Supreme court rules Texas redistricting may proceed
The supreme court will allow Texas to use a congressional map redrawn to favor Republicans in 2026. The ruling will impact elections as soon as the March primaries.
Texas redrew its congressional map this summer as part of an effort Donald Trump initiated to protect Republicans’ slim majority in the House ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The effort kicked off a nationwide redistricting battle that saw California voters respond by voting to redraw their state’s congressional map as well.
Today’s supreme court ruling responds to an emergency request for a decision from Texas because candidates have until 8 December to file to run ahead of the March primaries.
Key events
Democratic Congressional Compaign Committee chair Suzan DelBene called Texas’ redrawn congressional map “racially gerrymandered” in a statement responding to the supreme court’s decision today.
“The people of Texas don’t want this map, but it was put in place at the behest of national Republicans who are desperate to cling to their majority in the House of Representatives by decimating minority voting opportunity,” she said. “And because the public continues to turn on Republicans and their broken promises, we know Republicans will not net nearly the number of seats in Texas as they hoped. House Democrats remain poised to re-take the majority next year.”
California senator Adam Schiff also criticized the supreme court ruling and accused the court of abandoning its “commitment to justice”.
He said: “The Roberts Court will go down in history as having upheld the desires of Donald Trump and the GOP, rather than its commitment to justice, precedent or the rule of law. Today’s ruling — which substitutes its own fact finding for that of the lower court — is yet another example.”
Justice Elena Kagan sharply dissents, calling ruling disrespectful of lower court
Lauren Gambino
In a sharply worded dissent, Elena Kagan objected to the decision by the supreme court’s majority, arguing that it disrespected the work of the lower court, whose ruling actually was authored by a judge appointed by Trump.
“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,” Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“This court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the constitution,” she continued.
Hakeem Jeffries condemns supreme court’s decision on Texas congressional map
Meanwhile, Democrats have criticized the supreme court’s decision to allow Texas to use its new congressional map in 2026.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, said the court had “once again shredded its credibility by rubber-stamping a racially gerrymandered map in Texas”. In an X post, he added: “Republicans know the extremists can only win by cheating. The people of California and beyond will prevent that from happening.”
In a statement Jeffries added: “Tonight’s ruling by far-right justices on the supreme court is further proof that the extremists will do anything to rig the midterm elections. The gerrymandered Texas congressional map is a partisan and racially discriminatory power grab designed to subvert the will of the voters — particularly in Black and Latino communities.”
He added: “California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 50 and other states will soon follow suit. We will not let Republicans cheat their way to holding the majority in the House of Representatives. Donald Trump and Republican extremists started this fight. Democrats will finish it.”
Here’s our full report on the boat strike, which we will keep updating as more details emerge:
The latest strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat comes on the same day as senior military officials appeared in Congress over an attack on a boat on 2 September that has left the defense secretary under immense pressure.
US navy Adm Frank Bradley, who commanded the attack, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, appeared before the House and Senate’s armed services and intelligence committees for a closed briefing in which they showed video and discussed the attack with lawmakers.
Top Democratic and Republican lawmakers said after the meeting that Hegseth had not ordered the military to kill surviving members of a deadly attack on a boat alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean, but differed over whether the double strike was appropriate.
A leading Democratic lawmaker told reporters after the meeting he was disturbed by what he’d seen. “What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House armed services committee, said.
However, he said Bradley “confirmed that there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order, and there was not an order to grant no quarter”.
US Southern Command released unclassified footage of the boat strike, showing a vessel speeding through the waters before going up in flames.
US forces strike another alleged drug trafficking boat, killing four people
US forces have struck another alleged drug trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific, killing four men.
The US Southern Command released a statement on X saying the strike came at the direction of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
The statement says:
On Dec. 4, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.
Pam Bondi celebrates justices’ ruling in favor of Texas Republicans
Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi also celebrated the decision. Bondi said federal court had “no right to interfere with a state’s decision to redraw legislative maps for partisan reasons”.
