The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily halted a lower court ruling that found Texas’s new congressional map likely racially gerrymandered, allowing the map to remain in place while the justices consider the case. The plan, advanced under former President Donald Trump and backed by Texas Republican leaders, is expected to add several GOP‑leaning seats. Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett, whose district has repeatedly been reshaped, has decided to run for reelection amid the uncertainty.
On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay pausing a ruling by a three‑judge federal panel in El Paso that had blocked Texas from using its new congressional map. As Alito is the justice responsible for emergency matters from the circuit that includes Texas, his order temporarily restores the disputed map while the full court weighs the state’s appeal, according to NPR and other outlets.
The panel’s 2–1 decision had concluded that Texas’s latest congressional redistricting plan, drawn in 2025, likely discriminates on the basis of race in violation of federal voting rights law. The judges found that civil rights groups representing Black and Hispanic voters had shown strong evidence that the map amounted to intentional vote dilution and racial gerrymandering, a finding Doggett highlighted in his interview with NPR’s Scott Simon.
According to reporting by NPR and local public radio affiliates, the new map was adopted outside the usual once‑a‑decade redistricting cycle and is expected to give Republicans several additional seats in the U.S. House ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Supporters of the plan have framed it as a legitimate partisan strategy, while opponents say it undermines minority representation and locks in a narrow Republican majority.
Doggett told NPR that the 2025 map followed a letter from Trump’s Justice Department warning Texas that it risked legal action if it did not redraw several districts that favored Black and Hispanic voters. He said Governor Greg Abbott added redistricting to the agenda for a special legislative session in response to that directive and that legislative leaders later boasted about the outcome. Federal judges in El Paso cited that Justice Department letter as key evidence that race, not just party, drove the mapmaking process.
The Supreme Court’s stay is expected to remain in place for at least several days while the justices consider written briefs from both sides. As KUT and other public radio stations report, the order keeps Texas on course, for now, to use the new lines in its 2026 congressional primaries, avoiding an immediate shift back to the 2021 map that was drawn after the 2020 census.
Doggett, a Democrat who represents Austin and has seen his district renumbered and reconfigured multiple times over the past two decades, has personally felt the impact of the state’s long‑running redistricting battles. NPR reports that he initially planned to run under the newly drawn lines, then announced his retirement after the map was enacted, and finally reversed course and decided to seek reelection after the lower court ruling against the plan.
“Well, what we have is an administrative stay, as you said, issued by Justice Alito,” Doggett told Simon in the interview, adding that he does not view the temporary order as a definitive signal of how the full court will rule. He said he remains hopeful that the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the lower court’s conclusion that the map is a racial gerrymander and invalidate what he repeatedly called the “Trump map.”
Doggett dismissed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s argument that the Republican‑drawn maps merely respond to years of Democratic gerrymandering. “That it’s total nonsense coming from a fanatic,” he said, noting that Republicans had already reshaped his district multiple times, even once stretching it from Austin to the Mexican border.
The congressman also used the interview to renew his call for nonpartisan redistricting commissions. He praised California’s citizen‑led model and said Democrats in the U.S. House, under then‑Speaker Nancy Pelosi, previously pushed nationwide redistricting reforms that he says Republicans blocked. Doggett argued that independent line‑drawing is needed in all 50 states so that “politicians [are] not selecting their voters” and so that Congress better reflects the country’s full range of political views.
The Texas fight is part of a broader legal and political struggle over congressional maps across the country. As the Associated Press and other national outlets have reported, states including Missouri, North Carolina and California have recently adopted new maps that favor one party or the other, prompting a wave of lawsuits. Separately, the Supreme Court is reviewing a Louisiana case involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that could further shape how race may be considered in redistricting nationwide.
