What happened
A panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the new Texas congressional map drawn up at the behest of President Donald Trump was likely an illegal racial gerrymander. Texas Republicans engineered the map to add five GOP seats to their slim House majority, setting off a nationwide redistricting fight. The court ordered Texas to use its 2021 congressional map in next year’s midterm elections.
Who said what
Texas Republicans said publicly they were drawing the new districts for partisan reasons, as allowed by the Supreme Court, but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, said in his 160-page opinion. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the GOP-led state Legislature adopted “racial objectives” laid out by Justice Department civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon in a “legally incorrect” July 7 letter that was “challenging to unpack” because it “contains so many factual, legal and typographical errors.”
The ruling was a “stinging setback” for Trump and Republicans, who initially had the “upper hand” in their “unusual” mid-decade gerrymander push, The Washington Post said. But “state-level backlash, Democrats’ big Election Day win for California’s redistricting measure and this court ruling have cut into that advantage,” Politico said. Trump now “stands to end the fight he began behind or near a draw,” leaving Republicans “wondering whether the nationwide remapping effort was worth the political capital.”
What next?
Abbot’s “quick appeal” of the ruling “will give the Supreme Court the last word on which maps the state uses,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the window for Texas congressional candidates to file closes Dec. 8.
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