The Supreme Court gave Texas the go-ahead to use Republican-favoring maps in the 2026 midterms on Thursday, staying a lower court’s ruling that the maps were likely the result of an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In a blistering dissent many times longer than the court’s order, Justice Elena Kagan hammered the court’s conservatives for the casual way they tossed aside the lower court’s extensive work to determine that race was a key factor in the drawing of the maps.
“The District Court conducted a nine-day hearing, involving the testimony of nearly two dozen witnesses and the introduction of thousands of exhibits. It sifted through the resulting factual record, spanning some 3,000 pages. It assessed the credibility of each of the witnesses it had seen and heard in the courtroom. And after considering all the evidence, it held that the answer was clear,” she wrote. “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.”
Kagan added that the majority offered no evidence that the district court had erred in its ruling and failed to follow its own standards for review.
“The court issued a 160-page opinion recounting in detail its factual findings. Yet this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record,” she wrote, in a dissent joined by the court’s liberals. “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.”
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Texas redrew its maps largely at the insistence of President Donald Trump, who feared a blue wave in 2026 might stymie his agenda. In her dissent, Kagan lays out a detailed chronology of the way that Trump framed the unusual redistricting as a legal necessity.
Those maps passed the Texas legislature following a dramatic stand-off between state-level Democratic representatives and law enforcement. The state Democrats fled Texas to deny a quorum to the legislature, knowing that the maps would pass easily thanks to the state’s large Republican majority. The SCOTUS order all but guarantees the new maps will be in effect for the 2026 midterms.
Several Democratic states have floated their own partisan gerrymander to counterbalance the seat-swing in Texas, with California voters passing a proposition to redraw their maps in a way that favors Democrats.
Read more
about this topic
