Supreme Court Stays Order Blocking Texas's 2025 Congressional Map Pending Appeal; Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson Dissent

The Supreme Court granted Texas’s application for a stay of the district court order that had blocked the state’s new congressional map. The order is dated December 4, 2025, the same day on which the Court’s docket for No. 25A608 lists the application as referred to the Court. The application came from the State of Texas and several of its officials, and the stay applies to the November 18, 2025 order of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.

The order is a stay on an application, not a ruling on the merits. By its terms the stay lasts through any appeal: “Should a notice of appeal and jurisdictional statement be timely filed, this order shall remain in effect pending this Court’s action on the appeal.” The order ends only if the appeal is dismissed or the judgment is affirmed.

The Court’s reasoning is in the order itself, which says that Texas “is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the District Court committed at least two serious errors.” The first error it names is that the District Court failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith; the second is that it failed to draw an adverse inference against respondents who did not produce a viable alternative map.

Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, concurred in the grant of the stay. He wrote that the dissent did not dispute, “because it is indisputable,” that the impetus for the Texas map was “partisan advantage pure and simple.”

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented from the grant. She wrote that the three-judge District Court held a nine-day hearing and issued a 160-page opinion, and that it “held that the answer was clear” that Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines. She wrote that “today’s order disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”

The docket for the stay application, No. 25A608, ends with that order. The appeal, No. 25-845, was decided by summary reversal on April 27, 2026; see 2026-04-27–supreme-court-summarily-reverses-texas-congressional-map-ruling-abbott-v-lulac.