Democrats Will Rig The Midterms If Red States Let Them After Texas Ruling
A panel of three unelected judges issued an injunction Tuesday blocking Texas from using its newly drawn congressional map. If Texas loses the appeals process, the injunction could stand, which means the five seats Texas thought it was gaining will not materialize. But five seats that could materialize will be in California. Which means that Republicans in red states must step up or risk losing the House to Democrats permanently.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown ruled alongside Judge Davi Guaderrama in a 2-1 decision that the new map appears to be a race-based gerrymander, which is illegal.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” the majority opinion reads. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
A nine-day hearing was held in El Paso in October regarding the new maps, which would add five Republican-leaning seats reflecting Texas’ population growth and shift. The question before the court was whether Texas Republicans drew a map based on race, which is illegal, or on political preference, which is not. Texas Republicans maintained the map was drawn for political reasons.
Notably, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had sent a letter to Texas in July urging them to redraw its map because of race-based districts in the existing map.
“As stated below, Congressional Districts TX-09, TX-18, TX-29 and TX-33 currently constitute unconstitutional ‘coalition districts’ and we urge the State of Texas to rectify these race-based considerations from these specific districts.”
When Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to redistrict, he referenced the letter: “Legislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
The court alleges that the DOJ’s letter urged redistricting on the basis of race. If the court’s interpretation is accurate — and if Texas did in fact redraw their map to comply with such letter, then the map would be illegal since maps cannot be race-based. However, Texas Republicans have disputed such argument, instead claiming to have redrawn the map for political purposes
The majority of the court, however, rejected that testimony, claiming it is “extremely unlikely” that the Texas legislature map created congressional districts with racial outcomes that were by “pure chance.”
But as Director of Texas Public Policy Foundation Josh Findlay told The Federalist, “What Texas did this cycle was done to reflect the will of Texas voters, not left-wing special interests.”
Meanwhile, California is slated to pick up five Democrat seats after voters passed Proposition 50 to redraw the state’s maps to offset any potential GOP pickups in Texas. The DOJ has sued California, though, similar to Texas, and the appeals process could delay any changes until after the midterms, effectively locking in the new lines.
But as Findlay pointed out in a statement to The Federalist: “Any time an issue is decided by activist judges, there is a risk that the judge will substitute their political views for the law. If Republicans are counting on redistricting to hold their leads in the midterms, then other Red states may need to step up and adopt maps that reflect the political realities of their people, especially if control of the U.S. House of Representatives rests in the hands of liberal California judges.”
As of now, however, red states don’t appear willing to step up. In Utah, an unelected district court judge ruled that Republican-proposed congressional map was unconstitutional and instead the state — which President Donald Trump won by nearly 22 points last November — would have to adopt a plaintiff-drawn map that actually creates a solid-Democrat seat.
In Kansas, top House Republicans “dropped efforts to force a redraw of U.S. House districts” for now, according to The Associated Press. Meanwhile in Indiana, there is not enough support yet to redistrict, with Politico’s Adam Wren reporting that the spokeswoman for Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray said, “The votes still aren’t there for redistricting.” In fact, during a recent interview Bray’s team reportedly requested that an answer about redistricting be removed from the final production.
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