Texas Plays Cynical Racial Gerrymandering Game to Save House Majority for Trump

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Voting Wrongs

For a moment last week, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department appeared to throw a metaphorical life vest to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s public relations team. As search and rescue operations continued, the Republican governor was under fire for suggesting that survivors and the media were using the “word choice of losers” when asking him who was to blame for the state’s handling of the flash flood that claimed at least 134 lives over the July 4 weekend. Abbott also compared disaster preparedness to football, saying that “every team makes mistakes.”

On July 7, with search and rescue operations in full swing along the Guadalupe River, the Justice Department sent Texas a letter claiming that four congressional districts held by Democrats were drawn using “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” — offering the governor a distraction from the chaos that climate crisis, disinvestment, and poor management had wrought upon the state.

There is a glaring problem with the letter’s claim: A Republican lawmaker testified in court just last month that she did not consider race when redrawing Texas voting districts that were approved in 2021. The letter, and the points raised in it, reflects a yearslong effort by the Republican Party to reshape the Texas electoral map for maximum partisan benefit — and this time, marching orders are coming from the White House.

With Trump on his way to inspect the flood damage, Abbott called a special legislative session starting on July 21 to bring additional proposals before lawmakers. Special sessions have become routine in a state where the legislature meets for regular sessions only 140 days out of the year. Abbott’s agenda asks lawmakers to approve early warning systems and relief for flood victims, but also to redraw congressional voting districts “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” in the July 7 letter.

The Republican-controlled legislature in Texas would normally wait until the 2030 census before redistricting and is still defending controversial maps approved in 2021 against legal challenges. While lawmakers do not need a legal justification for redistricting now, Trump has made it clear that he wants Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps so Republicans can pick up five additional seats in the House. With Trump’s approval ratings underwater, and the GOP’s tiny majority in the House under fire for passing an unpopular budget bill that will push millions off of health insurance while exploding federal debt, a handful of gerrymandered seats in the House could decide whether Trump spends his final years as a lame duck president.

After Texas Republicans redrew voting maps with fresh census data in 2021, the Justice Department under President Joe Biden and voting rights groups quickly sued the state, arguing the maps dilute the power of Black and Latinx voters through allegedly racist gerrymandering. The Justice Department dropped the case in March after Trump took office and directed federal civil rights attorneys to abandon anti-discrimination cases. Up to 70 percent of attorneys at the Civil Rights Division are reportedly leaving the Justice Department because of Trump’s policies.

Voting rights groups continued the litigation and filed an emergency motion on July 10 asking a federal court to reopen testimony in the case, arguing that Abbott’s push for redistricting and testimony given by lawmakers during the trial are “flatly contradictory.” Abbott’s stated justification for redistricting is the letter from the Trump administration, which threatens to sue the state for “racial gerrymandering.”

During the trial, the state’s attorneys and at least one Republican state lawmaker argued no data on the racial makeup of voting districts was used when drawing the current Texas congressional maps. Litigation seeking documents and information from state lawmakers is ongoing. Chad Dunn, one of the lawyers challenging the Texas maps, told The Texas Tribune that one member of the Texas legislature used the term “blind to race” more times than he could count during the trial.

“Now the Department of Justice is saying that the Republican legislators who authored this plan weren’t telling the truth, and actually were drawing it on the basis of race,” Dunn said last week. “It’s going to be interesting to get to the bottom of that.”

However, on July 14 a federal court denied the emergency motion to reopen testimony in the redistricting case to question witnesses about whether they truthfully testified about drawing maps that did not consider race in light of the Justice Department’s letter. The plaintiffs can file a new motion to reopen the record after lawmakers take up redistricting and the rest of Abbott’s agenda, according to Democracy Docket.

Democrats and legal experts say the Justice Department’s letter is a sloppily written attempt to provide Abbott with political cover as he pushes lawmakers to prioritize redistricting along with the state’s response to deadly floods. Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), who represents a district in Fort Worth that is named in the letter and targeted for changes by Abbott and the GOP, told CBS News that it is “the stupidest memo I have ever seen” from the Justice Department.

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar who served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration, said the letter is “sloppily dashed-off work.”

“It looks like the sort of thing I’d expect from an AI engine that didn’t know how to do law,” Levitt said in an interview last week with The Texas Tribune.

Levitt said the letter blatantly misinterprets a 2024 ruling in Petteway v. Galveston County. Voters and civil rights groups argue that officials in Galveston, Texas — the birthplace of Juneteenth celebrations — drew electoral maps that make it virtually impossible for Black and Latinx voters to elect representatives to county office. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals broke with decades of precedent in 2024 and ruled that the Voting Rights Act does not apply to Black and Latinx voters who form a multi-racial coalition.

In the Justice Department letter that Abbott is using to justify redistricting during a special session, officials claim that four mostly urban districts held by Democrats are “coalition districts” that are not protected by the Voting Rights Act, an apparent reference to the districts’ large Black and Latinx populations. However, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Black and Latinx voters could not challenge redistricting under the Voting Rights Act as a coalition, not that any Texas districts violated the Voting Rights Act.

“Nothing in this letter is going to convince Texas to redraw lines that it wasn’t planning on redrawing anyway,” Levitt said.

Redistricting typically occurs once every 10 years after the census, and while redistricting in favor of Republicans five years early would not be unprecedented, it could be viewed by voters as a clear gerrymandering scheme. Democrats, who are in the minority both in Congress and the Texas legislature, are speaking out against the plan.

“The scheme of the Republicans has consistently been to make sure that they mute our voices so that they can go ahead and have an oversized say in this,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), whose district includes Dallas, during a news conference on Tuesday with House Democratic leadership. “So, I fully anticipate that’s exactly where they’re going with this map.”

Experts say the attempt by Abbott and Texas Republicans to redistrict early could easily backfire. The population of Texas is also growing fast, especially in large and racially diverse cities such as Fort Worth and Houston that are located in the districts targeted by Trump’s Justice Department for changes. Texas Republicans will redraw maps with 2020 census data that is already four years old. Shifting GOP voters into one district that Trump needs to preserve the GOP house majority takes them off the table in another. As Texans watch to see what improvements to flood warning systems lawmakers provide, another question hangs over the special session: How much are Abbott and the Texas GOP willing to sacrifice for Trump?