How a 2019 case cleared the runway for Texas to redraw its congressional map and why federal judges have now pumped the brakes: ANALYSIS
The decision Tuesday by a panel of federal judges blocking Texas' redrawn congressional map is a 160-page play-by-play description of a stunning political own goal by the Trump administration and Texas Republican officials.
Since the Supreme Court's 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, the federal judiciary has effectively rolled out a red carpet for partisan gerrymandering.
The court declared that even the most aggressive, self-serving partisan maps are "political questions" beyond federal review. In practical terms, Rucho created something close to a fail-safe environment for opportunists determined to maximize partisan advantage: draw districts to entrench your party, even egregiously skewed and unrepresentative ones, knowing that federal courts will look the other way.
Against that backdrop, the ruling in the Texas case is striking.
It is clear from the court's opinion that neither Texas politicians nor the Trump Justice Department realized how much room the current legal structure leaves for nakedly partisan, avowedly spoils-grabbing gerrymandering. Accordingly, both felt compelled to try to camouflage their motives by advancing what the court saw as disingenuous race-based concerns.
Key difference between the appearance of partisan vs. racial gerrymandering
The backbone of the reasoning in the court's 2-1 majority opinion is the sharp doctrinal divide between partisan and racial gerrymandering.
After Rucho, partisan gerrymandering is legally unchecked. A legislature intent on cementing partisan control can pack, crack and slice the electorate for partisan ends with impunity. Courts cannot intervene.
According to the court's opinion, Texas nonetheless crossed a constitutional line that remains enforceable: racial gerrymandering. The opinion underscores that even in a post-Rucho world -- where partisan manipulation is essentially immune from scrutiny -- states cannot sort, fracture or dilute voters on the basis of race. Texas, the majority found, did precisely that.
Racial gerrymandering remains prohibited by the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts will still scrutinize motives, examine detailed evidentiary records and strike down maps where race predominates -- particularly when the state invokes "partisan intent" as a post-hoc shield.
The Texas ruling is a reminder that this line, although narrow, is real.
DOJ letter at center of case
At the center of the case is a July letter sent by the Department of Justice, signed by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon. The letter claimed that several Texas "coalition districts" -- where white voters are not a majority, but Black and Hispanic voters together form an effective voting bloc -- were legally suspect.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who wrote the panel's opinion, rejected the DOJ's theory outright, calling it "legally incorrect," and noted "numerous factual, legal, and typographical errors."
Yet the majority emphasized that what mattered was how Texas responded.
Gov. Greg Abbott cited the letter explicitly when he revived redistricting in a special legislative session. Legislative leaders repeatedly referenced DOJ's racially framed "concerns." And, crucially, the DOJ letter made no mention whatsoever of partisan issues. Its focus was exclusively racial. This, the panel found, made the state's insistence that race "never entered the room" impossible to credit.
The court's discussion of the state's testimony is especially unsparing.
GOP redistricting consultant Adam Kincaid told the court that he drew the 2025 map "blind to race." The panel described that claim as "extremely unlikely," pointing to documentary evidence that he reviewed the DOJ letter before it was sent, communicated with White House officials via auto-deleting Signal messages and--unlike in the 2021 cycle -- received no instructions to preserve minority districts.
The court found significant inconsistencies between Kincaid's testimony and that of Senate Redistricting Chair Phil King, ultimately concluding that the state's asserted motives did not match the evidentiary record.
The groups that sued over the redrawn map argued that Texas intentionally dismantled five Democratic districts in ways that reduced Black and Hispanic electoral influence. The panel agreed the evidence pointed in that direction.
In effect, the court found that even with a red carpet rolled out for maximalist partisan mapmaking -- even with a federal judiciary formally barred from questioning maps that openly entrench partisan advantage -- Texas nevertheless crafted a plan so dominated by race that it failed a standard designed to be difficult to fail.
National implications
The ruling reverberates nationally.
Texas' map was the centerpiece of a broader effort by President Donald Trump and allied strategists to push Republican-controlled states into mid-decade redistricting before 2026.
The five new GOP-leaning districts Texas created were the single biggest projected gain in that strategy. Similar efforts are in motion in Missouri, North Carolina and Indiana.
Today's ruling disrupts that trajectory and reshapes the national electoral battlefield.
More broadly, the opinion demonstrates that racial-intent challenges remain a potent -- if narrow -- tool in the post-Rucho landscape. With federal courts closed to partisan claims, plaintiffs increasingly rely on racial-predominance arguments.
The Texas trial produced unusually clear evidence: a DOJ letter focused squarely on race, a legislative record built around that letter and testimony that the court found not credible.
What will Supreme Court do?
Abbott has said the state will appeal immediately. And given Trump's consistent success before the Supreme Court in politically consequential cases over the past several years, state officials are likely to view the high court as a receptive forum.
Famously, Justice Felix Frankfurter asserted that the "Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men." Here, that reasoning may help the majority rationalize that the true purposes were allowably partisan rather than racial in nature.
But unless the justices intervene, Texas will enter 2026 under its prior map. And the ruling will stand as a pointed reminder: even in an era where partisan gerrymandering is beyond judicial scrutiny, states can be found to have violated the Constitution by allowing race -- not politics -- to drive the mapmaking process.
James Sample is an ABC News legal contributor and a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of ABC News or The Walt Disney Company.
