Elena Kagan knows why Supreme Court majority wrongly upheld Texas redistricting effort
No one was surprised when the Supreme Court last week blocked a district court order overturning Texas’ recently redrawn congressional maps, emblematic of the court’s increasingly fragile legitimacy and the image of deep partisanship.
The new map was designed to benefit Republicans and potentially flip five House seats from Democrats to Republicans, so of course the court ruled in favor of Republicans with a 6-3 conservative majority. It’s no longer news that the court’s conservative justices simply ignore the law and lower court decisions when they harm Republicans, and create new legal principles when they benefit them.
In a 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan detailed how her colleagues ignored the law, past precedent and common sense.
Indeed, in her 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out in detail how her colleagues ignored the law, past precedent and common sense to provide political support to Texas Republicans. The conservative majority isn’t even pretending they aren’t pointing fingers at the scale of helping Republicans.
Texas Republicans redrawn the state’s congressional map this year in a shameless and cynical attempt to cede five House seats to Republicans next year. Many progressive groups quickly filed lawsuits claiming that Texas violated the 14th and 15th Amendments by using racial data in gerrymandering. A U.S. district judge appointed by President Donald Trump conducted an exhaustive nine-day hearing, hearing from 23 witnesses and poring over more than 3,000 pages of evidence. He then issued a 160-page decision that found overwhelming evidence that Texas had indeed created racially gerrymandered districts — and he blocked the maps.
However, Kagan wrote, “This court reversed that decision after perusing a cold hard copy of the transcript over the holiday weekend.”
It’s hard to imagine the conservative majority bothered to read the opinion, given how flippantly they dismissed the district court judge’s ruling. Even if they did take a look, they had already made up their minds.
Taking a step back, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that excessive partisan gerrymandering, while objectionable, unfair and “incompatible with democratic principles,” was “beyond the jurisdiction of federal courts” and therefore legal. In a unanimous opinion in the Texas case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that state Republicans were motivated by “pure partisan advantage.”
But the district court found evidence that this was simply not true.
The district court found that Texas lawmakers repeatedly acknowledged that the new districts were drawn along racial lines.
The evidence emerging in the trial of Republicans’ racial intentions was overwhelming. For example, in direct testimony, a Texas mapmaker argued that his motivation was to give Texas Republicans more House seats, but then admitted that “racial data is available at the press of a key on redistricting software.”
The new map constructs three districts that are majority black or majority Hispanic, in some cases “as little as possible,” less than half a percentage point. Kagan’s dissent noted that an expert witness testified that “she produced tens of thousands of congressional maps” that favored Republicans without using racial data and that “none of them had racial demographics similar to those in the 2025 map.”
Additionally, the district court found that Texas lawmakers repeatedly acknowledged that the new districts were drawn along racial lines. For example, Republicans who introduced the redrawing map bill said: “[W]We created four-fifths of the new seats “to have a ‘Hispanic majority. I would say that’s great.'”
It wasn’t even a close call, yet the Supreme Court flippantly rejected the district court’s factual findings in several paragraphs.
Surprisingly, Alito went a step further, attacking the plaintiffs for using false “claims of racial gerrymandering for partisan purposes.” By that logic, the blatant partisans were not those Texas Republicans who redrawn the state’s maps to give themselves a clear political advantage, but those who, according to the district court, correctly argued that Texas’ maps were racially motivated.
As Kagan noted, what’s particularly galling about this decision is that, under court precedent, lower courts’ factual findings about racial gerrymandering must be given “high deference.” The 6-3 conservative majority simply ignored this standard.
Kagan criticized her colleagues for acting like “we know better than the court that actually heard the evidence.”
The main justification used by most is to exacerbate the court’s dire judgment. “The district court inappropriately intervened in a lively primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the election’s delicate federal-state balance,” the Supreme Court majority wrote.
Here, the court made an indirect reference to the Purcell doctrine, which states that courts should avoid making decisions close to an election because this may lead to “voter confusion.”
People reading the last paragraph may be confused. It’s December 2025. As Kagan dryly noted, “Texas is not on ‘election eve’ yet.”
If the Supreme Court upholds the district court’s ruling, Texas will use the same House map for 2022 and 2024. One might even argue that allowing Republicans to change the map would create greater “voter confusion.”
The Supreme Court’s reasoning is absurd—and extremely dangerous. Kagan said that “if Purcell had blocked” changes to election laws nearly a year before the election, “it would have given every state the opportunity to have an illegal election.”
That means Indiana and Florida, two Republican-controlled states currently considering redrawing House maps, could create racial gerrymandering and, according to the Supreme Court, no legal word can stop them. What could stop Florida from using segregation tactics such as requiring voters to pass a literacy test or imposing a poll tax? In effect, the courts have given Republican states carte blanche to disenfranchise minority voters and ignore the Voting Rights Act.
At the end of her dissent, Kagan criticized her colleagues for acting like “we know better than the court that actually hears the evidence and makes the decision.” “I can’t think of a reason,” she said.
But Kagan was too kind. She knows exactly why—just like the rest of us. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is actually a branch of the Republican Party bent on helping Republicans, regardless of the law. The law is no longer the law. The law is favorable to Republicans.
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