‘Played with fire, got burned’: House GOP control in jeopardy after court blocks Texas map

Washington – A federal court on Tuesday blocked Texas from moving forward with its new congressional map, hoping to quickly pick up five additional Republican seats and secure the U.S. House for the GOP in next year’s midterm elections.

The decision is a major political blow to the Trump administration, which earlier this year pushed Texas lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional district boundaries in the middle of the decade — an unusual move that bucked the traditional practice.

A three-judge federal court in El Paso said in a 2-1 decision that “substantial evidence shows that Texas has racially adjusted its 2025 map,” ordering the state to return to the map it drew in 2021.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who at Trump’s behest directed GOP state lawmakers to proceed with the plan, vowed Tuesday that the state would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

Californians responded to Texas’ effort by voting to approve a new, interim congressional map for the state on Nov. 4, giving Democrats a chance to pick up five new seats.

Initially, the proposal proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which Pro. Known as Proposition 50, it created language that new California maps would be implemented based on whether Texas approved new congressional districts.

But that language was scrapped at the last minute, raising the possibility that Democrats will enter the 2026 midterm elections with a distinct advantage. The language was removed because Texas had already passed its own redistricting plan, which no longer needed the stimulus, said Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, who is Pro. He made 50 maps.

“Our legislature eliminated the trigger because Texas already had that trigger,” Mitchell said Tuesday.

Newsom celebrated the decision in a statement to The Times, which he also posted on social media site X.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom said. “This ruling is a victory for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”

An aide to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who led efforts to replace nonpartisan districting practices in California, suggested that California’s efforts to sell out to the public in response to Texas would run into trouble.

“The title of the proposal said it was the answer to Texas, and the voter guide mentioned Texas 13 times, so I imagine you’ll find voters who are misled if the Texas gerrymander doesn’t happen, California still does,” said Schwarzenegger spokesman Daniel Kitchell.

Legal experts had warned that the Texas bid would invite accusations and legal challenges of racial gerrymandering that the California map would not.

The Texas reorganization plan appears to have been prompted by a letter from Assistant Atty. For civil rights general Harmeet Dhillon, who threatened Texas with legal action over three “consolidation districts” that she argued were unconstitutional.

The coalition district has many minority communities, none of which is a majority. Legal experts said the newly redrawn districts passed by Texas roll back all three, potentially “cracking” racially diverse communities while protecting majority-white districts.

“I think this decision was both very smart and very careful in following the law,” Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former deputy attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said of the 160-page opinion.

“These are the judges who took the law seriously,” Levitt said, “as well as the judges who were rightfully — absolutely furious — at the DOJ for a letter that started the whole charade, where the legal ‘reasoning’ wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

While the Supreme Court’s rulings on redistricting are sporadic, the justices have generally ruled that purely political redistricting is legal, but that racial gerrymandering is not—an especially difficult line in Southern states where racial and political lines intersect.

In 2023, addressing a redistricting battle over black voter representation in Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that discrimination against minority voters in gerrymandering was unconstitutional, ordering the southern state to create a second minority-majority district.

The Justice Department is also suing California to block its use of the new map in next year’s elections.

J. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech professor who recently testified in an ongoing case about Texas’ 2021 redistricting efforts, said the potential collapse of Texas’ new map was an authoritarian turn for a president whose strategic goal was to put himself in the middle.

He accused Tuesday’s court decision — written by a Trump appointee — of undermining the president’s legal competence at the Justice Department, arguing that its legal strategy was flawed from the start.

“California gerrymandering is likely set in stone, because there is no evidence of racial predominance in California’s practice, especially compared to the ample evidence of racial motivation carefully considered by the Texas district court,” Kosar said, “and the Texas district court’s opinion is very precise and the Supreme Court will be hard to convince.”

“The DOJ purge leaves no one to warn Trump appointees that what they’re doing will likely boomerang,” Kosar added. “It is the law of unintended consequences that creates corruption.”

Times staff writers Melody Gutierrez and Seema Mehta contributed to this report.