Writing on X, she added: “A federal district court ignored that principle two weeks ago, and the Supreme Court correctly stayed that overreaching decision tonight. Congratulations to Texas for advancing the rule of law, my Solicitor General John Sauer, and our team of lawyers for their excellent brief supporting Texas in this important case.”
As Rachel Leingang reported, courts now cannot stop maps drawn for partisan reasons, but they can intervene if maps are racially gerrymandered. And that was the basis of the lower court’s decision as referenced in my earlier post.
Catch up on that full report here:
Texas attorney general hails supreme court decision
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has welcomed the supreme court decision in favor of the state’s Republican party.
In a statement carried by the Associated Press, Paxton said the order “defended Texas’s fundamental right to draw a map that ensures we are represented by Republicans”.
“Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state,” he added. “This map reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”
Today’s supreme court decision overrules an order by a panel of three federal judges in November, who had said the state could not use the 2025 maps because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.
At the time, Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote: “The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reported in November:
Typically, redistricting happens after a new decade’s census results. Maps are often fought over, inviting lawsuits that can take years to resolve. In some states, the process is done by lawmakers, while in others, by independent bodies. Courts now cannot stop maps drawn for partisan reasons, but they can intervene if maps are racially gerrymandered.
Brown pointed to Texas lawmakers’ responses to the justice department. Lawmakers initially resisted the idea of redrawing maps for purely partisan reasons, but moved forward after the Trump administration “reframed” the idea of redistricting around racial makeup.
A July letter from the head of the department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, made the “legally incorrect assertion” that four of Texas’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. She threatened legal action if the state did not redraw these “coalition districts”, where no single racial group made up a majority of voters – “a threat based entirely on their racial makeup”, Brown wrote.
“Notably, the [justice department] letter targeted only majority-non-white districts,” the decision says. “Any mention of majority-white Democrat districts – which [the justice department] presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial – was conspicuously absent.”
The legislature and governor’s office then followed suit on these demands from the justice department, Brown said, noting statements made by local officials on their reasoning.
“The governor explicitly directed the legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote. “In press appearances, the governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.”
The supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, issued its ruling in an unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented, Reuters reports.
In a brief opinion explaining the decision, the court writes: “The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”
While acknowledging the political aims of Texas to benefit the Republican party, the opinion also said the lower court mistakenly did not fault the new map’s challengers for not themselves producing “a viable alternative map that met the state’s avowedly partisan goals”.
The ruling comes amid a nationwide battle about the redrawing of electoral maps. Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in a war in legislatures and courts to narrow the political battlefield of 2026 before a single vote is cast.
Here’s more on this battle from the Guardian’s George Chidi and Andrew Witherspoon:
Grand jury refuses a second indictment of Trump opponent Letitia James
A grand jury has declined to re-indict Letitia James, the New York Times and Associated Press report, citing sources familiar with the matter.
A Virginia grand jury chose not to indict James, a Trump critic, on a mortgage fraud charge the Trump administration has sought to revive. The president has sought to prosecute James since returning to office in January, following a years-long civil case James had overseen investigating Trump for overstating his wealth.
Here’s more of our past coverage of James:
Supreme court rules Texas redistricting may proceed
The supreme court will allow Texas to use a congressional map redrawn to favor Republicans in 2026. The ruling will impact elections as soon as the March primaries.
Texas redrew its congressional map this summer as part of an effort Donald Trump initiated to protect Republicans’ slim majority in the House ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The effort kicked off a nationwide redistricting battle that saw California voters respond by voting to redraw their state’s congressional map as well.
Today’s supreme court ruling responds to an emergency request for a decision from Texas because candidates have until 8 December to file to run ahead of the March primaries.
Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called footage of a US attack on a Venezuelan boat “very disturbing”.
“We all know that our country’s record of interventions in the Caribbean and Central America and South America over the last 100-plus years hasn’t been a perfect record,” Warner said.
He added that all of Congress should see the video footage, and asked for the Trump administration to share additional information about the strikes.
