The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a controversial new congressional map in the 2026 elections, siding with state officials and halting a lower court ruling that found the plan was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

In a brief order issued December 4 in Greg Abbott, et al. v. League of United Latin American Citizens, et al., the Court granted Texas’s emergency request to stay a November 18 ruling by a three‑judge federal district court that had blocked the map for violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The unsigned order, backed by the Court’s conservative majority, means the new lines—drawn mid‑decade and designed to increase Republican representation—will govern Texas’s 2026 U.S. House elections while the case proceeds.

The Court concluded that Texas had met the traditional criteria for interim relief and is “likely to succeed on the merits” of its appeal of the lower court’s decision.

The majority identified two core legal errors it believes the district court committed:

• It “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith” by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature, contrary to the Court’s 2024 decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.​
• It failed to draw a “dispositive or near‑dispositive” adverse inference against the plaintiffs for not producing an alternative map that would achieve Texas’s stated partisan objectives without the same racial effects—a requirement the Court stressed in Alexander and earlier in Easley v. Cromartie.​

The Court also emphasized its election‑law doctrine warning lower courts not to change “the rules on the eve of an election.” Citing its 2020 decision in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, the majority said the district court improperly “inserted itself into an active primary campaign,” causing confusion and disrupting the federal‑state balance in election administration.​

The stay will remain in place if Texas files a timely appeal and until the Supreme Court either dismisses the case, affirms the district court, or issues a final judgment after full review.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a concurring opinion underscoring why he viewed the stay as necessary.

Alito framed the case as one in which partisan aims—not racial discrimination—motivated the Texas map, even if race and party overlap in practice.

He stressed two points:

• The “impetus” for Texas’s map, like a responding map in California, was “partisan advantage pure and simple,” not race as such.​
• The usual deferential “clear error” standard of review should not apply, he argued, because the district court’s findings rested on a “mistaken impression of applicable legal principles” regarding how to disentangle race and politics.​

Alito warned that because of the “correlation between race and partisan preference,” litigants can easily weaponize racial gerrymandering claims for partisan ends. To guard against that, he said, Supreme Court precedent squarely places the burden on challengers to “disentangle race and politics” by offering a viable alternative map that achieves the state’s partisan goals without similar racial patterns.

Here, he noted, the plaintiffs’ experts “could have easily produced such a map if that were possible,” but did not—creating a “strong inference” that the Texas map is driven by partisanship rather than race.

The stay halts an extensive, 160‑page ruling by a three‑judge district court in the Western District of Texas, which concluded after a nine‑day hearing that Texas had drawn its new map by “largely divid[ing] its citizens along racial lines” to create a pro‑Republican plan.

That court had:

• Heard testimony from nearly two dozen witnesses.
• Reviewed thousands of exhibits and roughly 3,000 pages of record evidence.
• Assessed the credibility of key actors, including the mapmaker and state officials.

The plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), argued that while partisan goals may have animated the project generally, race predominated in the specific line‑drawing decisions. They traced the push for new lines to efforts by then‑President Trump and his allies to bolster Republican House seats in Texas mid‑decade—well after the usual post‑census redistricting cycle.

The district court highlighted a pivotal turn: after political pressure failed to gain traction in Austin, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sent Texas a letter in July 2025 raising “serious concerns” about the legality of four “coalition” districts—seats where multiple minority groups together could elect candidates of their choice.

Although the letter, the district court noted, misstated the law by claiming such coalition districts were inherently unlawful, it demanded that Texas “correct” them and warned of possible legal action.

Within two days, Governor Greg Abbott added a “revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” to the special legislative session agenda. By late August, Texas enacted a new map that, according to the district court, both:

• Secured five more Republican‑leaning seats, and
• “Achieved all but one of the racial objectives that DOJ demanded,” including dismantling and “leav[ing] unrecognizable” the coalition districts at issue.

The court found especially telling that three former coalition districts were redrawn into bare majority‑Black or majority‑Hispanic districts, each just over the 50 percent mark—50.2 to 50.5 percent citizen voting‑age population. It deemed it “very unlikely” that a mapmaker working only with race‑neutral criteria and partisan data would have hit such racial targets three times “by pure chance.”

