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The solicitor general reinforced his point by highlighting the broader evidence around the Legislature’s actions. “There is overwhelming evidence — both direct and circumstantial — of partisan objectives, and any inference that the State inexplicably chose to use racial means is implausible,” he wrote, leaving critics little room to spin the narrative.
Sauer went a step further by defending an earlier letter sent by Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon. That letter had asked Texas to look into “coalition districts” that historically lean Democrat—a point opponents used to claim the redistricting effort was racially motivated. According to Sauer, those arguments completely misread both the letter and its relevance to lawmakers’ eventual decisions.
Democrats in the state responded to the letter with high-profile theatrics. Shortly after Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to the special session agenda, Democrat lawmakers fled the state in protest—a repeat of a familiar political stunt Texans have seen before. Sauer dismissed the idea that the letter meaningfully shaped the Legislature’s final map, arguing that the lower court “misinterpreted the letter’s meaning; and more importantly, the court misunderstood the letter’s significance to the legislature’s adoption of the 2025 map.”
The plaintiffs—made up of various left-leaning voting and immigrant-rights groups—claimed Dhillon’s letter pushed Texas to break up coalition districts and redistribute minority voters. They accused the DOJ of pushing a race-based agenda. Their filing stated, “The DOJ letter, riddled with legal and factual errors, incorrectly asserted that these districts were ‘unconstitutional coalition districts’ that Texas was required to ‘rectify’ by changing their racial makeup.”
Texas is just one battleground in a nationwide war over congressional maps going into a critical midterm cycle. With President Donald Trump heading into 2026 facing shifting political dynamics, Democrats have launched redistricting efforts across the country to claw back advantages. California passed a last-minute measure designed specifically to offset GOP gains in Texas. Utah produced a map benefiting Democrats, and Virginia is already moving toward another round of changes expected to favor the Left.
Meanwhile, Louisiana’s GOP-friendly map awaits Supreme Court review. Missouri has already added a Republican-leaning seat, and Indiana is considering doing the same next month—moves that could help reinforce the GOP’s advantage.
In a twist of irony, the Department of Justice also filed a lawsuit against California’s Democrat governor Gavin Newsom, arguing that his state’s latest map was racially driven—an argument completely opposite from its defense of Texas. Fox News first reported the contradiction, and critics are already questioning the DOJ’s inconsistencies.
Texas is now asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court’s 2–1 ruling that claimed race played an improper role in the Legislature’s mid-cycle redraw. The state rejected that logic entirely, saying, “This summer, the Texas Legislature did what legislatures do: politics.”
Not everyone on the lower court agreed with the ruling either. Judge Jerry Brown, appointed by President Reagan, issued a blistering dissent, condemning the majority opinion as the “most blatant exercise of judicial activism” he had seen in his entire career. He went so far as to call the ruling a “work of fiction.”
Justice Samuel Alito has already hit pause on the lower court’s ruling with an administrative stay, giving the Supreme Court time to issue what could be a decisive opinion in the coming days.
Texas attorneys are also warning that disrupting the map now would wreak havoc on the 2026 election cycle. Candidates have already begun filing under the new lines, and changing course this late would create chaos—not to mention political uncertainty.
