The Supreme Court Just Greenlit a Gerrymander That Even a Trump Judge Thought Was Too Racist

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The state-by-state gerrymandering wars aren’t going anywhere—and on Monday, the Supreme Court gave the greenlight to Texas’ gerrymandered electoral maps for the 2026 midterms. The lower court opinion—written by a Trump appointee—had found that Texas unconstitutionally diluted the voting power of racial minorities in its newly shaped districts. But the Supreme Court overturned that ruling on the shadow docket, issuing a vague decision that not only has significant stakes for these midterms but reminds us just how much of a mess the high court has made in this area of the law. Unless the court or Congress changes course, gerrymandering seems destined to distort American elections for years to come.

To back up: State legislatures oversee the drawing of their electoral maps into districts. This typically happens every 10 years along with each decade’s census. But in 2025, President Donald Trump became nervous that his deep unpopularity would lead to Republican losses in the midterms. So Trump asked Texas to take the unusual step of rewriting their maps “midcycle” to try to win more safe seats for the GOP. When Trump’s initial threats went unanswered, his administration threatened legal action, sending a letter to Texas arguing that the state had unconstitutionally used race in its initial 2021 maps and had to redistrict to correct for that. But the legal arguments in this letter were so weak that no one pursued them seriously, and the Department of Justice later had to backtrack the arguments in court.

Even though Texas said it was ignoring Trump, the state began a midcycle redistricting effort after the letter. The 2025 map was eventually challenged in federal court. Under federal law, parties are permitted to gerrymander for political gain but are not allowed to use race as the predominant factor in doing so. The district court explained in exhausting detail how Texas had unconstitutionally used race this time around. It became clear that the Texas mapmakers had attempted to rig the election for Texas Republicans in 2026 by spreading out Black and Hispanic voters away from one another. This splitting was surgically designed to create a new map with as few Democratic-leaning seats and as many Republican ones as possible.

It’s hard to overstate how carefully the lower court considered this question of whether Texas in fact unconstitutionally used race in its mapmaking. The lower court reached that conclusion only after it held a lengthy nine-day trial, including dozens of experts and over 3,000 pages of evidence.

But in December, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling, staying the district court’s decision and allowing the new Texas map to go into effect anyway. The vote was 6–3 along ideological lines. A concurrence authored by Justice Samuel Alito, and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, argued that the lower court had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith” that the Texas Legislature earned. In other words, it was the high court’s view that judges should simply take Texas at their word that what Texas really cared about was politics, not race. Even though Texas’ whole effort came immediately after Trump’s letter attacking multirace districts. Even though there was evidence of dozens of Texas politicians bragging about how they were trying to create “majority-Hispanic and majority-Black districts,” as noted in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent. And even though the statistical analysis showed that it was essentially mathematically impossible to have created the maps that Texas did without considering race (several districts were suspiciously just above 50 percent of one minority or another, which almost certainly could not have happened by chance). All in all, the Supreme Court boiled down those 3,000 pages of evidence considered below into just three pages of analysis that shrugged off all the facts on the ground.

Back in December, the court claimed that its ruling was just a “preliminary evaluation.” But on Monday, it doubled down, formally reversing the Texas federal court’s decision. And yet, the high court did so without any additional explanation, simply citing back to its three-page decision from December.

If all this seems like a complicated mess to you: That’d be correct. And the fault lies squarely with the Supreme Court. Back in 2019, the court issued one of its biggest anti-democracy decisions in decades in Rucho v. Common Cause. There, a 5–4 Republican-appointed majority held that partisan gerrymandering, while unsavory and undemocratic, was an issue beyond the judicial competence of the courts. The court invoked a rare constitutional theory called the “Political Questions” doctrine, which says there are certain issues that may pose legal problems but that nevertheless have been left to the political processes, meaning the legislatures and the executives must handle them. When a court finds that an issue is a political question, that means courts have no jurisdiction to hear arguments that partisan gerrymandering maps are unconstitutional. Hence the nationwide spread of gerrymandering and counter-gerrymandering across the country.

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But here’s the confusing part about the Rucho court’s legal treatment of gerrymandering. In the same breath that the court said that federal courts had no remedy in stopping partisan gerrymandering, the court reaffirmed that racial gerrymandering remained illegal and subject to judicial review. The 15th amendment, which prohibits denying or abridging the right to vote on the basis of race, makes racial gerrymandering legally suspect. But if they had wanted to, the court could have found similar protections against partisan gerrymandering: The 14th Amendment protects against a citizen’s right to equal protection of the law, as well as the “privileges or immunities” that come with citizenship, serving as the basis for the essential democratic principles like one person, one vote. But instead of enforcing those principles, the court threw up its hands and said partisan gerrymandering was simply beyond the court’s competence to oversee.

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The court’s decision in Rucho has sparked a gerrymandering renaissance, where dozens of states began rigging their maps to benefit that state’s majority party, including across California, Virginia, and Florida. It’s become something of an arms race, as previously created bipartisan commissions are taken over by more explicitly partisan attempts. The redistricting in Virginia, for example, is seen by Democrats as something of a necessary evil to level the playing field against Republican gerrymanders like those in Texas.

Ultimately, Rucho is the cause of much of the mayhem we see today. In a closing statement that now seems quaint, the Rucho decision declared that “our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering.” This claim has been undermined by the ever-worsening gerrymandering that has been taken to new racially tinged levels. What the court’s Monday ruling on the Texas map teaches is that gerrymandering is a project that now bears no shame and has no legal safeguards, even in the face of credible racial discrimination. Until Rucho is overruled, or Congress passes nationwide independent map-drawing commissions, the gerrymander battles will continue.

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