"A federal court struck down Texas' new gerrymander on Tuesday, in an extraordinary rebuke to Republicans who sought to hand the GOP five additional seats in the House of Representatives. The 160-page ruling -authored by Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a conservative Donald Trump nominee-scorched the scheme as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, declaring that the Legislature "intentionally drew district lines" to discriminate against Black and Hispanic Texans."
"Remarkably, Brown found that it was Trump's own Department of Justice that had injected race into the plot as part of its "hamfisted" effort to cook up a pretext for new maps. And he laid out a gobsmacking amount of smoking-gun evidence that all points in the direction of unlawful racism. The Texas Legislature, Brown noted, could simply have drawn a straightforward partisan gerrymander that benefited Republicans without regard to race."
"Many Texas Republicans were initially resistant to Trump's call, including Gov. Greg Abbott, wary of the backlash that a nakedly partisan gerrymander might provoke. Then, on July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, sent the governor a letter claiming that Texas' current congressional districts were unconstitutionally racist. She threatened to sue if those districts were not redrawn, creating an ostensibly nonpartisan excuse for new maps."
A federal judge struck down Texas' middecade congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. The 160-page ruling found that the Texas Legislature and the Department of Justice collaborated to inject race into redistricting, using DOJ pressure as a pretext to redraw districts by skin color rather than partisan advantage alone. The court documented extensive evidence of discriminatory intent and criticized the DOJ's role as a "hamfisted" effort to manufacture justification for new maps. The decision centers on LULAC v. Abbott and the Trump administration's push for maps to gain five House seats.
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