They’re playing the oldies, not the new tune that the Trump Justice Department tried to woo them with.
Texas officials acknowledged in a new court filing that the Justice Department’s rationale this summer for pushing them to redraw the state’s congressional maps was flawed, but insisted that they were still well within their rights to push ahead with the plan.
“Its ham-fisted legal conclusions notwithstanding, the DOJ Letter apparently sought to provide political cover for Texas to engage in partisan redistricting,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a 41-page document filed late Tuesday.
The filing comes as Republican state leaders are hoping to protect the new map from a legal challenge ahead of next year’s midterms. Since launching the redistricting push at the behest of President Donald Trump, they have leaned heavily into the fact that the new maps are intended to help the party win seats next November.
“The rationale behind the President’s request is simple,” the filing says. “Republicans currently have a razor-thin majority in the United States House of Representatives; if Democrats flip four seats in the upcoming midterm elections, they would take control of the House.”
That’s a different explanation than the Trump administration seemed to give this summer when officials at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division alleged in a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott that four Democratic districts had been illegally drawn to lump voters based on race.
They argued at the time that two blue districts in Houston — one represented by U.S. Rep. Al Green and another left vacant by the deaths of Sheila Jackson Lee and, later, Sylvester Turner — sort voters along “strict racial lines,” while another district, represented by U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, is majority Hispanic. And they said U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey’s Fort Worth district was similarly race-based.
The Attorney General’s Office downplayed that rationale in the new filling and instead leaned into the political motivations behind the push, pointing out that other states like California and Massachusetts have taken similar steps.
See here for some background. Just as a reminder, the claim that the map that Republicans drew in 2021 and have been defending ever since as a race-blind partisan-only effort is actually an illegal race-based gerrymander was cited by Greg Abbott and the rest of state leadership as a justification for the special session that led to the current map:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited the DOJ as his justification for adding redistricting to the special session call.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dustin Burrows also referenced the DOJ letter in explaining the need to redistrict. #txlege
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) 9:55 PM – 23 September 2025
I suppose this was the less awkward way to go, not throwing out everything you said under oath in the trial over that map. The hearing over the new map begins next week. See this thread from Michael Li for more.