Posted on 11/19/2025 4:08:21 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
A lower court order on Texas’ new congressional map has made its way to the high court. It could be the first of several mid-decade redistricting pushes.
Texas’ emergency appeal is sure to challenge that conclusion. Indeed, Abbott already declared Tuesday that the redistricting effort had nothing to do with race. But another consideration could be even more consequential for the justices: whether they conclude that the lower court’s action contravenes a longstanding principle that federal courts shouldn’t disturb election rules as the process gets underway.
A test for the Purcell Principle
Brown’s ruling contains a long section addressing the so-called “Purcell Principle,” a reference to the high court’s holding in a 2006 emergency-docket dispute that courts should butt out of voting-related cases as an election nears. Brown spends a substantial portion of his opinion suggesting the Supreme Court has given inconsistent guidance about precisely when it’s too late for courts to issue election-altering decisions.
In one case last year, Brown said, the justices made a “naked citation to Purcell without any accompanying reasoning or analysis.” And in a 2022 case blocking a redistricting order, he noted, “the Supreme Court did not cite to a single case to support its stay — not even to Purcell.”
“The Supreme Court has stayed a lower federal court’s election-related injunctions at least six times in the last 11 years. This Court is not naïve to that reality,” Brown wrote. “But this Court is also not naïve to the likely unconstitutional realities of the 2025 Map.”
One question the justices may have to confront is whether Texas’s unusual midterm redistricting and the rapid process the state undertook to change the district boundaries is entitled to the same deference courts have shown to more routine redistricting or to map-drawing efforts initiated because a court threw out an earlier...
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Set to wade into.
If you’re Democrats, gerrymander away, but if you’re Republicans, you can’t even draw neutral districts.
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