Comment: GOP can blame itself for Texas redistricting loss

The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board

In blocking Texas from using its new congressional maps, a federal judicial panel painstakingly discredited Republican arguments that race wasn’t the primary driver of the 2025 redistricting.

Truth be told, Republicans made it easy for the panel, so sloppy was their handiwork.

As you’ll recall, news reports emerged this summer that President Donald Trump was pressing Texas and other red states to redistrict and create more Republican seats in Congress. But the optics were bad, even by today’s standards. Suddenly, a clumsy Department of Justice letter accused GOP-led Texas of impermissibly using race to draw its 2021 congressional maps.

In virtually the same breath, Texas Republicans denied having done that but said that they would, of course, fix the maps.

First they broke up multiple minority “coalition” districts that elect Democrats and moved some minority voters unnecessarily into four new majority-minority districts. And these districts barely cleared that distinction, with just over 50 percent Hispanic or Black voters.

Republican lawmakers both assured Texans that they weren’t using race to draw the maps while also proclaiming that they had created new minority districts, apparently out of the goodness of their hearts. And it just so happens that these maps dissolved seven coalition districts where Black and Hispanic citizens combined to form voting majorities.

Our Republican leaders say everything is on the up and up. The federal judges didn’t buy it. Why should they? The whole thing smells like a horse barn.

“The [redistricting] bill’s main proponents purposefully manipulated the districts’ racial numbers to make the map more palatable,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee. “That’s racial gerrymandering.”

The panel agreed 2-1 to grant a temporary injunction against the new maps.

The Trump administration made it too easy to connect the dots. The DOJ letter that was used as the pretext for redistricting figures prominently in the court ruling. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon asserted, incorrectly, that coalition districts are unconstitutional. That’s simply not true, and it doesn’t take a law degree to figure that out.

“It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” reads the court ruling.

Tortured logic or not, Gov. Greg Abbott and a majority of Texas Republican lawmakers are obedient to Trump. They do what they are told. Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he will appeal to the Supreme Court.

This editorial board frowns upon partisan gerrymandering, but it is legal. Racial gerrymandering isn’t. We previously called Texas’ maps racist because the four new barely minority-majority districts are a front to conceal the dilution of Hispanic and Black votes in other districts.

Race wasn’t just a consideration in the case of the Texas maps. It was the decider.

We hope the Supreme Court will look at the federal panel analysis and reach the same conclusion.