Federal court bars Texas from using new Republican-friendly US House map in midterms
By Ethan Cohen, Devan Cole, Fredreka Schouten, CNN
(CNN) — A federal court Tuesday blocked Texas from using its newly drawn congressional map in next year’s midterms, ruling that the map is likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The ruling is a major setback for President Donald Trump and Republicans, who had made Texas the centerpiece of a national campaign to redraw maps ahead of the midterms. Texas announced it would appeal.
The court ordered Texas to use its previous map, which the state enacted after the 2020 census.
If the ruling stands, Republicans could end up on the losing end of the mid-decade redistricting fight they started.
The new Texas map aimed to help Republicans flip five Democratic-held House seats next year, and it kicked off a rush of redistricting efforts from both parties across the country. The Justice Department has joined a similar challenge to the new Democratic-drawn map in California enacted in direct response to Texas aiming to flip five Republican-held seats.
With House Republicans currently holding just a three-seat majority, the five seats at play in Texas could make the difference in who wins control of the House next year.
US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, wrote that the challengers were “likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
The three-judge panel that heard the case split 2-1, with Obama appointee David Guaderrama joining Brown. Reagan appointee Jerry Smith opposed the decision.
“The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, in announcing a planned appeal to the US Supreme Court.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday, “We strongly disagree with today’s district court ruling on Texas’s redistricting map – Texas’s map was drawn the right way for the right reasons.”
Judge criticizes a letter Trump’s DOJ sent to Texas
Tuesday’s ruling centers on a letter the Trump administration sent to Texas in July in which Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, warned of potential legal action over the state’s map because of what it called “unconstitutional” coalition districts, or districts with a non-White majority but where no single racial group makes up a majority.
While Brown calls DOJ’s assertion “legally incorrect,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited the letter when he added redistricting to a special session he’d scheduled for the legislature.
“In doing so, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns. In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote.
“The map ultimately passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor—the 2025 Map—achieved all but one of the racial objectives that DOJ demanded,” Brown wrote. “The Legislature dismantled and left unrecognizable not only all of the districts DOJ identified in the letter, but also several other ‘coalition districts’ around the State.”
Brown skewered Dhillon’s letter in his decision, writing that it’s “challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”
“Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General—who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration—describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally() unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess,” Brown wrote.
Even if states aren’t required to draw certain types of districts such as coalition districts under federal civil rights law, Brown wrote that they aren’t prohibited from doing so.
“Nor is it lawful for a legislature to purposefully target such districts for destruction,” Brown wrote.
Before being appointed to the federal bench, Brown served for nearly two decades as a state judge, culminating in six years on the Texas Supreme Court, the state’s highest civil court.
Abbott celebrated Brown’s appointment in 2019, noting that the judge had started his career as a law clerk for the governor when he was himself serving on the state Supreme Court.
Abbott said that he had “witnessed firsthand” Brown’s and another nominee’s “sharp legal minds and commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law.”
On Tuesday, Abbott ripped Brown’s ruling without naming the judge. He said it was “clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”
Texas Democrats who fought the GOP-led effort – including by leaving the state to delay the passage of the map – celebrated Brown’s ruling.
“A federal court just stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen,” said state Rep. Gene Wu, who leads the Texas House Democrats.
The national redistricting battles play out in court
The legal wrangling over efforts by Democrats and Republicans across the country to enact rare, mid-decade congressional maps will continue to play out in coming weeks and months. Last week, the Justice Department sued officials in California over newly enacted maps meant to give Democrats in the Golden State an edge next year. A court is set to hear arguments in that case next month.
Attorneys with the department are arguing that California’s redistricting plan, which was approved by voters in early November, was sold as a purely partisan effort, when in fact “the focus was not partisanship, but race,” which they say would be impermissible under the US Constitution.
Perhaps with a nod to the likelihood that Tuesday’s action would likely end up before the US Supreme Court, Brown began the panel’s ruling on the Texas maps by quoting Chief Justice John Roberts in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
To date, Republican-drawn maps across four states, including Texas, have targeted a total of nine Democratic-held seats. Six of those seats have been held by Black or Latino lawmakers.
Critics of the Republican redistricting efforts have argued that the GOP’s hunt for a partisan advantage in Congress has improperly diluted the voting power of racial and ethnic minorities.
“The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”
The Texas ruling points to one of the remaining legal tools available to groups challenging redistricting efforts.
While the Supreme Court ruled in a 2019 case that partisan gerrymandering could no longer be challenged in federal court, the opinion left open the possibility of challenging racial gerrymanders, including those that violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act – a crowning achievement of the civil rights era.
Civil rights groups say the law has reduced racial discrimination and expanded the number of minority lawmakers not only in Congress but also in state legislatures and even schools boards.
But the ability to bring those suits is now under threat because of a pending case from Louisiana. In that litigation, Louisiana v. Callais, a group of White voters claim that the state violated the Constitution by drawing a second Black-majority district. In other words, they argue that the 14th Amendment shouldn’t allow states to consider race when attempting to fix discrimination.
The court’s 6-3 conservative majority signaled deep reservations with Louisiana’s new congressional map when the court heard oral arguments in the case in October. But it was far less clear whether the court would strike down the key provision of the Voting Rights Act entirely or seek to modify it instead.
Just two years ago, the high court rejected similar claims raised by Alabama. In that case, a majority of the court ordered Alabama officials to redraw the state’s congressional map to allow an additional Black majority district.
A decision in the Louisiana case is expected next year.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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CNN’s Arlette Saenz and John Fritze contributed to this report.
