🔗 Share this article

Through a per curiam decision, the highest judicial body has allowed Texas to implement a redrawn congressional map that may create as many as five new GOP-friendly districts. The 6-3 order, issued on Thursday, approves a appeal by the state to overturn a lower court's block that had rejected the boundaries in November.

Court's Explanation

The federal judge erroneously placed itself into an active primary campaign, causing significant confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections, the order stated in justifying its ruling.

The federal court had previously found that Texas had likely sorted voters by their race – a act known as unconstitutional racial sorting – when it enacted the new maps. It had ordered the state to use the districts established after the 2020 census for the upcoming election.

Stinging Dissenting Opinion

Through a sharply worded dissent, Justice Elena Kagan criticized the court's ruling. She argued that it disregarded the work of the district court, pointing out that its decision was written by a judge appointed by former President Donald Trump.

While our court is superior in jurisdiction, we are not superior in making these fact-intensive determinations, Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

She continued, The majority's order ensures that Texas's new map, with all its boosted partisan advantage, will dictate next year's elections. And it guarantees that many Texas citizens, unjustly, will be sorted in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced consistently, is a infraction of the law of the land.

Countrywide Redistricting Battle

This decision comes amid a national fight over the remapping of electoral maps. Texas is a crucial component in pushes to transform the U.S. House map to bolster a narrow Republican hold. Usually, redistricting takes place after a new decade's census. Yet the move by Texas Republicans to initiate a aggressive off-cycle redistricting earlier in the summer set off a wave among other states.

Conservative legislators in states like North Carolina and Missouri have also passed redistricting plans that might create several additional Republican-leaning seats. Democrats, for their part, have pushed back with new maps in including California and Virginia, which might neutralize those projected gains.

Partisan Responses

The Texas attorney general praised the High Court's decision. In a comment, he said the order upheld Texas's basic authority to draw a map that secures representation aligned with his party. Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state, he remarked.

On the other hand, Democratic representatives decried the ruling. The Court's approval of this extreme, racially gerrymandered Texas GOP map is profoundly disappointing, said the head of a major Democratic election organization.

A senior House figure argued the court had once again eroded its standing by approving a racially gerrymandered map. Tonight's ruling by far-right justices on the supreme court is further proof that the extremists will do anything to rig the midterm elections. The gerrymandered Texas congressional map is a partisan and racially discriminatory power grab designed to subvert the will of the voters – particularly in Black and Latino communities, he stated.