The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily halted a lower court order that threw out Texas’ redrawn congressional maps in time for next month’s candidate filing deadline — as the state and its legal opponents square off on whether the maps were driven by politics or race.
Lawyers for Texas had asked the court earlier Friday to issue a stay and effectively let Texas return — at least for now — to the maps it passed over the summer, which redrew five Democratic House seats to make them more GOP-friendly.
Justice Samuel Alito granted the state’s request for an administrative stay, which means the lower court ruling is now on hold until the Supreme Court takes further action.
Texas is asking the high court to stay the lower court ruling on a longer-term basis by Dec. 1, noting that the deadline for candidates to file for next year’s primary elections is Dec. 8. He directed the plaintiffs who sued Texas to file their response by Monday afternoon.
The state’s redistricting push set of a nationwide effort to redraw House maps ahead of next year’s midterms, with California shifting five congressional districts to the left, and Missouri and North Carolina each shifting a seat to the right. President Trump has pushed other GOP-led states to take similar steps.
But earlier this week, a panel of federal judges blocked Texas from using its new maps in a 2-1 ruling. The court’s opinion, penned by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, sided with plaintiffs who argued the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The lower court pointed to a majority-White Democratic district that it said should have changed more if the process was driven purely by politics, not race. It also argued that some state officials, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, seemed to move in response to a letter by a top Justice Department official warning them to redraw four existing districts that the federal government viewed as illegal “coalition” districts, where non-Hispanic White voters are in the minority, but no racial group has a majority.
In Friday’s request to the Supreme Court, the state of Texas pushed back on these arguments, asserting that the redistricting process was entirely partisan and wasn’t motivated by race.
“From the start, everyone recognized that the purpose of Texas’s redistricting effort was Republican political advantage,” the state wrote, quoting several elected Democrats who criticized the new maps on political grounds.
Texas said the lower court ruling “erroneously rests on speculation and inferences of bad faith.” And it said the state GOP’s chief mapmaker worked with data on partisanship rather than race.
In some cases, the state of Texas cited a dissent from the lower court ruling written by Judge Jerry Smith. The Reagan appointee drew headlines earlier this week for his fiery opinion, which used the phrase “I dissent” 16 times, called Brown an “unskilled magician,” said the majority opinion would deserve an “F” on a law school exam and accused the other judges of improperly leaving him out of the process.
The State of Texas also argued the lower court ruling could cause “chaos” since it was issued during the candidate filing period for next year’s races.
