A panel of three federal judges ruled Tuesday that Texas can’t use the congressional redistricting maps approved in August — citing substantial evidence of racial gerrymandering — thwarting President Donald Trump’s plan to maintain a Republican majority in Washington.
The decision was hailed as a victory by Texas Democrats but political experts said it creates mass chaos and, “If you’re a candidate, you’re in a pickle.”
“It’s confusing for candidates, it’s confusing for voters, it’s confusing for the whole political system,” said University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who ordered the redistricting effort after he received a letter suggesting he do so from Trump’s Department of Justice, issued a statement following the ruling, saying he would swiftly appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texas’ conservative voting preferences — and for no other reason,” Abbott said. “Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during 10 days of hearings. This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”
It throws a wrench in the plans of some candidates who have already filed to seek office under the assumption that the new maps would hold. That includes longtime U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, who was drawn out of District 9 and announced recently he would run instead for District 18.
Immediately after the redistricting map was approved in August, Texas Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, filed for Congress in Green’s District 9, presumably assuming that he could win a congressional district that favored GOP voters.
So what happens to the 2026 midterms? Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, ordered Tuesday that the 2026 Congressional election “shall proceed under the map that the Texas Legislature enacted in 2021.”
Candidates who need to change their plans will have to do so quickly. The filing deadline is December 8. “It’s really all up to the Supreme Court now,” Rottinghaus said.
The U.S. Supreme Court is also deliberating a redistricting case out of Louisiana that could result in weakening the Voting Rights Act, the professor pointed out.
“If the Supreme Court says the Voting Rights Act doesn’t exist anymore, then this will go away,” he said. “It’s hard to know what they will do, but they’ve been hinting at that. The court has to make that determination.”
The Supreme Court can take as long as it wants to make a decision on Texas’ redistricting maps but it will likely be pressured by Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton to make an emergency ruling before the December filing deadline, said Nancy Sims, a UH political science lecturer.
“To me, it won’t be solved until the filing deadline,” Sims said. “It’s just chaos. It’s massively chaotic. It’s really challenging for the candidates to know what to do. If you’re Al Green or Briscoe Cain, you’re in a pickle, and your donors are in a pickle. It’s a wait-and-see for a couple of weeks, with a holiday in the middle.”
Green, Cain, and Austin Democrats Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett — whose congressional districts were essentially merged together under the new map — and several other candidates are in a holding pattern, Rottinghaus added, as they wait to see what the Supreme Court does before they change their filing paperwork.
Congressional District 18 candidates Christian Menefee and Amanda Edwards, who are facing off in a January 31 runoff, are unaffected since that election is a special-called contest to fill the unexpired term of the late former U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner. But it does produce uncertainty around who the runoff winner faces in the primary and when that election will be.
Menefee said in a statement Tuesday that the federal judge panel “confirmed what we already knew: this Trump-backed map was intentionally drawn to silence Black and Brown voters.”
“I hope the [Supreme] Court stands on the side of the Constitution and protects voters of color instead of letting politicians gut democracy in broad daylight. This moment will define what democracy means in 2025,” he said.
The Supreme Court could delay the primary to May while they’re litigating the map, Rottinghaus said. They’ve done it before.
“That’s why Ted Cruz is the junior senator from Texas,” he said. “In 2012, they pushed the primary off from March to the May deadline. Ted Cruz was way behind but a few months later, he was neck and neck. That pushed it to a runoff and he got the win.”
The three judges who voted to block the maps approved in August — Brown; Judge David Guaderrama, a Barack Obama appointee; and Judge Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee — offered scathing remarks in their ruling toward not just Trump but Abbott and Texas Republicans.
“The justices were very unhappy with Trump’s political involvement in this,” Rottinghaus said. “They basically implied that because the president asked for this to happen, it sullied the whole process in a partisan way that is a prima facie outcome that this is all racially gerrymandered.”
“They’re very vocal about how the Trump administration is being unfair and misleading when it comes to the arguments they have made,” he added. “You have to read this as a full-on rebuke of Donald Trump. They also slap the Legislature and Greg Abbott around a little bit, basically saying that they did what Trump wanted, which is bad enough, but there are also all these mistakes they made procedurally. The outcomes are definitely gerrymandered by race. They’re very critical.”
Brown said in his ruling 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. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map,” the ruling states.
Tuesday’s decision a huge blow to Republicans who were hoping that the new maps would yield control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts and protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House, Sims said.
“It’s common for a president to lose the midterms,” she said. “The reason they went to this extreme with the mid-decade redistricting in the first place was to help try to shore up the House for the president and the Republican Party. The margins are so thin currently and the way to remedy that was to draw more Republican seats, and that’s what they set out to do. Texas was first in line with our hands up, saying, Yes, sir.”
The post Chaos Erupts Over Judges’ Ruling to Block Maps in 2026 Midterms appeared first on Houston Press.
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