Republicans received some amazing news on Thursday, as the Supreme Court has decided to allow the great state of Texas to use a brand new congressional map that could hand the GOP five more U.S. House seats during the 2026 midterm election. This critical ruling increases the chances that the Republican Party maintains its majority hold on the House of Representatives, a sharp-witted move put into action by President Donald Trump.
The president has been prodding Texas and other Republican-led states to get on the ball and redraw congressional district lines to help secure the seats needed to maintain control of the House and ensure he can continue to implement his America First agenda. The court’s order comes on the heels of Texas filing an emergency request for the justices to halt a three-judge panel’s ruling blocking the state’s redrawn map.
The panel of judges held a nine-day hearing in October where they found that challengers of the redrawn congressional districts would be able to prove in a trial that the map violated the Constitution by allegedly discriminating against voters based on race.
The majority opinion, which was written by a Trump nominee to the bench, cited information contained in a letter from the Justice Department, along with several public statements from GOP state lawmakers that they believe suggests that the map drawer purposefully manipulated racial demographics to wipe out current districts where Black and Latino voters make up the majority of voters.
The panel then ordered Texas to ditch the new map and stick with the congressional districts drawn up by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2021. However, Texas fought back by filing a complaint with the Supreme Court that stated the lawmakers were not motivated by race and were drawing new districts to give Republicans a boost in the midterms.
In the ruling, the Supreme Court stated that the panel “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.” They went on to say that since the release of the panel’s ruling came during the middle of Texas’ candidate filing period, the lower court “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”
According to NPR, the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, slammed the majority decision for reversing the panel’s ruling after a “perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.” Kagan went on to write, along with fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the majority opinion “ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution.”
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, was thrilled to hear of the high court’s decision, releasing a statement saying that the new GOP-drawn map “reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”
Democrats, on the other hand, were not so pleased. Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), who serves as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, put out a statement of her own that said the “people of Texas don’t want this map, but it was put in place at the behest of national Republicans who are desperate to cling to their majority in the House of Representatives by decimating minority voting opportunity.”