Two weeks ago, a federal district court declared Texas Republicans’ proposal to redraw the state’s congressional districts to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and blocked it from taking effect. On Thursday evening, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court reimposed that map, which will allow the state to use it in the 2026 midterm elections. As a direct result of this decision, Republicans could win five additional seats in Congress, to which President Donald Trump has claimed his party is “entitled.” The three liberal justices dissented from the unsigned shadow docket order.

The decision below, which held that Texas illegally engaged in race-based redistricting, was not the knee-jerk response of some far-left partisan. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, authored the 160-page majority opinion after a nine-day hearing featuring 23 witnesses and thousands of exhibits. After assessing the credibility of the witnesses and evaluating the extensive record before them, Brown and Judge David Guaderrama reached a simple conclusion: “Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

District courts have a unique role in the legal system: They are the ones actually tasked with finding the facts. And under the Court’s own precedent, appellate judges are supposed to defer to a district court’s factual determinations about “whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines,” unless the district court’s findings are the product of “clear error.”

This is a demanding standard—not a “if it were me, I wouldn’t have done it like that” standard, or a “but I don’t like that result” standard, or a “but I was really hoping Republicans would keep their majority in the House next year” standard. Rather than apply it, which would have meant respecting both the lower court’s conclusions and voters of color as equal members of the political process, the Court opted to perform its own made-up analysis of its own made-up facts.