A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a redistricting plan approved by Texas state lawmakers earlier this year. File photo Jurode/Wikimedia Commons
Nov. 18 (UPI) — A federal court ordered Texas on Tuesday to throw out its redrawn Republican-friendly congressional maps for the 2026 election after finding it constituted an illegal racial gerrymander.
The 2-1 order by the three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court of Western Texas is a significant setback for Republicans after they pushed through an unusual redistricting of Texas’ congressional seats to insulate their slim House majority ahead of next year’s midterms.
President Donald Trump openly urged Texas state lawmakers to adopt the new congressional map in order to help the party’s prospects in Washington. Democratic lawmakers responded by fleeing the state in what was ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to deny Republicans the quorum needed to pass the new maps.
State Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat who led the quorum break, welcomed the court’s ruling in a post on X.
“Texas House Dems stood up to Abbott & Trump,” he wrote. “We broke quorum & we fought in the courts! We did not back down.”
However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a post on X that he would appeal the order to the U.S. Supreme Court. He criticized what he called partisan gerrymandering in Democratic-led states, including California, Illinois and New York. He added that he expects the Supreme Court to “uphold Texas’s sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting.”
Republicans currently hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats, and the now-scrapped redistricting was expected to give the party an edge by diluting Democratic strongholds.
But U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, instead focused on how the new map would affect the racial makeup of Texas’ congressional districts.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” Brown wrote. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
In his ruling, Brown cited a July letter from U.S. Department of Justice officials to Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, directing the state to correct four districts because they were illegal racial gerrymanders.
Brown wrote that the letter was difficult to assess because it contained “so many factual, legal and typographical errors.” But Brown pointed out that Abbott cited the letter as the reason he added congressional redistricting to the legislature’s special session earlier this year.