Elena Kagan knows why the Supreme Court majority wrongly upheld Texas’ redistricting effort

It is emblematic of the Supreme Court’s increasingly tenuous legitimacy and image of rank partisanship that no one was surprised last week when it blocked a district court order overturning Texas’ recently redrawn congressional map.

The new maps were intended to benefit Republicans and potentially flip five House seats from Democratic to Republican, so, of course, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled in their favor. The court’s conservative justices ignoring laws and lower court decisions when they hurt Republicans — and creating new legal doctrines when they benefit the GOP — is no longer news.

In a clinical 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan detailed how her fellow justices ignored the law, past precedent and common sense.

Indeed, in a clinical 16-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan detailed how her fellow justices ignored the law, past precedent and common sense in giving Texas Republicans a political boost. The conservative majority isn’t even pretending not to put their finger on the scale to help the GOP.

Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map this year in a brazen and cynical attempt to flip five House seats to the GOP next year. Several progressive groups immediately filed suit, claiming that Texas violated the 14th and 15th Amendments by using racial data in its gerrymandering process. A U.S. district judge appointed by President Donald Trump conducted an extensive nine-day hearing, hearing testimony from 23 witnesses and filing more than 3,000 pages of evidence. Then, he issued a 160-page decision that found overwhelming evidence that Texas had indeed created a racial gerrymander — and he blocked the maps.

Nevertheless, Kagan wrote, “this Court reverses that decision based on its observation, over the holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”

Given how quickly they overruled the district court judge’s decision, it’s hard to imagine the conservative majority even bothering to read the opinion. If they looked at it, they did so with their minds already made up.

To digress for a moment, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that while outrageous, unjust and “inconsistent with democratic principles,” highly partisan gerrymandering was “beyond the reach of federal courts” and thus legal. And in a concurring opinion in the Texas case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that state Republicans were motivated by “partisan advantage pure and simple.”

But evidence discovered by the district court suggests this is not true.

The district court found repeated instances of Texas legislators accepting that new districts were drawn along racial lines.

The evidence that emerged on the test of the GOP’s racial intent was overwhelming. For example, in direct testimony, a Texas map maker argued that he was motivated by the goal of giving Texas Republicans more House seats but then admitted that he had racial “data available at the press of the key to his redistricting software.”

The new map created three majority-black or majority-Hispanic districts, “as small as possible,” in some cases, less than half a percentage point. Kagan’s dissent notes that an expert witness “had generated tens of thousands of congressional maps” that favored Republicans and did not use racial data and that “none of them had racial demographics that looked like the 2025 map.”

Moreover, the district court found repeated instances of Texas legislators accepting that new districts were drawn along racial lines. For example, the Republican who introduced the bill redrawing the map said, “[W]e ‘created four of the five new seats to achieve a Hispanic majority. I’d say it’s great.’

It wasn’t even a close call, and yet, in a few paragraphs, the Supreme Court casually overruled the district court’s findings of fact.

Surprisingly, Alito went a step further and attacked the plaintiffs for using “racial gerrymandering claims for partisan ends.” Based on this argument, the apparent partisans were not Texas Republicans who redrew the state’s map to give themselves a clear political advantage, but rather those who argued, according to the district court, that the Texas map was racially motivated.

What’s special about this decision, as Kagan notes, is that under the Court’s precedents, lower courts’ findings of fact about racial gerrymanders must be given “significant deference.” A 6-3 conservative majority ignored that standard.

Kagan chastises her colleagues for acting like “we know better” than the court hearing the evidence.

Compounding the Court’s dire decision is the main argument used by the majority. “The district court improperly inserted itself into active primary campaigning, created much confusion and upset the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the Supreme Court majority wrote.

Here the court vaguely referred to the Purcell doctrine, which states that courts should avoid making decisions close to an election because it could lead to “voter confusion.”

Those of you reading that last paragraph may be confused. It is December 2025. As Kagan dryly notes, “Texas is not ‘on the eve of the election.’

If SCOTUS had upheld the district court’s decision, Texas would have used the same House map from 2022 and 2024. One could even argue that allowing Republicans to change that map would create too much “voter confusion.”

The Supreme Court’s reasoning is ridiculous—and also incredibly dangerous. “If Purcell” stops changing election laws about a year before an election, Kagan said, then “it gives every state an opportunity to hold an illegal election.”

This means that Indiana and Florida, two Republican-run states that are currently considering redrawing their House maps, can create racial gerrymanders and, according to the Supreme Court, have no legal argument to stop them. What’s to stop Florida from using Jim Crow tactics, such as requiring voters to pass literacy tests or adopting poll taxes? The court, in effect, gave Republican states carte blanche to disenfranchise minority voters and ignore the Voting Rights Act.

At the end of her dissent, Kagan chastises her colleagues for acting as if “we know better” that the court actually heard the evidence and issued the decision. “I can’t think of a reason why,” she said.

But Kagan is being very kind. He knows exactly why – as do the rest of us. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is, in fact, an arm of the Republican Party, intent on helping the GOP, legislation be damned. The law is no longer the law. Legislation is anything good for Republicans.

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