The Supreme Court sided with Texas over civil rights groups in an emergency appeal over the Donald Trump-backed congressional map that aimed to benefit Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented from the Republican-appointed majority’s decision to put the Trump-backed map in play on Thursday. The majority granted Texas emergency relief because, it said, the state would likely succeed in its appeal.
Writing for the dissenting trio, Justice Elena Kagan said the majority’s order “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.”
After a divided three-judge panel deemed the state’s map to be likely racially discriminatory on Nov. 18, Texas filed an emergency appeal to the high court. The appeal initially went to Justice Samuel Alito, the justice assigned to field such requests from that region. On Nov. 21, Alito issued an order temporarily halting the lower court ruling, pending further review by the full bench of justices.
Texas argued that the map it produced over the summer in response to Trump’s call was motivated by politics (which the Supreme Court has allowed), not race. The state noted that California worked to add Democratic seats to its congressional delegation in response to Texas’ move.
Ruling against the map in the lower-court panel ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, conceded that politics “played a role in drawing the 2025 Map.” But he concluded that it was more than that because “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Brown wrote for a two-judge majority, over dissent from Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, who wrote a wild dissent that personally attacked Brown and proclaimed the “main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom,” referring to the progressive philanthropist who has long been a bogeyman of the right and California’s Democratic governor, respectively.
Under Brown’s majority opinion, the state would have had to use the previous map from 2021 for the 2026 congressional election.
In its unsigned order Thursday, the Supreme Court majority faulted the lower court for having “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” Alito added a concurring opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, which said the high court dissenters didn’t dispute that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.” Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the lower court knew partisanship was at work but also that “race was all over it.” She said the majority’s order “disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge — that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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