Supreme Court Stays Order Blocking Texas’s 2025 Congressional Map for the 2026 Elections

The decision

On December 4, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States granted an application by the State of Texas and several of its officials to stay a November 18, 2025 order of a three-judge District Court in the Western District of Texas. That order had enjoined the use of Texas’s newly enacted congressional map in the 2026 elections. The Court acted by a short unsigned order rather than a full opinion after argument. The order states: “Based on our preliminary evaluation of this case, Texas satisfies the traditional criteria for interim relief.”

The Court found Texas likely to succeed in showing that the District Court committed “at least two serious errors,” and found that Texas had made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equities and public interest favored it. The order does not decide whether the map is a racial gerrymander. The order does not identify which Justices joined it and records no vote. Justice Alito filed a concurrence joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch. Justice Kagan filed a dissent joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.

Background

The order opens by noting that several States have recently redrawn congressional districts “in ways that are predicted to favor the State’s dominant political party.” Texas adopted the first new map; California then adopted a map “for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done”; North Carolina followed. Respondents challenged the Texas map, “contending that the legislature’s motive was predominantly racial.” A “divided three-judge District Court agreed” and enjoined use of the map in 2026. Texas applied for a stay; the application was presented to Justice Alito and referred by him to the full Court.

The order contains little further factual detail. The following account comes from Justice Kagan’s dissent and its description of the record. According to the dissent, in spring 2025 the President and his political team urged Texas officials to redraw the House map to create more Republican seats, but the project was on no legislative agenda, and the Governor’s June 23 call for a special session did not include redistricting. On July 7, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sent the Governor and Attorney General a letter describing “serious concerns regarding the legality of four of Texas’s congressional districts,” each characterized as a “coalition district,” and asserting that such districts were unlawful and “must now be corrected.” Two days later, the dissent recounts, Governor Abbott added to the special-session agenda legislation for a revised plan “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U. S. Department of Justice.” In late August the legislature enacted a new map that, per the dissent, secured five more Republican-leaning seats and converted three former coalition districts into majority-Black or majority-Hispanic districts with majorities between 50.2 and 50.5 percent.

The dissent describes Texas’s position as being that race played no role in the line-drawing and that officials acted only to protect Republican incumbents and add five Republican seats. The plaintiffs, it says, did not contest that politics motivated the redistricting, but argued that race “mainly accounted for where the new, Republican-friendly lines were drawn.” The District Court, according to the dissent, held a nine-day hearing with 23 witnesses and thousands of exhibits, made credibility findings, and issued a 160-page opinion on November 18 finding a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The court’s reasoning

Likelihood of success on the merits

The order cites Indiana State Police Pension Trust v. Chrysler LLC (2009) for the traditional criteria for interim relief and states that Texas is likely to succeed in showing two errors, each described in a single sentence with a “Contra” citation to Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024).

First, the Court stated that “the District Court failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.” Second, it stated that the District Court “failed to draw a dispositive or near-dispositive adverse inference against respondents” even though “they did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals.” The order does not elaborate on either point and does not state what standard of review it applied to the District Court’s factual findings.

Irreparable harm and the equities

The Court stated: “Texas has also made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equities and public interest favor it.” Quoting Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee (2020), the order said: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” It continued: “The District Court violated that rule here.” The order added that “The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” The order does not cite Purcell v. Gonzalez; only the dissent names that case.

Terms of the stay

The order stays the District Court’s November 18 order “pending the timely filing of an appeal in this Court.” If a notice of appeal and jurisdictional statement are timely filed, the stay remains in effect pending the Court’s action on the appeal. It terminates automatically if the appeal is dismissed or the judgment is affirmed. If jurisdiction is noted or postponed, the stay remains in effect until the Court’s judgment is sent down. The order does not note jurisdiction, set a schedule, or resolve the merits of the racial-gerrymandering claim.

Separate opinions

Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, concurred in the grant of the stay. He wrote: “Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections, so I will not delay the Court’s order by writing a detailed response to each of the dissent’s arguments.” He offered “two short points which for me are decisive.” First, he wrote that the dissent does not dispute that the impetus for the Texas map, like California’s later map, was “partisan advantage pure and simple.” Second, he wrote that clear-error review does not apply because the District Court based its findings on a mistaken view of the governing legal principles, citing Alexander. Because race and partisan preference correlate, he wrote, precedent places the burden on challengers “to disentangle race and politics,” and so “when the asserted reason for a map is political, it is critical for challengers to produce an alternative map that serves the State’s allegedly partisan aim just as well as the map the State adopted.” He concluded: “Although respondents’ experts could have easily produced such a map if that were possible, they did not, giving rise to a strong inference that the State’s map was indeed based on partisanship, not race.”

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented. She wrote that the District Court had found that “Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,” and that “this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.” Her central objection was the standard of review: under Cooper v. Harris and Alexander, she wrote, a district court’s finding that race predominated is reversible only for clear error and must stand if plausible, and the majority proceeded “Without so much as a word about that standard.”

On the presumption of good faith, the dissent stated that the District Court expressly invoked it, quoted Alexander’s instruction to draw inferences in the legislature’s favor when evidence is ambiguous, and found some legislators’ statements too ambiguous to overcome it while finding other evidence sufficient. On the alternative-map point, she wrote that the District Court did draw an adverse inference but, following Alexander’s statement that the inference may be dispositive where a plaintiff lacks direct evidence, declined to treat it as dispositive because the plaintiffs had produced substantial direct evidence. She added: “The word ‘near-dispositive’ does not appear in Alexander, which everyone agrees is the critical decision addressing alternative maps.”

On the equities, the dissent said the majority invoked the Purcell principle “though without naming” it, and distinguished the cases the majority cited: “Here, Election Day is eleven months from now. Even the primary election (which Texas could change) is in March.” She wrote that the 2021 map reinstated by the injunction was the status quo, that the District Court had weighed election preparations and found no significant disruption, and that the timing resulted from the legislature’s decision to redistrict in August.

Status

The District Court’s November 18, 2025 order is stayed under the terms described above. The order does not resolve the merits and conditions the stay’s continued effect on the timely filing of an appeal to the Supreme Court, on which the order takes no further action.

The order was widely reported.