4:04Texas Gov. Greg Abbott addresses the press after a bill enactment while Texas lawmakers debate a bill concerning a revised U.S. congressional district map during a special assembly within the Senate Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin, Texas, Aug. 22, 2025. Eric Gay/AP
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito temporarily suspended a ruling from a lower court that intended to prevent Texas from implementing its fresh congressional map.
Alito didn’t clarify his rationale for instituting an administrative pause, which serves as a provisional delay to maintain the existing situation, affording the justices time to deliberate on the subject without indicating any stance on the case’s inherent merits.
Alito’s decree on Friday evening was issued shortly after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s legal representatives submitted an urgent request to the Supreme Court, aiming to safeguard the state’s contentious redistricting strategy implemented mid-decade, with the objective of securing an additional five Republican seats in the House of Representatives.
Earlier in the week, the lower court’s majority opinion asserted that “considerable evidence” suggested the state’s new map constituted an unlawful racial gerrymander, acting upon a DOJ memo that specifically cited a rationale predominantly based on race.
In its submission to the court, Texas criticized the majority opinion penned by District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown, appointed by Trump, for neglecting to presume good intentions on the part of the legislature and failing to appropriately distinguish between race and politics as potential motivations in the map’s creation.
The state also maintains that Judge Brown should not have delivered a verdict, as the disagreement surfaced excessively close to the 2026 election, merely weeks before the candidate filing deadline on Dec. 8.
“The disarray resulting from such an injunction is evident: campaigning was underway, candidates had already obtained signatures and submitted applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away,” the state argued in its filing.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott addresses the press after a bill enactment while Texas lawmakers debate a bill concerning a revised U.S. congressional district map during a special assembly within the Senate Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin, Texas, Aug. 22, 2025.Eric Gay/AP
It requests the justices to grant a stay by Dec. 1, effectively ensuring the mid-decade 2025 map could be utilized in the midterms.
The court has requested a response from the case’s plaintiffs by Monday at 5 p.m.
The state’s emergency petition arrives days after a lower court released its impactful 160-page decision, invalidating Texas Republicans’ redistricting efforts from mid-decade as blatant racial gerrymandering.
Brown’s opinion, issued on Tuesday, prevented Texas from using its new congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections, concluding that “substantial evidence indicates that Texas racially gerrymandered the map.”
The decision disrupted a national redistricting contest initiated by President Donald Trump as an effort to preserve Republican dominance over the narrowly divided House of Representatives.
Brown concluded that the entire redrawing process — which typically occurs only once per decade — was undertaken primarily in response to a specific request from Trump’s Justice Department “based solely on the racial composition” of four Democrat-held districts.
Federal law and Supreme Court precedent forbid race from being the predominant factor when creating maps that intentionally deprive minority voters of their rights or otherwise effectively weaken their influence.
In his dissent, released the following day, Judge Jerry E. Smith accused Brown of acting at the behest of liberal billionaire activist George Soros and Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and defended Texas’ revised mid-decade map as a purely partisan and entirely lawful maneuver.
“The most apparent reason for mid-cycle redistricting, of course, is partisan advantage,” not intentional racial prejudice, Smith wrote. He highlighted that the Supreme Court has stated courts must refrain from intervening in the political act of map-drawing.
Sourse: abcnews.go.com
