Alito pauses lower court ruling that would have blocked Texas redistricting
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito put a temporary hold on a lower court order that would have blocked Texas from rolling out its new congressional map.
Alito did not explain his decision to impose an administrative stay, which is a "time out" to freeze the status quo in place to allow the justices time to consider the matter and says nothing about the actual merits of the dispute.
Alito's order Friday evening came less than an hour after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and attorneys for the state filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court seeking to preserve the state's controversial mid-decade redistricting plan, aimed at securing five more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.
In a decision earlier this week, the lower court's majority opinion said "substantial evidence" indicated the state's new map was an illegal racial gerrymander, acting on a DOJ memo that explicitly referenced a race-predominant rationale.
In its filing to the court, Texas blasted the majority opinion written by Trump-appointed District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown as failing to assume good faith on behalf of the legislature and properly disentangle race and politics as possible motives in drawing a map.
The state also insists Judge Brown should never have issued a ruling because the dispute arose too close to the 2026 election, just a few weeks before the candidate filing deadline on Dec. 8.
"The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away," the state argued in its filing.
It asks the justices to issue a stay by Dec. 1, effectively ensuring the mid-decade 2025 map could be used in the midterms.
The court asked for a response from the plaintiffs in the case by Monday at 5 p.m.
The state's emergency application comes days after a lower court dropped its bombshell 160-page decision invalidating Texas Republicans' mid-decade redistricting effort as blatant racial gerrymandering.
Brown's opinion, released on Tuesday, blocked Texas from deploying a new congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections, concluding "substantial evidence show that Texas racially gerrymandered the map."
The decision roiled a nationwide redistricting arms race initiated by President Donald Trump as part of a bid to retain Republican control of the narrowly divided House of Representatives.
Brown concluded that the entire redrawing effort -- which typically only happens once every decade -- was undertaken primarily in response to an explicit Trump Justice Department request "based entirely on the racial makeup" of four Democrat-held districts.
Federal law and Supreme Court precedent prohibit race as a predominant factor when drawing maps that either intentionally disenfranchise minority voters or otherwise effectively dilute their influence.
In his dissent, released the following day, Judge Jerry E. Smith accused Brown of doing the bidding of liberal billionaire activist George Soros and Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and defended Texas' mid-decade redrawn map as a purely partisan and entirely legal exercise.
"The most obvious reason for mid-cycle redistricting, of course, is partisan gain," not deliberate racial animus, Smith wrote. He noted the Supreme Court has said courts must stay away from interfering with the political exercise of map-drawing.
