Challengers to Texas’ new congressional map urged the Supreme Court not to pause a lower court ruling requiring the state use its old congressional map next year, arguing in a filing Monday the ruling came with plenty of time ahead of the elections.
The court filing is the latest step in a fast-moving legal fight over whether the Lone Star State will get to use a map targeting five House seats held by Democrats in next year’s midterms.
Texas officials have appealed the 2-1 lower court ruling that found the state’s map redrawn this year is an illegal racial gerrymander and forced the state to use its prior map drawn in 2021 after the 2020 census.
The state urged the Supreme Court to act by next Monday, arguing in an application that the lower court ruling came too close to the state’s Dec. 8 candidate filing deadline.
“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 petition said.
The challengers in the filing Monday argued that using the map the state has used for the last four years would cause “less work and less confusion” than adopting a new one that is already subject to a court order finding it unlawful.
“No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’s congressional elections for the past four years,” the response said.
The challengers also defended the lower court ruling and called the new Texas map “as stark a case of racial gerrymandering as one can imagine.” The challengers argued that even though the state drew the map to gain a partisan advantage — targeting five seats held by Democrats — the state also discriminated against minority voters in the process.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued a preliminary pause on the case on Friday while the justices consider whether to allow Texas to use its redrawn 2025 map.
The justices’ decision could end up impacting the midterms, where states controlled by both parties have sought to use redistricting to shore up their political power in the House.
The legal procedure used in the case allows for a direct appeal to the Supreme Court. The case could be primed for a preliminary decision as soon as later this week.
In the lower court ruling, the two-judge majority found that the state Legislature targeted minority-voter districts for changes and explicitly used that as justification for the map.
The Trump administration filed a brief as well on Monday, asking the court to side with Texas and find the challengers did not meet the “heavy burden” of showing that the Legislature drew the map with race in mind.
“The United States has a strong interest in protecting citizens from race discrimination in voting, and it has an equally strong interest in ensuring that federal courts do not erroneously interfere with federal elections and usurp the constitutional primacy of States in the drawing of congressional districts,” the brief said.
The Trump administration argued the lower court “misused” a letter sent by the Justice Department to the state which argued that several districts had to be changed to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and that the order came too close to the state’s first election deadlines.
The state Legislature passed the new map in August. Litigants in an ongoing lawsuit alleging Voting Rights Act violations by the state in the first map that legislators drew after the 2020 census added the second map to the lawsuit.
The state drew the new districts at the behest of the Trump administration, a rewrite that touched off a nationwide redistricting arms race over the summer.
Since then, California, Virginia, Missouri, North Carolina and Kansas have drawn new maps or started the process to do so.
The case is Greg Abbott et al. v. League of United Latin American Citizens et al.
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