Political drama is once again unfolding in Texas, where the fate of congressional districts—and potentially the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives—hangs in the balance. In a whirlwind of court rulings, appeals, and last-minute legal maneuvers, the state’s 2025 redistricting map has become a lightning rod for controversy, pitting Republican lawmakers against federal judges, and leaving candidates and election officials in a state of limbo.
It all began last summer, when Texas Republicans, at the request of former President Donald Trump, redrew the state’s congressional map. The aim? To secure up to five additional House seats for the GOP in the pivotal 2026 midterm elections. The move was bold, and, as it turns out, deeply contentious. According to The Dallas Morning News, the new map was quickly challenged in federal court, with plaintiffs alleging that it amounted to racial gerrymandering designed to dilute the voting power of minority communities.
On November 18, 2025, a federal court panel—led by Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee—ruled 2-1 that the map was indeed illegally crafted to weaken minority voting power. Judge Brown granted a preliminary injunction, which would have forced Texas to revert to its previous 2021 map. But the story didn’t end there. Justice Jerry E. Smith issued a fiery dissent, and the case was promptly appealed.
Just days later, on November 28, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. In a move reported by The Dallas Morning News and San Francisco Chronicle, Justice Samuel Alito signed an order blocking the lower court’s ruling, allowing the new districts to remain in effect—at least temporarily. The Supreme Court requested a full ruling from the bench, expected within the following week. This sudden intervention left more than a dozen candidates and hundreds of state and county election officials across Texas in suspense, all awaiting a final decision on which map would govern the upcoming elections.
For veteran Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett, the court’s intervention came as a surprise. Doggett, whose political career stretches back to 1973, had been set to retire after Republicans redrew his district, a move that would have forced him into a tough primary against rising progressive star Greg Casar. But when the federal court blocked the new map, Doggett’s prospects were suddenly revived. “The reports of my death, politically, are greatly exaggerated,” Doggett quipped, as reported by The Dallas Morning News. Yet even he acknowledged the uncertainty: the Supreme Court’s looming decision could once again upend the political landscape.
At the heart of the legal wrangling is the so-called “Purcell principle,” a doctrine established by the Supreme Court in 2006. As explained by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Purcell ruling holds that courts should refrain from altering election rules shortly before an election, to avoid voter confusion and administrative chaos. The Court wrote in its 2006 decision, “Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”
This principle has had far-reaching consequences. In recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked Purcell to block lower court rulings that would have changed state election laws or procedures in the weeks and months leading up to an election. In 2020, for example, the Court set aside a federal judge’s order that would have given Wisconsin officials more time to count absentee ballots during the pandemic. In 2022, it allowed Alabama to use new election maps in a primary, even though those maps were later found to violate the Voting Rights Act.
For Texas, the Purcell principle could mean that the controversial 2025 map remains in place for the 2026 elections, regardless of its ultimate legality. As law student David Herman noted in a 2023 Yale Law Review article, Purcell and related Supreme Court rulings have made it “much easier for states to hold at least one election under unlawful procedures.” That’s a sobering thought for voting rights advocates, who worry that minority communities could be disenfranchised—at least temporarily—by maps later found to violate federal law.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and a prominent liberal legal scholar, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “There’s no way that a challenge could have been brought sooner. If the court says nonetheless that Purcell precludes this, it sends such a clear message to state legislators: You can do anything you want within a certain amount of time before the election.” Chemerinsky’s concerns are echoed by many on the left, who see the Purcell principle as a tool for entrenching partisan gerrymanders and undermining the Voting Rights Act.
But Texas officials see things differently. In a filing to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that it was the lower courts—not the state legislature—who were sowing confusion by intervening so close to the election. “The confusion the district court’s order has injected into Texas’s congressional elections is real,” Paxton’s office wrote. They cited Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in a 2020 case: “It is one thing for state legislatures to alter their own election rules in the late innings and to bear the responsibility for any unintended consequences. It is quite another thing for a federal district court to swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent.”
The urgency was palpable. The filing deadline for candidates to appear on the Texas primary ballot was December 8, 2025—less than three weeks after the federal court’s initial ruling. With the Supreme Court’s intervention, nobody knew for sure which map would be in effect, making it nearly impossible for candidates to plan their campaigns or even decide which district to run in. As The Dallas Morning News pointed out, until the issue is settled, “potential congressional candidates will not know which position to file for.”
The stakes could hardly be higher. With the House of Representatives narrowly divided, the outcome of the Texas redistricting battle could determine which party controls Congress after the 2026 elections. And while the Supreme Court’s final ruling is expected imminently, the episode has already exposed deep fault lines in American democracy—between state and federal power, between the rights of voters and the prerogatives of legislatures, and between the urgent need for clarity and the slow grind of justice.
For now, Texans—candidates, officials, and voters alike—are left waiting and watching, caught in the crossfire of a legal and political struggle that shows no signs of abating.
