Based on overwhelming evidence that Republican lawmakers intended to racially gerrymander Congressional redistricting maps — because they said as much during public testimony early in the process — University of Houston law professor David Froomkin said he believes a district judge’s order to block the maps should stand.
“They said it was about race before they said it was about politics,” Froomkin said Monday.
But the maps approved by the state legislature in August, intended to flip five seats in favor of Republicans, will remain in place temporarily, per a Supreme Court ruling on November 21.
The decision, handed down by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, is a short-term pause while the high court decides which map Texas should use as a court battle over its legality plays out. The ruling came three days after a panel of district judges led by Donald Trump appointee Jeffrey Brown ruled on November 18 that Texas couldn’t use the maps approved in August, citing substantial evidence of racial gerrymandering.
Alito’s decision adds yet another layer of confusion for candidates and voters in the upcoming March 2026 primaries, for which the filing deadline is December 8. Froomkin said Monday that “we shouldn’t read too much into” Alito’s temporary stay.
“That is likely to be reconsidered by the entire Supreme Court in the coming weeks,” he said. “I imagine they will be sensitive to the December 8 filing deadline. I think there’s a strong chance that the district court decision will stand and that candidates certainly should stay the course for now.”
Six of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the mid-decade redistricting effort after he received a letter suggesting he do so from the U.S. Department of Justice. Republican legislators at first said they needed to redraw the maps to fix racial gerrymandering that occurred in 2021. When confronted with federal court testimony showing that Republicans referred to the ’21 maps as “race-blind,” the GOP changed its tune.
Froomkin said they were given bad legal advice.
“This is a relatively easy case in that there was a fairly explicit racial gerrymander here,” he said. “The story here is really a story of the careless, sloppy lawyering that we have come to expect from this administration. This decision could have been easily avoided if Republicans had consulted good lawyers [at the onset] rather than shooting from the hip.”
Abbott appealed the district judges’ decision to the Supreme Court and said in a press release last week that the maps approved by the legislature over the summer were drawn to “better reflect Texas’ conservative voting preferences — and for no other reason.”
As it stands today with the temporary stay in place, Congressman Al Green, a Democrat from Houston, no longer lives in District 9, an area he’s represented for 20 years. He now lives in District 18. Green filed for the District 18 seat earlier this month, but if Brown’s ruling stands, Green goes back to District 9. He’s one of several candidates in limbo pending a ruling from the Supreme Court.
The Congressional District 18 seat has been vacant since former Rep. Sylvester Turner died in March. Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards are in a January 31 runoff to fill Turner’s unexpired term. The special election runoff will be governed by the maps that were in place when Turner was elected in 2024.
Froomkin said back in August, after Texas Republicans pushed through their map, that “the premise underlying this redistricting plan was that there was a racial problem with the prior map that needed to be corrected.”
The professor said Monday that even though the Republicans walked back the messaging that they were redistricting to correct a racial gerrymander, the damage was already done.
“It’s quite rare for the state to announce that it has a racial objective behind a redistricting plan,” he said. “In fact, announcing that the objective of a redistricting plan is to reallocate political power on the basis of race is exactly what a state is not supposed to do.”
“Even if, by some incredible coincidence, the mapmakers achieved the very result that they had been encouraged to reach by the DOJ without relying on racial demographic data, the fact that state officials characterized the plan’s goals in racial terms is itself a sufficient reason to invalidate the plan as a racial gerrymander,” he added.
The opinion handed down last week from Brown, a district judge from Galveston, offered scathing remarks toward the Trump administration for micromanaging a state’s redistricting process and chastised Governor Abbott and the elected Republicans for doing Trump’s bidding.
“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map,” Brown said in his opinion. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
The Brown ruling was a blow to Republicans who were hoping that the new maps would yield control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts and protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House. Alito’s “pause” issued a few days later didn’t garner much response from either political party, as it appears they’re waiting to see what happens next, Froomkin said.
“I think that Judge Brown’s opinion for the district court was very careful, methodical and well-grounded in existing law and precedent. I would also observe that I really don’t think the Supreme Court has strong grounds to overrule the district court because the main issues are factual issues.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.