US Supreme Court blocks order on likely racial bias in new Texas voter map

A lower court’s decision that the Texas 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely exhibits racial discrimination has been temporarily blocked by the US Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Friday ruling will remain in effect for at least the next few days as the court considers whether to allow the new map, which favors Republicans, to be used in the US midterm elections in the future.

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The lower court’s “injunction against Texas’s map” was temporarily halted by the ruling, which was welcomed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

“Radical left-wing activists are abusing the US Supreme Court to derail the Republican agenda and smuggle Democrats’ House.” In a previous social media post, Paxton stated, “I am fighting to stop this blatant attempt to upend our political system.

In order to maintain a slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, Texas redrew its congressional map in August, sparking a bipartisan bipartisan bifight nationwide.

Republicans were given five additional House seats by the new redistricting map in Texas, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 on Tuesday, citing the likelihood that the civil rights organizations that had filed the map’s challenge on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters would prevail.

According to the court, the redrawn map was likely to be discriminatory in terms of the US Constitution.

The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news outlet, reported that the state is now temporarily voting on its 2025 congressional map because the Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided which map to use, and that the “legality of the map” will be decided in court in the coming weeks and months.

Texas was the first state to comply with Donald Trump’s redistricting demands. Following Texas, Missouri and North Carolina released new redistricting maps that would each add an additional Republican seat.

California’s voters approved a ballot initiative to increase Democrats’ five seats there in response to those moves.

In California, Missouri, and North Carolina, redrawn voter maps are currently up for challenge in court.

In the second half of his most recent administration, Trump’s legislative agenda would be hampered by the fact that Republicans currently control both chambers of Congress, and that they would lose control of either the House or Senate in the November 2026 midterm elections.

The Supreme Court has been the subject of numerous legal battles for decades over the practice known as gerrymandering, which involves drawing electoral district boundaries to deceive a particular group of voters and limiting their influence on others.

The court’s most significant ruling on the issue was made in 2019, and it stated that federal courts could not rule on gerrymandering for partisan reasons to improve one’s own party’s electoral chances and weaken a political opponent.