After District Judge Jefferey Brown struck down the Texas’ 2025 redistricting map because it was racially contrived, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary pause on Brown’s ruling, allowing Texas to tentatively use the 2025 map. The Supreme Court’s ruling is only a drop in the endless ripples of rulings that have unsettled decades of constitutional precedent and normalcy.
For decades, Texas has redistricted after every new census, which happens every ten years. Following a call from President Donald Trump in July to create a new map, Texas redistricted after redrawing its map not even five years prior in 2021. This allowed Texas to gain five congressional seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Texas’ 2025 map not only deviates from the decades-old cycle but does so with the intention of showing subservience to the executive branch, detailing the lengths the Trump administration is willing to go to meddle and interfere with election results.
Redistricting is already a polarizing political act, but it should not be done at the service or authority of any other political official besides the representatives of the redrawn districts.
Texas is a heavily gerrymandered state, and the 2025 maps only worsen it. Texas districts are drawn in a way that not only places Democrats at a disadvantage but also limits the voting power of lower-income individuals and people of color, with white people making up 40% of the Texas population and controlling 73% of Texas’ congressional seats.
By redrawing the map, a lower court has found that the 2025 map exacerbates already racially polarized, drawn-out districts, making it clear that — along with Samuel Alito’s temporary block — Texas is set on attaining its red hue by minimizing the voices of people of color through maximizing the white vote.
Throughout the 2025 map, districts are meticulously drawn in a manner that relies on a low turnout rate of Texas’ Hispanic population. The 2025 map has combined or modified districts, such as appending San Antonio’s District 118 with conservative Guadalupe, to attain a higher turnout of white voters. Even though Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican legislators would like the public to think they are supporting a diverse group of voters, they are strategically redistricting to ensure the fortification and retention of their power through white votes — the very reason Brown struck down the map.
In the lower court’s case, Texas claimed that these maps were drawn race blind, but as Brown notes in his 2-1 majority opinion, it is “extremely unlikely” that Texas drew the map blind to race. When taking into consideration that Republicans redrew the map in a way that relies on a lower voter turnout of people of color, it should be abundantly clear that the 2025 map will amplify racial disparities ahead of the 2026 midterms, giving Republicans a racist edge over Democrats.
Texas has a long, decrepit history of denying people of color the right to vote and minimizing their voting power since the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed. The map is only emblematic of the state’s past. Texas has not put behind its racist past, but rather, has only transformed it to make bigoted tactics legally and socially permissible.
