The ruling means the GOP-friendly Texas congressional map, signed into law earlier this year, will be used for the 2026 elections, possibly netting Republicans as many as five additional seats in the House of Representatives and marking a key victory for the GOP in the mid-decade redistricting fight.

The unsigned majority found the lower court “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature” and “failed to draw a dispositive or near-dispositive adverse inference against respondents even though they did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals” in its ruling that the new congressional map was an unlawful racial gerrymander.

“The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the unsigned majority ruling said.

Justice Samuel Alito, who had granted an administrative stay last month that had temporarily reinstated the new map, wrote a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in which he explained the new map was clearly drawn for partisan reasons, which is lawful, rather than racial reasons, which would be unlawful.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a lengthy dissent, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she claimed the majority on the high court disregarded the lengthy fact-finding process the lower court conducted before reaching its ruling. Kagan wrote the order “disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge.”

“This Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record. 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. That is why we are supposed to use a clear-error standard of review—why we are supposed to uphold the District Court’s decision that race-based line-drawing occurred (even if we would have ruled differently) so long as it is plausible,” Kagan wrote.

Alito’s concurrence responded to the dissent’s claims, rejecting the notion that the district court reached the correct conclusion regarding the motivation behind the new map.

“Neither the duration of the District Court’s hearing nor the length of its majority opinion provides an excuse for failing to apply the correct legal standards as set out clearly in our case law,” Alito wrote.

The ruling comes weeks after a three-judge panel, consisting of two federal district judges and one federal circuit judge, ruled 2-1 that the newly drawn map was an unlawful racial gerrymander. U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith was the lone dissenting judge from the panel’s ruling and took aim at the majority opinion and its author, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, in his 104-page dissent.

TEXAS GOP BANKS ON NEW CONGRESSIONAL MAP TO KEEP THE HOUSE MAJORITY

Smith called the ruling “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed” and said it was “replete with legal and factual error, and accompanied by naked procedural abuse,” which demanded reversal by the Supreme Court.

Texas’s decision to draw the new congressional map, which is expected to net Republicans five seats in the House, sparked a race for mid-decade redistricting. Last month, California voters passed a ballot measure to give the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature the ability to redraw the congressional map, likely netting Democrats five seats. Several other Republican- and Democrat-led states are also eyeing changes to their congressional maps ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections.