This week’s Texas gerrymandering court ruling is one of the wilder decisions I’ve seen in recent years.
Lisa and I discuss why above…
But start with this: the three-judge panel comprised an Obama appointee, a Reagan appointee, and a Trump appointee. The Trump appointee is a former Texas Supreme Court Justice who once clerked for Texas Governor Greg Abbott when he was a Supreme Court Justice.
So you’d assume the Obama appointee would lose 2-1, right?
Wrong.
It was the Trump appointee and former Abbott clerk who joined the Obama appointee to hand a devastating (if perhaps temporary) loss to his old boss and Trump, and their attempt to rig elections prior to the 2026 election. And it was the Reagan appointee who wrote a fiery dissent.
And that’s just the beginning of the story.
The 9-day trial and decision revealed all sorts of other issues, including just how corrupt the entire Texas enterprise and how screwed up the law is when it comes to gerrymandering:
the Pam Bondi-led DOJ and Associate AG for Civil Rights (Harmeet Dhillon, who has spent her career fighting against civil rights) were essentially in collusion with Texas officials to satisfy Trump’s wishes to eliminate five Democratic districts. Why? How?
Early in the year, Trump and Abbott’s attempt to convince Texas legislators to re-gerrymander the state went nowhere.
But in July, a DOJ letter concocted and worked on jointly with Texas officials was “sent” from the DOJ to Texas to give Abbott a legal justification to demand that Texas be re-gerrymandered. The man who would go on to gerrymander Texas’s districts was shown “a preliminary draft of [the letter] in the West Wing of the White House and discussed it with key White House and DOJ officials—and Governor Abbott—a week before DOJ released it.”
When the letter arrived in July, Abbott immediately cited it as the reason that the new districting special session had to happen. Unlike his and Trump’s previous efforts to re-gerrymander Texas, that strategy worked and the process began. But there was a problem…
The letter was so ham-handed, error-strewn and amateurish, (the court’s description—full of “factual, legal, and typographical errors” and “many inaccuracies”) it turned out to be the smoking gun evidence that led to the Texas defeat in court. Why?
Because if you know anything about how gerrymandering cases are now handled by federal courts, you know that the Supreme Court has ruled that:
And, that concocted DOJ letter set into motion a process that was clearly based on race and not simply partisan or political interests. As the court said:
The letter affirmed that race “was the driving force behind the 2025 Map.” — “DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn’t immediately dismantle and redraw these districts—a threat based entirely on their racial makeup.”
The DOJ letter “is equally notable for what it doesn’t include: any mention of partisanship.”
Abbottt’s response echoed the letter’s theme: “the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race. In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.”
“The redistricting bill’s sponsors made numerous statements suggesting that they had intentionally manipulated the districts’ lines to create more majority-Hispanic and majority-Black districts.”
Which means that, in its desperate effort to rig Texas for Trump’s benefit, Trump’s own DOJ is so inept that they kick-started the process in the only way that triggers federal court review. And the letter failed to frame it in the way that would’ve kept federal courts from reviewing the map at all.
And even though officials in Texas are now protesting that the goal was partisan all along—“we were only being partisan hacks, and race had nothing to do with it!”—the court found that the letter and accompanying evidence and public statements make it clear that they are lying. (Their words were that they “doubt the veracity” of the state witnesses).
All of this puts the conservative majority of the Supreme Court in a bad spot. Because the justices that most loudly insist that race should never be a part of districting are the conservative justices. (Which is why it’s a conservative Trump appointee who wrote this opinion). They believe this so strongly that they claim that race can’t even be considered when states are trying to remedy against cases when districts have been found to be racially discriminatory!? (that’s essentially what will be decided in the case from Louisiana this term that got so much attention). The Texas case is basically the same type of remedial case, but in Texas, the claimed need to correct a map was the Trojan Horse Abbott used to eliminate five Democratic districts.
This is why the opening quote by the Trump appointee’s opinion is of John Roberts himself: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This judge believes he is following Supreme Court precedent for these types of cases.
So to prevail here, Texas will need to convince the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to abandon a position they’ve been pushing for years now, including in the Louisiana case now before them. In fact, for Texas to prevail, the Court’s conclusion would have to be the exact opposite of what they will likely rule in the Louisiana case before them.
So yes, this case results from a combination of collusion between Texas and the DOJ, sheer incompetence by the DOJ, and the application of what has become bedrock conservative jurisprudence to defeat an urgent conservative political cause.
It also highlights just how absurd overall Supreme Court doctrine is when it comes to gerrymandering: that the “get out jail free” card for those who gerrymander is to cry out that they were motivated purely by partisan aims and not racial aims. But the motives are clearly intimately tied together, the effect is largely the same, as is much of the harm—so courts treating the distinction in the polar opposite way makes little sense.
The question now is, what happens next?
If you’re like me, you stopped holding your breath for Supreme Court principle and consistency years ago.
As Lisa and I discuss above, the Court can still resurrect the Trump-Abbott plan through a combination of lifting the lower court stay, or taking the full appeal and reversing the decision outright.
The court could even ultimately rule against the map, but as it’s done in other big cases, it could do so with a long enough delay that Trump and Abbott win for the 2026 cycle. Thats what happened to North Carolina in 2022.
So, would the Roberts majority allow a map that violates it own clearly stated principles to stand—in a way that clearly benefits Trump and Republicans in the short-term?
I’ve seen enough in recent years to know the answer to that question.
Thank you Katharine Hill, Daniel D Woodard, Barbara Shields, Shirley Figueroa, Rhonda Foster, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lincoln Square! Join me for my next live video in the app.
