When Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil-rights attorney, sent a letter this summer telling Texas officials that their congressional map was unconstitutional, it set off a nationwide battle between the political parties to gain an edge in next year’s elections by redrawing their House districts.
This past week, that letter created major legal problems for Republicans and a setback for the Trump administration.
Dhillon’s warning to Texas was the central evidence a federal court cited in blocking a House district map that could have yielded Republicans as many as five additional seats. The result: President Trump’s push to protect his party’s House majority through gerrymandering is now at risk of costing the GOP seats, rather than producing a net gain.
The Texas ruling left the White House working to shore up the firewall it has been trying to build to ensure that Democrats are unable to gain control of the House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow, six-seat majority, with three seats vacant. With four GOP-led states already putting maps in place that are more Republican-friendly, the White House is pushing Indiana, Florida and other states to follow suit, aware that a Democratic-led House would stymie the president’s agenda in Congress and possibly impeach him.
Late Friday, the administration got good news as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary pause on the lower-court ruling, restoring the contested map for now. Alito, the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas, ordered the groups that challenged the map to respond by Monday.
Still, the Dhillon letter “was clearly an unforced error,” said Jacob Rubashkin, an editor at Inside Elections, a nonpartisan newsletter….