WASHINGTON – In a significant move, the Supreme Court on Thursday stepped in to favor Texas Republicans, permitting the state to proceed with next year’s elections under a congressional redistricting plan that leans towards the GOP. This decision comes despite a lower court’s judgment suggesting the map could be racially discriminatory.

The decision was prompted by an urgent appeal from Texas, which required swift action due to the ongoing candidate qualifying process for the new districts, with primaries slated for March.

The Supreme Court’s ruling temporarily halts the implementation of the lower court’s 2-1 decision that blocked the GOP-friendly map. This suspension will remain in place at least until the high court delivers a final verdict on the matter. Justice Samuel Alito had previously issued a temporary block on the lower court’s order, allowing time for the full Supreme Court to examine the Texas appeal.

This action is not unprecedented, as the justices have intervened in similar redistricting cases before, including recent ones in Alabama and Louisiana, especially when such rulings were issued close to election dates.

The congressional map in Texas, which was drawn last summer under the influence of former President Donald Trump, is designed to secure an additional five House seats for Republicans, highlighting the strategic political maneuvers at play.

The effort to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections touched off a nationwide redistricting battle.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California and Missouri. A three-judge panel allowed the new North Carolina map to be used in the 2026 elections.

The Trump administration is suing to block the new California maps, but it called for the Supreme Court to keep the redrawn Texas districts in place.

The justices are separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s unclear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

In the Texas case, U.S. District Judges Jeffrey V. Brown and David Guaderrama concluded that the redistricting plan likely dilutes the political power of Black and Latino voters in violation of the Constitution. Trump appointed Brown in his first term while President Barack Obama, a Democrat, appointed Guaderrama.

“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map,” Brown wrote. “But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

The majority opinion provoked a vituperative dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, an appeals court judge on the panel.

Smith accused Brown of “pernicious judicial misbehavior” for not giving Smith sufficient time before issuing the majority opinion. Smith, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, also disagreed strenuously with the substance of the opinion, saying it would be a candidate for the “Nobel Prize for Fiction,” if there were such an award.

“The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom,” Smith wrote, referring to the liberal megadonor and California’s Democratic governor. “The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law.”