Texas Republicans' first legal salvo to try to get their congressional gerrymander reinstated for the 2026 midterm election has been rejected in court — an expected move that sets them up for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

"The 3-judge panel in Texas has denied the state’s request to stay the ruling striking down the congressional map," Brennan Center voting rights counsel Michael Li reported on Friday. "Judge Smith would have granted the stay. Under procedural rules, Texas is now clear to seek a stay at SCOTUS."

"At SCOTUS, once a stay request is filed, the normal process is that the justice with responsibility for the circuit that a state is in (in this case, Justice Alito) will ask for a response from the other side & then refer the motion to the entire court for decision," Li noted.

Texas' new congressional map, which at President Donald Trump's request carved up five Democratic congressional districts to try to make them more Republican-favoring, was unexpectedly struck down this week. A split 2-1 panel of federal judges including two district judges and one appellate judge found that state lawmakers violated the 14th and 15th Amendments by predominantly using illegal racial criteria to draw the new seats, obliterating Black districts while mostly leaving alone white districts.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” stated the majority opinion written by U.S. Judge Jeff Brown, a conservative Federalist Society stalwart and Trump appointee who previously served on the Texas Supreme Court. “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 2025 Map.”

The dissenting judge, a Reagan appointee named Jerry Smith, spent large parts of his opinion personally attacking Brown, accusing him of judicial misconduct and lamenting, "The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom."