Supreme Court OKs Texas’ redrawn congressional map

The nation’s highest court on Monday allowed Texas to use the new U.S. congressional districts its legislature passed in August 2025 in a Republican-led effort to gain more seats for the GOP. The Supreme Court summarily reversed a lower court’s decision, which blocked the new map on the grounds that it was racially gerrymandered.

The Supreme Court cited its previous ruling from December 2025, which temporarily allowed the new map to stand, as the basis for the Monday decision. The Supreme Court previously wrote that lower courts accepted ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence as proof that the Texas legislature wasn’t acting in good faith. Justices also wrote that they needed to be careful not to upset the delicate federal-state balance of elections in an election year. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from both the interim decision and Monday’s ruling.

The Supreme Court in February allowed California to use its new congressional maps, redrawn to favor Democrats as a counter to Texas’ changes. A similar redistricting plan in Virginia, also led by Democrats, is working its way through the courts. The Virginia Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in one of at least two lawsuits challenging the redrawn maps.

What other key orders did the Supreme Court release on Monday?

• The court rejected a Florida couple’s parental-rights lawsuit over a policy preventing school workers from informing parents about their child’s gender transition at school. The denial marked the third time the court has sidestepped a similar case. The majority of the justices in March sided with California parents in a similar case, but that decision only reinstated a lower court’s ruling that temporarily blocked schools from withholding such information. The justices have yet to weigh in on the substance of the arguments, and they also rejected a similar plea from California teachers.

• The court on Monday also declined to hear appeals from former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and former lobbyist Matt Borges over their federal racketeering convictions.

Dig deeper: Read Christina Grube’s story on a Colorado state court’s ruling against a funeral home operator.