In mid-August, amid Texas’ high-profile redistricting fight, CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Gov. Greg Abbott on why the state was suddenly redrawing its congressional map.
“You are doing this to give Trump and Republicans in the House of Representatives five additional seats, right?” Tapper asked. “That’s the motivation, is to stave off any midterm election losses.”
Abbott pushed back, citing a recent 5th Circuit ruling that barred Black and Hispanic voters from joining together to bring voting rights lawsuits.
“Again, to be clear, Jake, the reason why we are doing this is because of that court decision,” Abbott said. “Texas is now authorized under law that changed that was different than in 2021 when we last did redistricting.”
This insistence, which Abbott repeated across several news interviews and was initially echoed by Republican lawmakers, is one of the key allegations that led a federal court to this week strike down Texas’ new congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander.
If Abbott had stuck with the story that this was purely political gamesmanship, the court would likely have allowed the redraw to stand, based on Supreme Court precedent effectively sanctioning partisan gerrymanders. But by repeatedly tying the process to a court ruling that changed the racial makeup of who can bring legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act, Abbott “explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote in the ruling that blocked Texas’ new map.
Brown’s 160-page opinion also sharply criticized Republican legislators for unduly tethering the process to race, and specifically condemned state Sen. Phil King, chair of the Senate redistricting committee, as untruthful and inconsistent on the stand.
In a scathing dissent issued the day after Brown’s ruling, 5th U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith wrote that none of Abbott’s or the lawmakers’ comments indicate they brought a racial lens to redistricting.
“The challenge faced by these plaintiffs and Judge Brown is to explain how it could be that the Republicans would sacrifice their stated goal of political gain for racial considerations,” he said, calling the ruling’s conclusions “both perverse and bizarre.”
The ruling, issued Tuesday, has already been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to act quickly. Candidates have until Dec. 8 to formally declare which seats they are running for in 2026, putting the onus on the courts to soon clarify which map will be used in that election.
Abbott’s comments
If there’s one thing everyone involved can agree on, it’s that the letter was a mistake.
While Trump was pressuring Texas Republicans to take up redistricting, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alerting them that four of the state’s congressional districts were unconstitutional.
Dhillon pointed to a recent ruling from the 5th Circuit, in a case titled Petteway v. Galveston County, that said different racial groups cannot band together to bring voting rights complaints. As a result of that ruling, Texas needed to redraw four of the majority non-white congressional districts it had crafted in 2021, Dhillon wrote.
The state had just concluded a monthlong trial in which its lawyers argued repeatedly that the 2021 maps were drawn blind to race. Paxton responded to Dhillon’s letter reiterating that defense, but noting that the state still might undertake redistricting to shore up Republican strength in the state.
“The purpose behind his letter appears to have been to refocus the redistricting dialogue toward permissible considerations like partisanship, politics, and traditional districting criteria — and away from legally fraught considerations like race,” Brown wrote in his ruling. “If that was the letter’s purpose, it didn’t work.”
Abbott continued to draw from Dhillon’s letter, directing the Legislature to redistrict “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
“By incorporating DOJ’s race-based redistricting request by reference, the Governor was asking the Legislature to give DOJ the racial rebalancing it wanted — and for the reasons that DOJ cited,” Brown wrote.
The governor then went on a media blitz, telling several different outlets, including CNN, that the redraw was because of these constitutional concerns. In eliminating coalition districts, Abbott told Tapper, the new map “turned out to provide more seats for Hispanics … It just coincides it’s going to be Hispanic Republicans elected to those seats.”
Abbott later changed tact, removing references to the DOJ letter when he called lawmakers back for a second special session, after Democrats returned from their quorum break. But that doesn’t suffice to have “cleansed the first proclamation’s racial taint,” Brown said.
“The map that the Legislature passed during the second session was largely identical to the first, indicating that racial considerations had already infected the map by the time the Governor issued the second proclamation,” he wrote.
Smith, the dissenting judge, said the fact that Abbott’s comments about Hispanic districts came after the first version of the map was drawn show that he had “adjusted his rhetoric to defend the map in a forward-facing capacity,” rather than directing the Legislature to redraw based on a race-based premise.
