Supreme Court lets Texas use gerrymandered map that could give GOP 5 more House seats

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a Texas congressional map that may help the GOP win five more U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms. A lower court found the map is likely unconstitutional.

By Hansi Lo Wange, NPRDecember 4, 2025 5:31 pmGovernment & Politics, Partner Organizations

Eric Gay / AP

Texas Republican state Sen. Pete Flores looks over the state's redrawn congressional map at the Texas Capitol in Austin in August.

From NPR:

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a new congressional map that could help Republicans win five more U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterm election.

The decision released Thursday boosts the GOP’s chances of preserving its slim majority in the House of Representatives amid an unprecedented gerrymandering fight launched by President Trump, who has been pushing Texas and other GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to benefit Republicans.

The high court’s unsigned order follows Texas’ emergency request for the justices to pause a three-judge panel’s ruling blocking the state’s recently redrawn map.

After holding a nine-day hearing in October, that panel found challengers of the new map are likely to prove in a trial that the map violates the Constitution by discriminating against voters based on race.

In its majority opinion — authored by a Trump nominee — the panel cited a letter from the Department of Justice and multiple public statements by key Republican state lawmakers that suggested their map-drawer manipulated the racial demographics of voting districts to eliminate existing districts where Black and Latino voters together make up the majority. For the next year’s midterms, the panel ordered Texas to keep using the congressional districts the state’s GOP-controlled legislature drew in 2021.

But in Texas’ filing to the Supreme Court, the state claimed the lawmakers were not motivated by race and were focused instead on drawing new districts that are more likely to elect Republicans.

What the Supreme Court said

In its Thursday decision to side with Texas, the Supreme Court said the panel “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.”

The high court also found that, given the release of the panel’s ruling in the middle of Texas’ candidate filing period, the lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

In a dissenting opinion, however, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan criticized the court’s majority for reversing the panel’s decision after a “perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”

The high court’s decision “ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race,” wrote Kagan, who was joined by the court’s two other liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “And that result, as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution.”

In November, after the panel blocked the new map, Justice Samuel Alito allowed Texas to temporarily reinstate it while the Supreme Court reviewed the state’s emergency request.

Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday, saying in a statement that the GOP-drawn map “reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”

Democrats criticized the high court. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that the “people of Texas don’t want this map, but it was put in place at the behest of national Republicans who are desperate to cling to their majority in the House of Representatives by decimating minority voting opportunity.”

Texas kicked off a redistricting fight

The mid-decade redistricting plan Texas Republicans passed in August sparked a counter response by Democratic leaders in California, where voters in a special election in November approved a new congressional map that could help Democrats gain five additional House seats. A court hearing for a legal challenge to that map is set for Dec. 15.

The rest of the redistricting landscape remains unsettled as well. Lawsuits are challenging new gerrymanders in places like Missouri, where there is also a contested referendum effort. And other states, including Florida, Indiana and Virginia, may also pursue new districts prior to the midterms.

Last week, a federal court ruled to allow North Carolina’s midterm election to be held under a recently redrawn map that could give Republicans an additional seat.

Another wave of congressional redistricting may be coming soon depending on what — and when — the Supreme Court decides in a voting rights case about Louisiana’s congressional map. After the court held a rare rehearing for that case in October, some states are watching for a potential earlier-than-usual ruling that may allow Republican-led states to draw more GOP-friendly districts in time for the 2026 midterms.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey