(The Center Square) – States looking to pad partisan advantage by redrawing political maps ahead of the 2026 midterms face mounting legal challenges and a fresh race against the clock to get the boundaries settled.

A federal court blocked Texas from using Republican-drawn maps, while the Department of Justice recently joined a legal challenge to California's Democrat-drawn maps.

The Texas court ordered the state to use the congressional lines in place before they were redrawn earlier this year.

"The public perception of this case is that it's about politics," Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the decision. "To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2

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