OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:25 AM – Friday, December 5, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Texas Republicans’ newly redrawn congressional maps, which may give the GOP five additional seats in the House of Representatives.
On Thursday, a 6-3 conservative majority court granted Texas’s request to overturn a lower court’s November ruling that blocked the new map.
“The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned order explaining the decision.
The lower district court argued that Texas had likely drawn voting districts based on race, which constitutes unlawful gerrymandering. It ordered the state to return to the maps it used after the 2020 census, instead, for next year’s midterm elections.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote in the majority opinion for the previous ruling. “But it was more than much just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
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The three liberal justices within the Supreme Court dissented from the new decision.
Justice Elena Kagan reiterated the argument that the map was racially gerrymandered in a dissenting opinion backed by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” Kagan protested.
She continued, “This court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the constitution.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin condemned the decision as a failure that will undermine Texas voters.
“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court to allow Texas Republicans’ rigged, racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect is wrong — both morally and legally,” Martin said. “Once again, the Supreme Court gave Trump exactly what he wanted: a rigged map to help Republicans avoid accountability in the midterms for turning their backs on the American people. But it will backfire.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are celebrating the decision’s finality.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton responded to the decision in a statement saying, “Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state. This map reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”
In a post to X, Texas Governor Greg Abbott exclaimed, “We won!”
“Texas is officially—and legally—more red,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court restored the congressional redistricting maps passed by Texas that add 5 more Republican seats. The new maps better align our representation in D.C. with the values of Texas.”
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