WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court told a lower court yesterday to review a redrawing of Texas’s congressional districts that may cost Democrats up to six House seats, but the order won’t affect the November 2 elections.

The justices’ one-sentence statement gave Republicans a short-term victory because the new district lines – engineered by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican of Texas – should help the GOP gain seats and extend its 10-year hold on the House. Republicans currently control the chamber by 227-205, plus an independent and two vacancies.

“The court’s decision has no impact on the current election,” said the head of the House GOP campaign organization, Rep. Tom Reynolds, a Republican of New York. “As I see it, the Democrats lose several incumbents come November 2.”

But in the longer term, yesterday’s order breathes fresh life into Democratic court challenges to the Texas redistricting plan. Democrats say the new lines were drawn to defeat Democratic lawmakers by putting them in the same districts as other incumbents or giving them thousands of new or Republican constituents.

“Any time you have an illegal process, you’re likely to get illegal results,” said an attorney for Democrats in the suit, Gerry Hebert. “Today’s decision sets the stage for a court to ultimately find that this map was illegal.”

Yesterday’s order ships the case back to a three-judge federal panel in Texas. However it rules, the case seems likely to end up before the Supreme Court again.

“I see this as the Supreme Court punting right before the national election,” said an election law expert at Loyola Law School, Richard Hasen. “It buys the Supreme Court another term before it has to rethink the issue.”

Texas’s new district map already helped prompt Democratic Rep. Jim Turner to retire. Thirteen-term Democratic Rep. Martin Frost is pitted against Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, a four term veteran, in a new GOP-leaning district.

Democratic Rep. Charles Stenholm, another 13-term veteran, is fighting for his political life against freshman GOP Rep. Randy Neugebauer in a district in which two-thirds of the voters are new to Mr. Stenholm. And Democratic Reps. Max Sandlin, Nick Lampson, and Chet Edwards also face difficult fights from challengers, though Mr. Edwards may well win.

“This decision puts a spotlight on redistricting and how West Texas was gerrymandered,” said Mr. Stenholm. “This will remind voters of how power brokers in Washington and Austin redrew these lines without considering the impact on West Texas.”

Republicans saw just the opposite.

Mr. DeLay’s spokesman, Stuart Roy, said the order was “a highly technical court decision that suggests no problem with the existing map.” And the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Tina Benkiser, said the new lines correct an imbalance in which 56% of the state’s votes in 2002 went to GOP House candidates, but Republicans won less than half the state’s House seats.

“Something was very wrong,” Ms. Benkiser said.

At the dispute’s center is Mr. DeLay, one of Congress’ most powerful Republicans and a man whom Democrats have tried to cast as a symbol of GOP extremism.

The Constitution requires states to draw new congressional districts every 10 years to reflect population shifts measured by the census. Texas state legislators failed to pass a new map for the state’s 32 House seats in 2001, after the new census numbers were available, so a federal court drew up a plan.

Republicans won control of the state Legislature in the 2002 elections and, with Mr. DeLay’s encouragement, started crafting another map in 2003.To try blocking GOP-written maps, Democratic lawmakers staged quorum-breaking walkouts and even fled to nearby states, but Republicans ultimately prevailed.

Congressional Democrats complained about Mr. DeLay’s role in the battle. Earlier this month, the bipartisan House ethics committee concluded Mr. DeLay raised “serious concerns” by contacting the Federal Aviation Administration last year to help locate Texas Democrats who flew to Oklahoma to try thwarting passage of the redistricting plan.

In throwing out the lower court’s decision yesterday, the justices cited a 5-4 ruling they made in April in which they seemed to open the door for challenging district maps if the new districts were so partisan that the minority party was denied basic rights.

Critics of the court, however, say that ruling was too vague to provide a clear guideline.

Democrats also argued that the new districts violated the rights of the state’s minority groups by drawing a new map that hurt minority representation in Congress. The Supreme Court order did not mention that argument.