In a statement after the ruling, Abbott said it was “absurd” to say the maps were discriminatory.
“I have never seen a judgment, an opinion so erroneous in his writing,” he added on Fox News on Thursday. “It looked like Judge Brown geared his writing to try to achieve a result, and that’s something that the United States Supreme Court, I think, is just not going to tolerate.”
Legislators’ comments
As all three judges acknowledge, Abbott’s comments matter a lot less than what the Legislature did based on them. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that when trying to separate out partisan gerrymandering from racial influence, courts should generally give legislatures the benefit of the doubt.
But Brown found “direct evidence” that “key legislators … had the same racial objectives as DOJ and the Governor.” He pointed to a press release from House Speaker Dustin Burrows that said the chamber had “delivered legislation to redistrict certain congressional districts to address concerns raised by the Department of Justice,” as well as interviews from lawmakers where they pointed to the Petteway ruling as the impetus for the redraw.
Burrows said in a statement that he disagrees with the ruling, and expects it to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court “in short order.”
Brown also dug into comments from state Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who carried the bill that enabled the map. Upon presenting the bill on the floor of the Texas House, Hunter walked through the racial makeup of each district, volunteering “without prompting,” Brown noted, that the new map increased the number of Hispanic and Black majority districts.
“Chairman Hunter’s floor statements and exchanges with other legislators suggest that he and the bill’s joint authors viewed the plan’s racial numbers not merely as raw statistical facts, but as selling points of the bill,” Brown wrote. “He said it was ‘good,’ ‘great,’ and a ‘strong message’ that those four districts were majority-Hispanic.”
Brown also flagged the increase in districts where Black or Hispanic voters made up “just barely a majority” of the eligible voting population.
“The bill’s main proponents purposefully manipulated the districts’ racial numbers to make the map more palatable,” he wrote. “That’s racial gerrymandering.”
Smith vociferously disagreed, saying none of Brown’s arguments overrode the presumption of good faith that should be awarded to legislators. He took special umbrage at Brown’s interpretation of Hunter’s comments.
“For Judge Brown to insist that [Hunter] harbored inward racial animus on this ambiguous fact pattern unfairly paints Hunter, a former democrat, as an unreformed, unrepentant racist maintaining a flagging veneer of partisan nastiness over Strom Thurmond-like segregationism,” Smith wrote. “This upside-down fantasy entertained by Judge Brown is plain error and justifies reversal.”
Hunter did not respond to a request for comment.
Several lawmakers made comments that bolstered the partisan argument that the state now argues in court, including House Redistricting Committee Chair Cody Vasut, R-Angleton. Smith said those comments should be held in equal weight to any comments from other members of the Legislature, but Brown disagreed.
“We conclude that the contemporaneous statements of legislators involved in the 2025 redistricting are more indicative of racial motives than partisan ones,” he wrote.
Kincaid v. King
King, the Senate redistricting committee chair, is among the legislators who repeatedly claimed the process was motivated by pure partisan goals. But Brown dismissed his comments on the grounds that he was not as involved in the process as Hunter, and because Brown deemed him to be an unreliable witness after he contradicted himself and other witnesses on the stand.
At issue are King’s communications with Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, who drew the map on Texas’ behalf. King and Kincaid met at a conference before redistricting began. By King’s retelling, he explicitly told Kincaid he didn’t want to talk about redistricting and never asked how many seats Republicans might gain; Kincaid said King spoke openly with him about the process at that meeting, including asking how many seats the GOP could get.
There were other inconsistencies between King and Kincaid’s testimonies, which Brown said indicated one of the two was incorrect, and raised the question of “whether anything happened during that meeting that would betray an unlawful legislative motive.”
Smith agreed that King was the less reliable narrator, writing that “Kincaid’s remarkably lucid, rapid-fire, and forthright demeanor on the stand — compared to King’s calculated demeanor” made it “obvious” that Kincaid was telling the truth.
King did not respond to a request for comment.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
