Supreme Court pauses lower court order that blocked Texas’ new congressional maps

By John Fritze, Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — Texas urged the Supreme Court on Friday to boost President Donald Trump’s effort to help Republicans maintain control of Congress, asking the justices to review a federal court ruling that found the state’s new map is likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Soon after the appeal was filed, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily blocked the lower court ruling that barred Texas from using the congressional maps, putting the fast-moving appeal on pause while the Supreme Court considers the case.

The state’s emergency appeal could have enormous consequences for next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of the House for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. A Democratic majority would likely unleash a string of investigations aimed at the administration and possibly block most of the president’s legislative agenda.

Texas asked the Supreme Court to block the lower court ruling by December 1. It also urged the court to quickly step into the case on the merits now and expedite its review.

The state said the lower court order had caused “chaos” in its elections.

“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 officials told the Supreme Court.

Alito asked the groups that challenged Texas’ maps to respond to the emergency appeal by Monday evening, suggesting he is eager to move the high-profile case at a fast pace. Alito, a conservative, handles appeals rising from courts within the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Alito will likely refer the case to the full court soon, and the “administrative” order he signed Friday night will remain in place only until all nine justices review the case.

Trump has repeatedly called for red states to redraw districts and increase the number of GOP-held seats for political reasons. That has set off an unusual mid-decade arms race between red and blue states to redraw lines in order to maximize each party’s chances in the midterms.

At issue is whether Texas lawmakers violated the Constitution when they redrew the state’s congressional boundaries based on a Trump Justice Department letter urging the state to change the racial compositions of four of those districts. In a scathing opinion on Tuesday, a federal court found that focus on race when drawing the lines likely violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The new Texas map would likely flip five Democratic-held House seats to Republican next year. House Republicans currently hold a narrow three-seat majority.

The Supreme Court has long been reticent to engage in these disputes. In 2019, the court extricated itself from litigation over partisan gerrymandering – ruling that those were political rather than legal matters. If Texas had justified its new map based on politics, the state would almost certainly have been able to defend the changes in federal courts.

Texas told the Supreme Court in its emergency appeal Friday that politics, not race, drove the new maps.

“This summer, the Texas Legislature did what legislatures do: politics,” the state told the high court.

In a statement minutes after the state filed its appeal, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reinforced the point.

“Texas engaged in partisan redistricting solely to secure more Republican seats in Congress and thereby better represent our state and Texans,” Paxton said. “For years, Democrats have aggressively gerrymandered their states and only cry foul and hurl baseless ‘racism’ accusations because they are losing.”

But the Supreme Court won’t have much, if any, room to maneuver around claims of racial gerrymander in the Texas case. The justices will have to decide on a relatively short fuse whether to temporarily block the lower court order that threw out the state’s new boundaries or leave that ruling in place.

Congressional hopefuls in Texas must declare their candidacy by December 8. The state’s primaries are set for March.

And those looming deadlines may prompt a majority of the court to decide that it’s too close to the election for federal courts to be wading into the Texas morass. Under a 2006 decision, the justices have warned federal courts to avoid making last-minute changes to the status quo of voting rules before an election. If the court decides that principle applies, then it would likely side with Texas – allowing the redrawn map to take effect for next year’s elections.

Texas leaned heavily into that argument in its briefing Friday, asserting that it was too late – too close to the election – for federal courts to get involved.

US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, nominated to the bench by Trump during his first term, eviscerated the letter the Justice Department sent to Texas in July urging the redistricting. That letter 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.

“It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” Brown wrote. “The gist of the letter, though, is that DOJ is urging Texas to change the racial compositions” of four districts.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, cited the DOJ letter when he added redistricting to the agenda of a special legislative session. By doing so, “the governor explicitly directed the legislature to draw a new US House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns,” Brown said.

“In other words, the governor explicitly directed the legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote.

States may consider race when they redraw congressional lines – usually every decade following the census – but Supreme Court precedent bars race from being the predominant factor in that effort.

“When given an opportunity to publicly proclaim that his motivation for adding redistricting to the legislative agenda was solely to improve Republicans’ electoral prospects at President Trump’s request, the governor denied any such motivation,” Brown wrote. “Instead, the governor expressly stated that his predominant motivation was racial.”

The special three-judge court that heard the election case split 2-1, with an Obama appointee joining Brown and a nominee of President Ronald Reagan dissenting.

The legal battles over efforts by Republicans and Democrats to enact rare, mid-decade congressional maps will continue to play out in coming weeks. Last week, the Justice Department sued officials in California over new 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.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is considering a separate case dealing with congressional districts in Louisiana and the creation of a second Black-majority district there to comply with a federal court order. That case threatens to unwind how states, courts and civil rights groups have viewed the role of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to prevent racial discrimination in redistricting. It may also jeopardize majority-Black and heavily Democratic seats in several other states across the country.

In the Texas case, Brown ordered the state to use the same map it drew after the 2020 census. Of the state’s 38 House seats, 25 are held by Republicans.

It’s not clear how quickly the court will decide the case. So far this year, in non-argued emergency cases, the court has taken an average of about three weeks to resolve appeals dealing with the Trump administration.

US Circuit Judge Jerry Smith issued a sprawling dissent on Wednesday that repeatedly attacked Brown’s handling of the case. Smith argued that the majority opinion was “replete with legal and factual error, and accompanied by naked procedural abuse.”

“If this were a law school exam, the opinion would deserve an ‘F,’” Smith wrote. “Judge Brown is an unskilled magician. The audience knows what is coming next.”

This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.