Trump’s incompetent Justice Department may have accidentally handed Democrats five House seats
In a decision that could potentially reshape the 2026 midterm elections and cement the Democratic Party’s future control of the US House, a federal court just struck down the gerrymandered Texas maps that President Donald Trump pressured that state to enact. If the decision holds, it could cost Republicans as many as five House seats.
And that’s not all. The most remarkable thing about the three-judge panel’s decision in League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Abbott is that it turns on an incompetent decision by Trump’s own administration.
As Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, explains in the court’s opinion, Texas lawmakers initially “didn’t have much appetite to redistrict on purely partisan grounds” — even as Trump urged them to do so. But Texas Republicans appear to have changed their mind after the Justice Department sent a letter last July to Texas’s top officials, which demanded that the state redraw several districts to change their racial makeup.
That letter, as I’ll explain in more detail below, misread a federal appeals court opinion to mean that the state was required to remake its maps. According to Judge Brown’s opinion, “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.” He added that “even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”
In reality, the Supreme Court has long held that “if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map” is subject to the most skeptical level of constitutional review and “may be held unconstitutional.” When the Justice Department told Texas to redraw several of its congressional districts to change their racial makeup, it ordered Texas to give “race a predominant role.” Oops.
Notably, the Court has held that this restriction on maps that predominantly rely on race can be found in the Constitution itself, not in federal statutes like the Voting Rights Act. So, even if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, as it is expected to do during its current term, that will not undermine the panel’s decision in LULAC. [Continue reading…]