The mapmaker testified that he never used racial data, even though it was available at a keystroke in his software. The district court, noting his awareness of the DOJ letter and pre‑letter contacts with White House officials, “discredited” that testimony as implausible.

An expert for the plaintiffs testified that she generated tens of thousands of Republican‑favoring maps using traditional criteria and race‑neutral inputs, and none reproduced the racial composition seen in the 2025 plan—reinforcing the court’s conclusion that race, not just politics, drove the line‑drawing.

On this record, the district court held the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that Texas had used race as the predominant factor in drawing districts, in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, even though the ultimate goal was partisan advantage.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, filed a forceful dissent from the Court’s decision to grant the stay.

Kagan accused the majority of discarding the clear‑error standard that traditionally governs appellate review of factual findings in racial gerrymandering cases.

Under Supreme Court precedent, she wrote, the question whether race predominated in drawing district lines is one of fact, reversible “only for clear error”—meaning an appellate court must uphold a district court’s finding so long as it is “plausible in light of the full record,” even if a different view might be equally or more plausible.

Here, Kagan said, the district court’s conclusion was not only plausible but “quite careful,” reached after meticulous review of direct statements by state officials and circumstantial demographic evidence. By overriding that judgment based on “its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record,” Kagan argued, the Supreme Court “arrogat[ed] to itself” the role of the trial court.

She rejected the majority’s suggestion that the district court had failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith, noting that the judges explicitly invoked that presumption, construed ambiguous evidence in the legislature’s favor, and nonetheless found that the cumulative record overcame it.

On the “alternative map” issue raised in Alexander, Kagan stressed that the district court did draw an adverse inference against the plaintiffs but—consistent with the Supreme Court’s own language—declined to treat it as “dispositive” because the plaintiffs had produced “substantial direct evidence” of race‑based districting. Alexander, she noted, reserved dispositive weight for the alternative‑map inference primarily in cases lacking such direct evidence.

Introducing the new phrase “near‑dispositive,” Kagan wrote, the majority invented a standard not found in Alexander or any other Supreme Court opinion, then faulted the district court for failing to apply it.

Kagan also disputed the majority’s reliance on the so‑called Purcell principle, which cautions courts against making late‑breaking changes to election rules.

In Purcell v. Gonzalez and later emergency rulings, the Court warned that last‑minute federal court interventions can cause voter confusion and disrupt election administration. The majority here cast the district court’s November 18 injunction as an improper alteration “on the eve of an election.”​

Kagan countered that neither Election Day nor even the primary date was close enough for Purcell to control. Election Day 2026 is still nearly a year away, she noted, and the March primary could be rescheduled. The map the district court reinstated—the 2021 plan—was already familiar to officials, candidates, and voters, and is scheduled to be used in a January 31, 2026 special runoff in the state’s largest county.

In her view, “no one dilly‑dallied”: the legislature adopted the new map in late August, plaintiffs sued and sought an injunction immediately, waived discovery to speed the process, and the district court issued its extensive opinion just a month after briefing ended. If Purcell bars an injunction under those circumstances, she warned, it effectively gives states a “free pass” to implement even a “blatantly unconstitutional map” simply by passing it late in the cycle.

The Supreme Court’s stay has immediate and longer‑term consequences.

For Texas:

• The 2025 congressional map, drawn mid‑decade and designed to add five Republican‑leaning seats, will control the 2026 House elections unless the Court later reverses course after full review.
• Voters whom the district court found were assigned to districts “because of their race” will remain in those districts for at least the next election cycle.

For election law and redistricting nationwide, the order signals:

• A continued tightening of the evidentiary and procedural standards for racial gerrymandering challenges, particularly where partisan motives are invoked and race and party overlap.
• A willingness by the conservative majority to apply the Purcell principle aggressively, even many months before a general election, in ways that can insulate late‑enacted maps from timely judicial review.
• A widening gap between the Court’s conservative and liberal blocs over how to police the boundary between race‑based and purely partisan line‑drawing, especially after the Court declared partisan gerrymandering non‑justiciable in federal court in Rucho v. Common Cause.