What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, more to the point, what’s bad for the goose is very bad for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s gerrymander.
Abbott and his fellow Republican lawmakers are probably currently digesting this 160-page mic drop from the United States District Court in El Paso. Turns out that Texas’ attempt to rig elections with a mid-decade redistricting turned out to be a racial gerrymander. Which, it turns out, is still illegal! Even for Texas! Who knew?
Tuesday’s ruling throws out the 2026 congressional maps that Texas Republicans pushed through to preserve their slender majority in the House of Representatives at the behest of President Donald Trump. Hey, if you can’t win over voters with your policies, you’re going to have to go with these sorts of shenanigans, designed to dilute or entirely suppress the votes of people who tend to vote for Democrats, because we can’t have that.
Protesters gather in the rotunda outside the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol as lawmakers debate a redrawn U.S. congressional map during a special session on Aug. 20.
Since this is a redistricting case, it is a bit weird in terms of how it is handled. Where federal district court cases are usually presided over by a single judge, redistricting cases are heard in the lower court but with a panel of three judges. Any appeal goes directly to the Supreme Court, which is where this will inevitably end up. But for now, until the Supreme Court finds a way to say that what Texas did was fine—lol, who are we kidding? They won’t find a way to say it. They’ll just put it on the shadow docket.
But it’s gonna leave a mark that the author of this district court decision is Judge Jeffrey Brown, who Trump appointed to the bench. Brown had previously served on the Texas Supreme Court after being appointed by then-Gov. Rick Perry. No wild-eyed racial justice warrior is he, but here he goes hard—and Texas is so mad.
At root, what Brown held here is that while Texas Republicans certainly made clear they were doing this for political reasons—to benefit the GOP by drawing a more favorable map—in the end, it was just a racial gerrymander, albeit for white people. Brown is, uh, not subtle about the administration’s role in this either:
But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board.
There’s no love lost between Brown and the Department of Justice here either. The agency fake-threatened the state, saying the existing map had unconstitutional “coalition” districts. This gave Texas Republicans cover to redistrict, waving the DOJ letter as evidence that the existing maps had to go.
But turns out all the suspect districts that the DOJ identified were majority non-white. So, the demand to redistrict those, while leaving intact and never mentioning majority-white Democratic districts, means we’ve got ourselves a good old-fashioned racial gerrymander demand.
Related | Americans hate gerrymandering. Texas Republicans don’t care.
And Texas delivered, with Brown noting that the new maps achieved all but one of the racial objectives “demanded by the DOJ.”
In the meantime, the DOJ intervened in a lawsuit by California Republicans over that state’s new maps, arguing that because California Democrats basically mentioned Latino voters, it was a racial gerrymander. Gov. Gavin Newsom ran around the whole state stumping for this, saying it was explicitly a partisan gerrymandering designed to counter Texas.
So, to recap: The maps the DOJ pushed through in Texas are out while we wait to see what happens in California.
Fun fact! It does not appear that Proposition 50 contains any language saying that California will drop its new maps if Texas’ maps are no longer allowed. In other words, if California survives its lawsuit, it gets to redistrict and keep that electoral advantage.
Indeed, Trump’s whole redistricting scheme might be falling apart. Indiana isn’t on board any longer despite multiple threats from the president.
There’s no way this doesn’t get to the Supreme Court ASAP, and let’s be honest: The chance that Chief Justice John Roberts and his merry band of hard-right jurists will find a way to say Texas’ maps are fine and California’s are not is pretty high. They might even do it on the shadow docket with no explanation.
But for now, let’s point and laugh at the DOJ and GOP henchman Abbott being furious that even Trump-appointed judges know that the law applies to them. We gotta take the wins where we can.
