urging of President Donald Trump.

The emergency appeal filed Friday evening urged the high court to put a hold on a lower court’s decision Tuesday that found racial considerations likely unconstitutionally tinged the new map.

Texas’ petition formally asked the justices to weigh in on a matter that could determine control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. A longer-term ruling by the high court restoring Texas’ new map would make Democrats’ path to retaking the majority more difficult.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the lawmakers who approved the new map say the lower-court decision came “far too late in the day” — scrapping the new congressional boundaries would wreak havoc on an election that’s already underway, they say.

“The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away,” Texas Solicitor General William Peterson wrote.

Lawyers for Texas asked the Supreme Court to grant the longer-term stay by Dec. 1, just one week before the state’s filing deadline for congressional races.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who authored the 2-1 majority decision throwing out Texas’ new congressional map, concluded that the inconvenience caused by reverting to an older map was outweighed by the prospect of requiring Texans to live under an unconstitutional racial gerrymander for two years. Though courts are guided by a longstanding principle to avoid making significant changes too close to an election cycle, that rule is amorphous, Brown noted, and there is still time for the state to reorient to the earlier map.

Texas’ appeal rejects the lower court’s finding that race-related considerations set the redistricting effort in motion.

“The State Defendants presented a specific, detailed, non-racial, unrebutted explanation for every single redistricting decision. … From the start, everyone recognized that the purpose of Texas’s redistricting effort was Republican political advantage,” Peterson wrote, noting that Trump repeatedly urged Texas and other GOP-leaning states to rejigger their 2026 maps.

“The district court erred by inferring bad faith and racial intent because the Texas Legislature’s map did not (through some hypothetical means) transform the only Democratic district in Austin — an exceptionally Democratic city — into a Republican stronghold,” Peterson added.

Texas’ attorneys also asked the high court to hear and reverse the earlier decision, but that is highly unlikely to happen in time for the coming year’s races, so the court’s action on the emergency stay request will likely dictate whether Texas’ changes take effect in 2026 or the previous map remains.

The emergency application went to Alito in the first instance because he oversees urgent matters arising in the 5th Circuit, which includes Texas. Alito, who is expected to refer the stay request to the full court, appeared to put it on a fast-track by giving the civil rights groups that sued to block the new map a deadline of 5 P.M. eastern time Monday to file a response.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/21/texas-supreme-court-map-case

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader