Supreme Court wipes out lower court ruling against Texas redistricting

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday summarily reversed a lower court ruling that found Texas’ new congressional map was likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, pointing to the high court’s unsigned order last year allowing the map to go into effect.

Monday’s one-paragraph order cements a new GOP-drawn congressional map for the Lone Star State targeting five House seats currently held by Democrats. The order noted that the court’s three Democratic appointees dissented from the decision, but none wrote separately.

The Texas redistricting effort last summer, started at the urging of President Donald Trump, touched off a nationwide mid-decade push to redraw congressional maps. States such as California, Virginia and Missouri have all kicked off partisan redistricting efforts, and Florida could follow suit in the coming weeks.

Voters challenged the Texas map, arguing that the district lines were drawn with a racial motive. A three-judge panel agreed in November, finding that the state likely unconstitutionally used race in redrawing the district lines.

The Supreme Court paused that three-judge panel ruling in December, when the court’s conservative majority allowed Texas to move forward with the new map despite the lower court order.

In an unsigned order at that time, the justices said the three-judge panel that originally decided the case made several errors, including deciding the case so close to Texas’ primaries.

The lower court “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature,” the December order said.

In that order, Justice Elena Kagan dissented, writing that the majority allowed the state to group its voters based on race.

“And this Court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution,” Kagan wrote.

Monday’s order also took the unusual step of citing that emergency docket decision as a reason to reverse a case without briefing or oral argument.

The case is Greg Abbott et al. v. League of United Latin American Citizens et al.

In other court news:

▪ A divided court heard arguments on whether the police use of phone tracking data violates the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable searches.”

Most of the justices sounded wary of barring investigators from obtaining precise location history from Google or cellphone providers if it helps find a murderer or a bank robber.

“I’m trying to figure out why this was bad police work,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told an attorney representing the defendant, Odell Chatrie.

He said a police detective in Virginia was seeking clues to find a bank robber and sought a “geofence warrant” from a judge that told Google to turn over data from phones that were near the bank during the hour of the robbery.

“In the end, he got three names,” Kavanaugh said, including Chatrie, who pleaded guilty. He said these searches have proved to be practical for finding criminals.

But other justices said the court should not rule broadly to endorse digital searches of vast databases held by private companies.

What about emails or Google Photos, asked Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

All three said this information deserves more privacy protection than location data.

In the past, the court has said the 4th Amendment protects against government searches that intrude upon a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The two sides in this case differ on whether a digital search of location data violates privacy rights.

Gorsuch said he was generally skeptical of broad searches if the government had no particular suspect.

Is it OK to search “all the rooms in a hotel for a gun or all the storage units or all bank deposit boxes of the pearl necklace that has been stolen?” he asked.

Eric Feigin, a deputy solicitor general, said the government probably could not obtain a search warrant for all storage units or hotel rooms, but a Google search is different because it is a software filter.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. proposed a narrow ruling.

Perhaps unwittingly, Chatrie had agreed to have Google store his location history data. Roberts said he could have turned off the public location data, and for that reason, he may have lost his right to appeal.

“If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off,” he said.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed. Chatrie “voluntarily disclosed to Google the information about where he was going to be,” he said.

Eight years ago, Roberts wrote an opinion for a 5-4 majority that said investigators needed a search warrant before they could obtain 127 days of cell tower records that helped convict a Michigan man of several store robberies.

Four of the court’s liberal justices joined that majority, but only two of them — Sotomayor and Kagan — remain on the court.

Since then, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have joined the court.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and other civil liberties groups backed Chatrie’s challenge to the government’s use of geofence warrants.

Chatrie had “a reasonable expectation of privacy in his location history given both its sensitive and revealing nature and the fact that it was stored in his password-protected account,” Washington attorney Adam Unikowski told the court. “There was not probable cause to search the virtual private papers of every single person within the geofence merely because of their proximity to the crime.”

Feigin, the Justice Department attorney, said a ruling for Chatrie “would impede the investigation of kidnappings, robberies, shootings and other crimes.”

He agreed, however, that email should be protected because it involves personal communication.

The justices will hand down a ruling in Chatrie vs. U.S. by the end of June.

▪ The justices upheld the federal racketeering convictions of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and former lobbyist Matt Borges in the state’s sweeping $60 million bribery scandal, leaving intact their prison sentences, Newsweek reported.

The justices declined to overturn a unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which last May rejected the defendants’ challenges to their convictions. Householder and Borges had sought Supreme Court review after the appeals court denied requests for a rehearing by the full bench.

Federal prosecutors secured the convictions in March 2023. Authorities said Householder, once one of the most powerful figures in Ohio politics, led a criminal enterprise funded by Akron-based utility FirstEnergy Corp.

Prosecutors said the scheme used secret payments to help elect Republican allies, install Householder as speaker, and pass a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear power plants tied to FirstEnergy. The group then worked to protect the law, known as House Bill 6, from a voter-backed repeal effort.

Householder, now 66, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Borges, 53, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, received a five-year sentence for his role in undermining the repeal campaign. He was released to a Cincinnati halfway house in October and is scheduled to be released Nov. 12, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.

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This story was originally published April 27, 2026 at 1:32 PM.