Editor's note: This excerpt is from a Bloomberg Law Insight.

"Texas’ US Supreme Court victory allowing its new congressional maps to be used for next year’s midterm elections has potentially broad implications for election law more generally.

The court’s ruling that it’s too close to the 2026 elections for the federal courts to weigh in on Texas’ new maps risks giving state legislatures excessive latitude to change election laws well in advance of elections—without fear of federal court oversight.

This summer, Texas opened a new front in the voting wars by launching the re-redistricting of its congressional map in the middle of the decade rather than following the custom of redistricting every 10 years after the federal census. That ignited an ongoing battle of re-redistrictings of congressional maps among red and blue states.

The Supreme Court weighed in on Dec. 4 on the first of these new maps—the one from Texas. A three-judge federal court had held in a 2-1 vote that the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court stayed the decision, which means Texas will be able to use its new map in the midterms. The brief stay opinion cast doubt on the correctness of the lower court’s racial-gerrymandering judgment but also imposed troubling limits on the permissible timing of federal court review of late-breaking changes to state election law and policies.

The substantive dispute of whether Texas 'merely' engaged in partisan gerrymandering, which current doctrine unfortunately makes permissible, or unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, is highly fact-specific. It turns on how individual districts were designed.

I want to focus here instead on the remarkable implications of the Supreme Court’s decision for the timing of when federal courts are permitted to adjudicate state election law changes…"

Read the full piece here.