The Supreme Court upheld Texas’s new congressional maps, reversing a lower court ruling. In a 6-3 decision, the Court said that it reverses the previous judgment. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The new ruling comes as the Supreme Court upheld a redrawn election map in December. “Based on our preliminary evaluation of this case, Texas satisfies the traditional criteria for interim relief,” the Court wrote. The decision notes that the district court “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.”
The District Court “failed to draw a dispositive or near-dispositive adverse inference against respondents even though they did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals,” the decision added.
According to the new order, the lower court’s order has been set aside “for the reasons set forth” in the December ruling.
Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, filed a dissent in the December ruling as well, declaring that the order “disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right.”
In November 2025, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown wrote for the 2-1 decision on Texas’s maps that the “public perception of this case is that it’s about politics.”
“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map,” the decision read. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
