Is gerrymandering on grounds of race legal
Executive summary
The short answer: race-based gerrymandering has long been declared unconstitutional, but recent Supreme Court actions and filings create significant uncertainty about how strictly courts will police race in redistricting; a federal judge found Texas’s 2025 map an illegal racial gerrymander, yet the Supreme Court allowed the map to remain in use while the case proceeds [1] [2]. Legal commentators and rights groups say the high court’s recent intervention risks making racial-gerrymandering rulings harder to win even as partisan gerrymandering remains largely unreviewable in federal courts [3] [4].
1. What the law has said: race-based gerrymanders are unconstitutional
For decades, Supreme Court precedent and federal law have held that drawing districts with the intent to discriminate on the basis of race violates the Constitution; courts have treated intentional racial sorting of voters as unlawful even while grappling with how to measure harms and remedies [4] [5]. The Voting Rights Act — especially Section 2 — also has been used to challenge maps that dilute minority voting strength, creating a legal line between impermissible race-based discrimination and permissible consideration of race to remedy past discrimination [6] [4].
2. Why the line between “race” and “partisan” is messy now
Recent Supreme Court decisions and pending cases have blurred the boundary between racial and partisan motives. The Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling removed federal courts from policing partisan gerrymanders, making racial intent the main federal constitutional route to challenge maps — but distinguishing race from politics is difficult where race and party affiliation correlate, and the Court has struggled to provide clear, manageable standards [3] [4].
3. The Texas fight: a concrete flashpoint
A federal district court in El Paso concluded the Texas 2025 map was an illegal racial gerrymander and barred its use; Texas appealed and the Supreme Court stayed that order, allowing the map to be used pending further review [1] [2]. The district judge wrote that “substantial evidence” showed racial gerrymandering; three liberal justices protested the stay as harming millions of Texans assigned to districts “based on their race,” while some conservative justices emphasized partisan motives [2] [7].
4. How the Supreme Court’s intervention affects enforcement
By staying the lower-court order, the Supreme Court signaled greater deference to legislatures in contested redistricting fights and highlighted a continuing tug-of-war in how judges should infer intent and weigh ambiguous evidence — a posture critics say will make proving unconstitutional race-based line-drawing harder [1] [2]. Legal analysts warn that this development, combined with Rucho, narrows effective federal remedies for many gerrymandering complaints [3] [4].
5. Competing viewpoints: enforcement vs. deference
Civil-rights advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers say courts must vigorously police race-based plans because the Constitution forbids assigning voters by race [8] [9]. Defenders of the contested maps and some justices counter that many redistricting choices are driven by partisan aims and traditional districting principles, not unconstitutional race-based intent, and that judges should not substitute their judgment for legislatures’ at the cost of disrupting election administration [2] [10].
6. Practical consequences this cycle
The immediate effect is procedural: maps like Texas’s remain in use for upcoming elections while litigation continues, potentially altering House-seat outcomes (some analysts say Texas’s map could give Republicans up to five extra House seats) and adding political stakes to judicial timing decisions [7] [1]. Observers say the interplay of state redrawing, counter-redistricting by opposing parties, and litigation will shape multiple states’ maps ahead of 2026 [11] [1].
7. What sources do not settle here
Available sources do not mention a final Supreme Court ruling resolving the Texas case’s merits; they report stays, appeals and broader doctrinal uncertainty but not a conclusive new standard that eliminates the prohibition on race-based gerrymandering [2] [1]. They also do not establish that partisan gerrymandering is newly legal — rather, federal courts are limited in policing partisan claims after Rucho even as racial claims remain theoretically actionable [3] [4].
8. Bottom line for readers
Constitutionally, drawing districts “with the intent to discriminate on the basis of race” remains prohibited in principle, but recent court actions — notably the Supreme Court’s stay in the Texas dispute — mean enforcement is currently uneven and contested. Watch pending appeals and the Court’s forthcoming decisions closely: they will determine whether proving and remedying race-based gerrymanders becomes harder or whether older protections will be reaffirmed [2] [1].