Supreme Court approves ethnic biased Tex voting map

NY Times - The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for Texas lawmakers to use newly redrawn congressional maps favoring Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

The decision overturns, at least for now, a lower-court ruling that the new maps were likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That decision had blocked lawmakers from using the maps in the midterms.

The Supreme Court’s order comes days before a Dec. 8 deadline for candidates to file to run for office in Texas. It marks a victory for Texas Republicans and for President Trump, who has pushed Republican-led states to revise their congressional maps to try to secure G.O.P. victories in the midterms.

The ruling also adds to the growing list of successes for the Trump administration before the justices, particularly on their emergency docket of cases heard without oral arguments, where the court’s orders are intended to be merely interim. Critics refer to it as the “shadow docket” and note the temporary decisions can have broad consequences.

In a five-paragraph order, the majority wrote that Texas was “likely to succeed on the merits of its claim” that a lower court had wrongly blocked the new maps. The trial court, the majority wrote, had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”...

In a 17-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the court’s two other liberals, argued that the majority had wrongly overturned a careful, 160-page lower court ruling, “based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”

“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” she wrote.

Justice Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court’s order “disserves the millions of Texans whom the district court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race,” adding that “because this court’s precedents and our Constitution demand better, I respectfully dissent."