With the 2026 midterms looming, the U.S. Supreme Court is officially weighing in on the redistricting arms race between red and blue states. Late Thursday, the nation’s highest judicial authority disagreed with a lower court ruling and instead allowed Texas to implement new congressional district maps expected to take five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives from Democrats and hand them to the GOP.

A divided three-judge panel consisting of two federal district court judges and one appellate court judge ruled late last month that the new congressional district maps Texas planned were unlawful, charging the state legislature with remaking congressional districts on racial lines, rather than along political ones. Six of the Supreme Court’s nine justices reversed the lower court’s decision. “Texas is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the District Court committed at least two serious errors. First, the District Court failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature,” the court’s majority wrote in a two-page order halting the lower court’s injunction. “Second, the District Court failed to draw a dispositive or near-dispositive adverse inference against respondents even though they did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals.”

The Supreme Court’s progressive wing, comprised of Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a 17-page dissenting opinion authored by Kagan and joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. “In enacting an electoral map slanted toward Republicans, did Texas predominantly use race to draw its new district lines? Or said otherwise, did Texas accomplish its partisan objectives by means of a racial gerrymander?” Kagan asked. “Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,” she continued, noting the lower court’s decision. “Yet this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record. 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.”

“That is why we are supposed to use a clear-error standard of review — why we are supposed to uphold the District Court’s decision that race-based line-drawing occurred (even if we would have ruled differently) so long as it is plausible,” she wrote. The clear-error standard of review is an appellate standard, under which “a finding is ‘clearly erroneous’ when, although there is evidence to support it, the reviewing court on the entire evidence is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed,” according to the Supreme Court in United States v. United States Gypsum Co. “Without so much as a word about that standard, this Court today announces that Texas may run next year’s elections with a map the District Court found to have violated all our oft-repeated strictures about the use of race in districting,” Kagan continued. “Today’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. And today’s order disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”

Justice Thomas Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, responded to Kagan’s argument in a three-paragraph concurring opinion. “Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections, so I will not delay the Court’s order by writing a detailed response to each of the dissent’s arguments. Instead, I offer two short points which for me are decisive,” Alito wrote. “First, the dissent does not dispute — because it is indisputable — that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

“Second, the clear-error standard of review does not apply here because the ‘trial court base[d] its findings upon a mistaken impression of applicable legal principles,’” Alito clarified. “Because of the correlation between race and partisan preference, litigants can easily use claims of racial gerrymandering for partisan ends. … To prevent this, our precedents place the burden on the challengers ‘to disentangle race and politics,’” he continued. “Thus, when the asserted reason for a map is political, it is critical for challengers to produce an alternative map that serves the State’s allegedly partisan aim just as well as the map the State adopted.” It is common, in such cases, for challengers to present an alternative map that achieves the stated partisan objectives without racially gerrymandering. However, Alito observed, the challengers in the Texas could not do so, “giving rise to a strong inference that the State’s map was indeed based on partisanship, not race.” He emphasized, “Neither the duration of the District Court’s hearing nor the length of its majority opinion provides an excuse for failing to apply the correct legal standards as set out clearly in our case law.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter hailed the Supreme Court’s decision. “The Supreme Court handed Texas Republicans, and by extension Republicans in Congress, a huge victory in the redistricting war by restoring Texas’s congressional maps last night,” he said. “This emergency order from the highest court in the land does more than restore five new potentially red congressional districts, it signals that this court is unlikely to side with frivolous claims of racial discrimination in the gerrymandering process from leftwing lawyers like Marc Elias — whose legal group represented one of the plaintiffs in this case, and has gone to great lengths to hurt election integrity wherever it has advanced,” Carpenter continued. “This could have huge ramifications as we also expect a decision from the Supreme Court on Louisiana vs. Callais, a case with the potential to strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which would open up as many as 19 other congressional districts for redistricting.”

The Supreme Court only issued a stay on Thursday, halting a lower court’s injunction. However, the justices are deliberating over a similar set of circumstances, originating in Louisiana. In the dual cases of Louisiana v. Phillip Callais and Press Robinson v. Phillip Callais, since consolidated into a single case, the Supreme Court will consider Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which bars racial gerrymandering, and reconsider its own precedents on the issue. Congressional district maps drawn by Louisiana’s state legislature in 2022 only created one majority-black congressional district out of the state’s six, despite the fact that roughly one-third of the state’s population is black. In response to a lawsuit accusing them of racial gerrymandering, Louisiana legislators remade the maps, yielding two majority-black districts. Those remade maps, however, were subsequently challenged, also on racial grounds: this time, the argument was that the new maps were racial gerrymandering because they were explicitly redrawn along racial lines.

In the midst of oral arguments in October, a majority of justices appeared poised to render Section 2 toothless and dilute its own precedents on the issue. In a line of questioning that would have been almost equally applicable to the Texas case, Alito asked, “If registered, Democrats overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates, regardless of the candidate’s race. Is that bloc voting?” Querying the relationship between redistricting along political lines and redistricting along racial lines, he continued, “Likewise, if registered Republicans overwhelmingly vote for Republican candidates, that’s not bloc voting. … So if it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting? Or is it still just partisan voting?”

Accusations of racial gerrymandering have often been used by progressive voting groups to challenge and block Republican-led redistricting efforts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas case could potentially indicate which way the Justices may rule in the Louisiana matter. A decision to neuter Section 2 allows red states to move forward with partisan redistricting maps, eliminating over a dozen Democrat-held House seats.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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