On Friday evening, November 22, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped into the intensifying battle over Texas’s congressional districts, temporarily allowing the state to use a new, Republican-friendly voting map for the 2026 midterm elections. Justice Samuel Alito, who oversees emergency applications from Texas, issued an administrative stay that blocks a lower court’s ruling against the map—at least for now—giving the high court time to weigh the legal and constitutional questions swirling around the state’s redistricting efforts.
The decision, as reported by The New York Times and confirmed across multiple outlets, comes as Texas’s candidate filing period for the March 2026 primary barrels ahead. The administrative stay does not resolve whether the new map is constitutional, but it does mean that, for the moment, candidates are filing to run under boundaries that could create up to five new Republican-favored seats. Justice Alito instructed the civil rights groups challenging the map to respond by Monday, November 24, signaling that a more permanent decision could arrive soon.
The road to the Supreme Court was paved by a contentious and closely watched ruling from a federal panel of judges in El Paso. On November 18, the panel blocked the new map from being used, declaring in a 2-1 decision that it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the majority opinion, “Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.” The 160-page ruling ordered Texas to revert to the congressional map enacted in 2021 while litigation proceeds, effectively stalling Republican ambitions to reshape the state’s congressional delegation before the midterms.
But Texas officials wasted no time in pushing back. Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, expressing confidence that the justices would “uphold Texas’ sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting.” Governor Greg Abbott, speaking at a campaign event in Frisco, condemned the lower court’s decision. “There was zero evidence that any map-drawing decision was made based upon race,” Abbott told CBS News Texas. “Those in the legislature who testified said race played no role whatsoever. It was all about politics, which is legal.” Abbott further asserted, “I feel very confident the Supreme Court is going to take this case and once again overturn Judge Jeff Brown for a wrong ruling on redistricting.”
The debate over Texas’s new map is part of a broader redistricting arms race gripping the nation ahead of the 2026 midterms. After the 2020 census, states typically revise their congressional districts once per decade. But this cycle has seen an unusual flurry of mid-decade map changes, with both Republicans and Democrats seeking to maximize their chances in a closely divided House of Representatives. In Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature approved the new map over the summer, reportedly at the urging of President Donald Trump and national GOP leaders, aiming to flip Democratic seats and shore up Republican control.
The new map’s impact is already reverberating through the state’s political landscape. Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat representing Texas’s 32nd Congressional District, voiced alarm on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday,” stating, “If these new, very partisan, racially based, gerrymandered maps go forward, that makes the 32nd Congressional District — it swings it 46 points, it doesn’t really make it a viable seat.” Johnson and other Democrats argue that the map is designed to disenfranchise voters of color and tilt the playing field toward Republicans. “What the Republicans and Greg Abbott did in Texas to seeking to disenfranchise voters of color was egregious, and the court clearly agreed with that,” Johnson said to CBS News Texas. “This opinion is sharp, and it is clear, and it is concise.”
Other Democratic lawmakers echoed Johnson’s concerns. One representative from Fort Worth told CBS News Texas, “I feel like we’re on good legal grounds here. So, I feel confident, but you know I’m going to be again cautiously optimistic in watching what the Supreme Court says.” Another Dallas-area Democrat added, “I’ve always made it clear that this was racial, and I know that some people want to run away from the race element, but the law protects it. We know that our Constitution recognizes and protects it.” State Representative Nicole Collier of Fort Worth called the ruling “a victory today because it validates what the House Democrats and so many Texans have been saying about these hastily drawn maps. It’s very clear that they were drawn to disenfranchise, to harm the people of color, the voters of color, and that’s exactly what the court recognized.”
Republicans, however, have pushed back hard on the racial gerrymandering claims, insisting that the map was drawn for partisan, not racial, reasons—a distinction that remains at the heart of the legal dispute. Republican State Representative of Rockwall told CBS News Texas, “It seemed the court really overstated race and understated politics. The opinion, to me, misreads the motivation of the 2025 maps and ignores the legislative process. It sounded like, to me, like they were focused more on what the federal government was saying, not necessarily what the legislature actually did. And I think that’s where people are getting lost in the translation. We just simply redrew the maps based on political performance... and I think the Supreme Court will sort this out.”
The lower court’s majority ruling also referenced a July 2025 letter from the U.S. Department of Justice to Governor Abbott, threatening legal action if Texas did not redraw the districts based on their racial makeup. The dissenting judge, Jerry Smith of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lambasted the majority’s findings. “If, however, there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate,” Smith wrote, arguing that the majority opinion was politically motivated and unfair to Texas voters. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law.”
As the Supreme Court weighs its next move, the stakes could hardly be higher. The candidate filing period for Texas’s March 3 primary began November 8, and candidates have until December 8 to finalize their paperwork. Governor Abbott has asked the justices to rule by December 1, warning that “the confusion sown by the district court’s eleventh-hour injunction poses a very real risk of preventing candidates from being placed on the ballot and may well call into question the integrity of the upcoming election.”
Meanwhile, Texas is not alone in the redistricting fray. California voters recently approved Proposition 50, which allows lawmakers to redraw congressional lines prior to the midterms, potentially flipping several Republican seats—a move that Democrats hope will counterbalance GOP gains elsewhere. The Supreme Court is also expected to rule soon on a similar challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, which could influence how justices approach the Texas dispute.
As the deadline for candidate filings approaches and the nation’s highest court deliberates, both parties are watching Texas closely. The outcome could tip the balance of power in Congress and set a precedent for how far states can go in drawing political lines—whether for partisan gain, racial exclusion, or both. For now, the only certainty is that the fight over Texas’s map is far from over, and the eyes of the nation remain fixed on the Supreme Court’s next move.
