Supreme Court docket lets Texas use gerrymandered U.S. Home map : NPR

The Supreme Court docket has cleared the way in which for Texas to make use of a brand new congressional map that would assist Republicans win 5 extra U.S. Home seats within the 2026 midterm election.

The choice launched Thursday boosts the GOP’s probabilities of preserving its slim majority within the Home of Representatives amid an unprecedented gerrymandering combat launched by President Trump, who has been pushing Texas and different GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to learn Republicans.

The excessive courtroom’s unsigned order follows Texas’ emergency request for the justices to pause a three-judge panel’s ruling blocking the state’s lately redrawn map.

After holding a nine-day listening to in October, that panel discovered challengers of the brand new map are more likely to show in a trial that the map violates the Structure by discriminating towards voters primarily based on race.

In its majority opinion, authored by a Trump nominee, the panel cited a letter from the Division of Justice and a number of public statements by key Republican state lawmakers that advised their mapdrawer manipulated the racial demographics of voting districts to eradicate current districts the place Black and Latino voters collectively make up the bulk. For the following yr’s midterms, the panel ordered Texas to maintain utilizing the congressional districts the state’s GOP-controlled legislature drew in 2021.

However in Texas’ submitting to the Supreme Court docket, the state claimed the lawmakers weren’t motivated by race and have been targeted as an alternative on drawing new districts which are extra more likely to elect Republicans.

What the Supreme Court docket mentioned 

In its Thursday choice to facet with Texas, the Supreme Court docket mentioned the panel “didn’t honor the presumption of legislative good religion by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial proof towards the legislature.”

The excessive courtroom additionally discovered that, given the discharge of the panel’s ruling in the course of Texas’ candidate submitting interval, the decrease courtroom had “improperly inserted itself into an energetic major marketing campaign, inflicting a lot confusion and upsetting the fragile federal-state stability in elections.”

In a dissenting opinion, nevertheless, Supreme Court docket Justice Elena Kagan criticized the courtroom’s majority for reversing the panel’s choice after a “perusal, over a vacation weekend, of a chilly paper document.”

The excessive courtroom’s choice “ensures that many Texas residents, for no good motive, will probably be positioned in electoral districts due to their race,” wrote Kagan, who was joined by the courtroom’s two different liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “And that consequence, as this Court docket has pronounced yr in and yr out, is a violation of the Structure.”

In November, after the panel blocked the brand new map, Justice Samuel Alito allowed Texas to quickly reinstate it whereas the Supreme Court docket reviewed the state’s emergency request.

Texas state Lawyer Common Ken Paxton, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court docket’s ruling on Thursday, saying in a press release that the GOP-drawn map “displays the political local weather of our state and is an enormous win for Texas and each conservative who’s bored with watching the left attempt to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”

Democrats criticized the excessive courtroom. In a press release, U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Marketing campaign Committee, mentioned in a press release that the “individuals of Texas don’t need this map, however it was put in place on the behest of nationwide Republicans who’re determined to cling to their majority within the Home of Representatives by decimating minority voting alternative.”

Texas kicked off a redistricting combat

The mid-decade redistricting plan Texas Republicans handed in August sparked a counter response by Democratic leaders in California, the place voters in a particular election in November accredited a brand new congressional map that would assist Democrats achieve 5 further Home seats. A courtroom listening to for a authorized problem to that map is about for Dec. 15.

The remainder of the redistricting panorama stays unsettled as effectively. Lawsuits are difficult new gerrymanders in locations like Missouri, the place there may be additionally a contested referendum effort. And different states, together with Florida, Indiana and Virginia, can also pursue new districts previous to the midterms.

Final week, a federal courtroom dominated to permit North Carolina’s midterm election to be held beneath a lately redrawn map that would give Republicans an extra seat.

One other wave of congressional redistricting could also be coming quickly relying on what — and when — the Supreme Court docket decides in a voting rights case about Louisiana’s congressional map. After the courtroom held a uncommon rehearing for that case in October, some states are looking ahead to a possible earlier-than-usual ruling that will permit Republican-led states to attract extra GOP-friendly districts in time for the 2026 midterms.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey