Texas’ redistricting ruling exposes a truth Trump, politicians ignore

If there were a pari-mutuel window in the federal courthouse in El Paso, it's likely the smart money would have been on the three-judge panel ruling in favor of the state of Texas in the politically charged lawsuit over the congressional redistricting plan enacted by the Republican Legislature in September and signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.

After all, two of the judges assigned to the case were appointed by Republican presidents. And guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court over the past couple of decades suggests that a majority of the justices have been generally OK with how Republican Texas lawmakers have drawn district lines to benefit their own party.

That made the 2-1 ruling handed down Tuesday, with filing for the March 3 Republican and Democratic primaries already underway, both surprising and dramatic. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, writing for the prevailing side, not only struck down the map, but he also issued some particularly sharp criticism for how everyone involved in the process decided that Texas needed to overhaul the congressional map enacted just two years earlier.

Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeff Brown, left, listens to oral arguments in a Texas school finance case at the state Supreme Court on Sept. 1, 2015, in Austin. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, Pool)
Eric Gay/AP

"Legally unsound," "baseless," "erroneous," "ham-fisted" and "a mess" were some of the words Brown had for the way the 2025 redistricting plan came to be.

Anyone who saw Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's quote blaming the "radical left" for the ruling, or Abbott's assertion that the decision was "clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature," might have thought that Brown was the one judge on the panel appointed by a Democratic administration.

Not so. Brown was named to the federal bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump, who this summer stated openly that he wanted Texas to enact a map that would give Republicans five more seats in Congress after the 2026 midterm elections. Brown also worked for Abbott when the future governor was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. And Brown later became a justice on that court, running for the seat as a Republican.

Trump has been up front that he expects people he appoints to office to be loyal to him. And that expectation would seem to reinforce the belief that Brown would have sided with Circuit Court Judge Jerry Smith, the other Republican appointee on the panel, to uphold the map.

But here's the rub: The way the American system of government works, judges, no matter how they find their way to the bench, must promise their loyalty to the law and the Constitution, not to their political benefactors. Does that always hold up in practice? Probably not. But it remains the ideal.

We'll leave it to legal scholars to debate whether Brown's ruling and his reasoning were correct. Smith, who has served on the federal bench since then-President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1987, made it clear in his dissent that he believes the ruling was wrong-headed and that his fellow Republican jurist might be deserving of the "Nobel Prize for Fiction."

This, instead, is a cautionary tale against reading the tea leaves to predict how judges will rule on any given case.

Going back to the middle of the 20th century, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed California Gov. Earl Warren to be chief justice of the United States. Politically, it made perfect sense for the president then in the first year of his first term. Like Eisenhower, Warren was a Republican in good standing and, like his president, a picture of the GOP establishment of the 1940s and '50s.

But events would take Warren in a direction that Eisenhower might not have foreseen. According to a report published by Georgetown University Law Center, Warren presided over "not just the most liberal Supreme Court in American history, but arguably the only liberal Supreme Court in American history."

Among the Warren Court's landmark rulings: that public schools must be desegregated and that the long-held notion of "separate but equal" was an abomination to the Constitution. The court also ruled that the government had no business telling married couples they couldn't use contraceptives, and it further safeguarded the principle of freedom of the press.

Eisenhower would later say that his appointment of Warren was "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made."

President John F. Kennedy's first Supreme Court appointee would go on to become something of an anatagonist for liberal Democrats. Justice Byron White was considered a New Frontier progressive when he joined the high court in 1962. Ten years later, he was one of just two justices who voted against the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that affirmed national abortion rights.

"The Court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries," White wrote in his dissent.

Abortion during Kennedy's time in the White House was not central to his party's platform, as it would become in the decades that followed. But when he nominated White, it's safe to assume Kennedy believed his pick would be a mainstay of the high court's liberal faction. Instead, White became a swing vote who frequently sided with the court's conservatives.

If that was the case, it proved to be an unwise bet. But it wouldn't be the only one in the history of American jurisprudence.