Washington — The Supreme Court on Thursday restored for now Texas' newly redrawn congressional map that could give Republicans five additional House seats, after a lower court found that some of the new voting lines were racially discriminatory.

The high court appeared to split 6-3. It said in an unsigned order that it "has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and the district court "violated that rule here." 

"The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections," the Supreme Court said.

The court wrote that "based on our preliminary evaluation of this case," Texas was likely to succeed on the merits of its arguments that the district court merits committed "at least two serious errors" when it found the new map to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the ruling and said that the lower court had sought to determine whether Texas had accomplished "its partisan objectives by means of a racial gerrymander enacting an electoral map slanted toward Republicans" and found that Texas "largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution's Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments."  

"The court issued a 160-page opinion recounting in detail its factual findings," Kagan added. "Yet this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record." Kagan was referring here to the Supreme Court's emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket. The term refers to the orders and summary decisions issued by the Court without the full briefing and oral argument that accompanies cases on the regular docket.

"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 said.

The decision from the high court is a boon to House Republicans and President Trump — who has pushed numerous GOP-led states to undertake a rare mid-decade redistricting in an effort to ensure his party holds onto its majority in the House.

That plan was temporarily derailed last month when a divided panel of three judges blocked Texas from using its re-crafted House map for the 2026 election cycle and found that certain districts were racially gerrymandered.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, swiftly asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and Justice Samuel Alito temporarily reinstated the map while the full court considered the request. The high court has now agreed to block the lower court's decision, allowing Texas to use the new district lines for next year's House elections.

Abbott celebrated the high court's decision in a statement, writing: "We won! Texas is officially—and legally—more red." 

"The new congressional districts better align our representation in Washington D.C. with the values of our state," the governor said. "This is a victory for Texas voters, for common sense, and for the U.S. Constitution."

Texas state House Democratic Leader Rep. Gene Wu said in a statement, "The Supreme Court failed Texas voters today, and they failed American democracy. This is what the end of the Voting Rights Act looks like: courts that won't protect minority communities even when the evidence is staring them in the face."

The move by Texas Republicans to draw new House district lines over the summer kicked off a redistricting fight that has extended to numerous other states. Mr. Trump and White House aides had been pushing GOP lawmakers in Texas to create a new map to bolster Republicans' chances of maintaining their majority in the House, and Abbott called a special session to tackle the issue. 

In the wake of that decision, California swiftly moved to redraw its congressional map to net up to five seats for Democrats, offseting the new GOP-leaning seats in Texas. GOP state lawmakers in North Carolina and Missouri have also approved plans that each seek to shift a single Democratic-held seat to the right. Those efforts have also faced legal challenges.

In Texas, six groups of plaintiffs challenged the redrawn House districts and asked a three-judge district court panel to prohibit the state from using the new boundaries in the 2026 elections. The district court divided 2-1 in concluding that Texas racially gerrymandered its map and ordered the state to use for next year's House elections voting boundaries that were enacted by the GOP-led state legislature in 2021.

In an opinion authored by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, the court found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing that race predominated over politics in the map-making process and that the legislature set and followed a racial target.

"The public perception of this case is that it's about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map," Brown, appointed to the federal bench by Mr. Trump in 2019, wrote. "But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map."

Texas officials turned to the Supreme Court for emergency relief, arguing that map-makers sought to achieve certain partisan goals to give Republicans a political advantage.

"This summer, the Texas Legislature did what legislatures do: politics," they wrote in a filing. "It redistricted the State's 38 congressional districts mid-decade to secure five additional Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives."

Texas officials also argued that the district court's injunction came too late — the filing period for congressional candidates opened 10 days before its decision and ends Dec. 8 — and disrupted the state's election procedures, risking confusion for candidates and voters. The state invoked a legal principle that generally keeps courts from changing election rules too close to an election in order to avoid confusing voters and election officials.

"The injunction changes the boundaries of all but one of the State's 38 congressional districts, enjoining Texas from using its duly enacted 2025 map and resurrecting the repealed 2021 map," they wrote. "The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away."

The district court's order, Texas officials, said, has "thrown the election into disarray."

But lawyers for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which is the lead plaintiff, said that maintaining the status quo, which is the 2021 map, will prevent voter confusion, while reinstating the latest redistricting plan will force more than 10 million Texas voters into new House districts.

Additionally, they said that keeping the 2021 map in place will allow incumbent lawmakers to campaign in the same districts they were elected to represent in 2024.

"All candidates for Congress will run in the districts they thought they were running in until 13 weeks ago when the Texas Legislature enacted a new map," LULAC lawyers wrote in a filing.

They argued that race was the predominant factor that drove the map-drawing process this summer, and the legislature targeted multi-racial districts specifically because of their racial composition. LULAC lawyers accused state lawmakers of "purposefully" sorting voters on the basis of race to meet racial targets.

The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to let Texas use its new congressional map for the 2026 election cycle because what's at issue is an "openly avowed partisan gerrymander." The Supreme Court in 2019 said federal courts have no role to play in partisan gerrymandering.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a filing there is "overwhelming evidence" that Texas lawmakers were motivated by partisan objectives.