A three-judge panel in Texas has temporarily blocked a new congressional map adopted by the state’s Republican legislature in an attempt to net five House seats for the GOP. If the legislature is forced to use the old congressional maps adopted in 2021, then Republicans following President Trump’s orders may have accidentally dug their own graves with their aggressive redistricting push. 

The Texas legislature redrew the state’s congressional map over the summer after Mr. Trump said he was “entitled” to additional seats in the House because he won the Lone Star State in 2024. On Tuesday, a panel of three judges said that Republicans were illegally gerrymandering the state. 

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics,” Judge Jeff Brown, who was nominated to his seat on the federal southern district of Texas court in 2019, writes in an opinion for the court. “Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

Judge Brown began his opinion with a quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Governor Greg Abbott called his legislature into special session in July after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a letter stating that Texas’s congressional maps represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That letter allowed the legislature to redraw maps in such a way that five Democratic seats would be gerrymandered in order to make them more favorable for Republicans. 

On Tuesday, Judge Brown wrote that Mr. Abbott directed his legislature to draw maps “based on race” — the exact accusation that the DOJ levied against the original maps. 

Judge Brown notes that Mr. Abbott and Texas Republicans did not seem interested in redrawing the state’s maps until after the DOJ offered up its memo on racial gerrymandering. In June, the governor called a special legislative session for the summer but made no mention of redrawing congressional maps. 

It wasn’t until after the DOJ issued its letter on Texas’s allegedly unconstitutional maps that Mr. Abbott made clear that he would try to redraw his state’s maps for the purpose of creating new districts which just so happened to favor Republicans. 

“Legally and factually, DOJ had no valid argument that the Legislature should restore the House map to some preexisting racial equilibrium,” Judge Brown writes. “Far from seeking to ‘rectify … racial gerrymandering,’ the DOJ Letter urges Texas to inject racial considerations into what Texas insists was a race-blind process.”

The implications of the Texas court decision — if it is upheld by the Supreme Court in the coming weeks — could be monumental. The Texas redistricting effort kicked off Democrats’ own redrawing processes across the country, with California on track to eliminate five GOP seats, and other states like Virginia and Maryland poised to eliminate some of their Republican districts, as well. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says he will consider a redistricting measure in his state if Indiana Republicans redraw their maps. 

On Tuesday, the House minority leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries — who has been traveling the country trying to get blue states to redraw their House maps — told the New York Sun that he is not going to stop his efforts in the wake of the Texas decision. 

“We are moving full steam ahead,” Mr. Jeffries told the Sun just off the House floor on Tuesday afternoon. “Republican extremists started this gerrymandering fight — we’re gonna end it.”

The filing deadline for congressional races in Texas is December 8, meaning that the Supreme Court will likely have to consider an appeal before then if Republicans have any hope of holding on to their redrawing in the state.