Texas redrew its voting map as a part of US President Donald Trump’s plan to win additional Republican seats within the 2026 midterm elections.
Printed On 22 Nov 2025
The US Supreme Court docket has briefly blocked a decrease court docket ruling that discovered the Texas 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely discriminates on the idea of race.
The order signed on Friday by Supreme Court docket Justice Samuel Alito will stay in place no less than for the following few days whereas the court docket considers whether or not to permit the brand new map, which is beneficial to Republicans, for use within the US midterm elections subsequent 12 months.
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Texas Legal professional Basic Ken Paxton hailed the ruling, which had granted an “administrative keep” and briefly stopped the decrease court docket’s “injunction in opposition to Texas’s map”.
“Radical left-wing activists are abusing the judicial system to derail the Republican agenda and steal the US Home for Democrats. I’m combating to cease this blatant try to upend our political system,” Paxton mentioned in an earlier submit on social media.
Texas redrew its congressional map in August as a part of US President Donald Trump’s efforts to protect a slim Republican majority within the Home of Representatives in subsequent 12 months’s mid-term elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle between Republicans and Democrats.
The brand new redistricting map for Texas was engineered to offer Republicans 5 further Home seats, however a panel of federal judges in El Paso dominated 2-1 on Tuesday, saying that the civil rights teams that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters have been more likely to win their case.
The redrawn map was probably racially discriminatory in violation of US constitutional protections, the court docket discovered.
Nonprofit information outlet The Texas Tribune mentioned the state is now again to utilizing, briefly, its 2025 congressional map for voting because the Supreme Court docket has not but determined what map Texas ought to in the end use, and the “legality of the map” will play out in court docket over the approaching weeks and months.
Texas was the primary state to fulfill Trump’s calls for on redistricting. Missouri and North Carolina adopted Texas with new redistricting maps that will add an extra Republican seat every.
To counter these strikes, California voters approved a ballot initiative to offer Democrats an extra 5 seats there.
Redrawn voter maps are actually dealing with court docket challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.
Republicans at present maintain slim majorities in each chambers of Congress, and ceding management of both the Home or Senate to the Democrats within the November 2026 midterm elections would imperil Trump’s legislative agenda within the second half of his newest time period in workplace.
There have been authorized fights on the Supreme Court docket for many years over the follow referred to as gerrymandering – the redrawing of electoral district boundaries to marginalise a sure set of voters and improve the affect of others.
The court docket issued its most essential ruling to this point on the matter in 2019, declaring that gerrymandering for partisan causes – to spice up the electoral probabilities of one’s personal social gathering and weaken one’s political opponent – couldn’t be challenged in federal courts.
However gerrymandering pushed primarily by race stays illegal underneath the US Structure’s 14th Modification assure of equal safety underneath the regulation and fifteenth Modification prohibition on racial discrimination in voting.
