Last summer, Texas lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map to add more GOP seats. The unusual mid-decade redistricting effort prompted some Republican lawmakers to dream even bigger.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Louisiana v. Callais case that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, Texas will take up redistricting again (Congressional, Texas Senate and Texas House),” Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, posted on social media. “Get ready. It’s coming.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued the ruling Spiller had been waiting for. The court did not entirely eliminate Section 2, the law’s key holding that prohibits vote dilution based on race, but it did make it much harder to win a case on those grounds. The court’s conservative majority declared that plaintiffs must now prove that mapmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of a racial group. This higher bar, Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissent, would eliminate the “lion’s share” of challenges under Section 2.
Some states are immediately rushing to redraw their maps under this new standard, hoping to split majority non-white areas that favor Democrats in order to create new Republican districts and strengthen existing ones before the midterms.
Texas is not yet following suit, in large part because the first round of the 2026 primary is already in the rearview mirror. But Spiller and others say they expect redrawing the state’s congressional, state House and Senate and State Board of Education districts to be on the table when lawmakers return in 2027.
“I think that we will have that opportunity and I look forward to that, if that’s what leadership decides that they’d like to do,” Spiller said, noting that the decision to redistrict will be made “above my pay grade.”
Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, said he anticipated the state would audit its maps and see if there was a need to redraw them in light of the Callais ruling.
“Someone is going to have to look at this and say, did we use race to draw majority-minority districts? And if so, that will encourage some soul-searching and review of where the lines lie,” he said, alluding to the court’s argument that sorting voters by race — even for the purpose of adhering to Section 2 — runs afoul of the Constitution. “I think there will be an appetite to get it right, whatever that means under the Callais opinion.”
On Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott called the ruling a “victory for state sovereignty and a recognition of the inherent equality of all Texans.” He did not say whether he thought the state should take another look at its voting maps; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows did not comment on the ruling or respond to a request for comment.
The Legislature’s two redistricting committee chairs, Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, and Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, also did not respond to requests for comment. Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, who carried the House’s redistricting plan last summer, did not respond; earlier this year, he said the Callais decision could “spark the discussion” to redraw more maps.
The silence from the state’s top GOP leaders is not surprising, considering Texas’ 2021 and 2025 maps are still under litigation. Last summer, after four years of legal action and a monthlong trial over the 2021 maps, the judges decided to delay their decision until after the Callais ruling. In the subsequent legal battle over the 2025 congressional map, plaintiffs focused heavily on comments made by Abbott, Hunter and other elected officials to prove racial intent. And when the map was initially struck down by a federal panel, the judge who penned the decision cited those comments as the basis for the ruling, saying Abbott “explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race.”
The Callais decision is likely to reopen the record for both of these lawsuits. Chad Dunn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Wednesday’s decision was disappointing but insisted it wouldn’t stop their litigation against the existing maps.
“The Texas redistricting was handled so poorly that it fails even this new, more stringent test by the Supreme Court,” Dunn said.
‘A game changer’
The idea of redrawing state legislative districts first gained traction several months before Callais, when House Democrats left the state last summer to protest congressional redistricting. Some Republicans said it was past time to redraw their seats and give the GOP a 100-member majority, depriving Democrats of the numbers needed for future quorum breaks.
A top aide to Attorney General Ken Paxton urged GOP lawmakers to “play hardball” and circulated a spreadsheet with a list of 22 majority non-white House districts ripe for being redrawn. A few days after the Legislature sent the congressional map to Abbott’s desk, more than 30 House Republicans signed a letter asking the governor to call another special session to redraw the lines for their chamber.
“Simply redistricting congressional seats does not go far enough,” the August letter said. “If congressional [H]ouse seats are unfair to Texans then so too are the state districts.”
The Texas Republican Party later passed a resolution urging Abbott to do the same, specifically calling for the elimination of coalition districts — ones drawn to protect Black and Hispanic voters where neither makes up a majority alone — in the state House. And GOP Chair Abraham George suggested that Abbott had expressed interest in the idea.
“My understanding is there is about 20-plus coalition districts in the Texas House today,” George said at an August meeting of the GOP’s governing executive committee. “It doesn’t have to be, like the governor said this morning. We want to start messaging that it should be redrawn to political districts, not coalition districts.”
Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Plano Republican, said the political will to redraw other maps was already there before this week’s Supreme Court ruling. But now, lawmakers will have even more motivation to “rebalance” the state House, Senate and State Board of Education maps, as he put it. He said he’s optimistic lawmakers will take it up in 2027, when they are next scheduled to reconvene in Austin, rather than waiting for after the 2030 Census.
“We have districts drawn today that don’t represent the reality of what our state looks like,” Shaheen said. “It really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color. We will continue that in Texas.”
Spiller, who serves on the House redistricting committee, said it was premature to speculate where Republicans could make gains if they took up legislativeredistricting. But Wednesday’s ruling reaffirmed that states can undertake partisan redistricting, and lifted some of the constraints that Section 2 previously put on lawmakers, he said.
“I think that’s a game changer,” Spiller said.
After the Callais decision, there are virtually no legal constraints on lawmakers if they want to draw an aggressively partisan map, said David Froomkin, a political science professor at the University of Houston. But there are other factors to consider, he said. Unlike Louisiana or Alabama, where Democratic voters are more concentrated, Texas’ sprawling, left-leaning cities and suburbs make it harder to eliminate Democratic seats without imperiling Republican incumbents.
“That’s the tension mapmakers face, the more you try to divide the opposition, the more districts that are in danger of flipping, especially with an unpredictable electorate,” he said.
Since Texas’ midterms are already underway, the state has the luxury of waiting to see what November brings before deciding whether to embark on more redistricting, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University. If the new congressional map yields fewer than the five anticipated GOP pickups, lawmakers may get the memo that voters don’t want this redistricting effort to continue.
“Texas has cranked the volume up to 11 or 12 on this, and conceivably you could run into territory where that starts blowing out the speaker,” he said. “I think this fall will bring political lessons about redistricting, maybe the lessons we expect, and maybe not.”
Additionally, the midterms could show Republicans whether to focus on expanding their majority or, in the case of a blue wave, fortifying GOP districts for 2028. Spiller echoed the call for caution, especially as the state waits to see the results of the national redistricting arms race that launched last summer.
“I think you always need to be careful what you ask for, what you reach for, because you might get an unintended result,” he said. “You don’t want to overreach. I think you need to be deliberative about how we do this.”
Disclosure: University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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