A legal expert was taken aback on Tuesday after a federal judge issued a stunning ruling against President Donald Trump's efforts to sway the 2026 midterm election in favor of Republicans.

On Tuesday, Judge Jeffrey V. Brown of the District Court for the Southern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, ruled that the Republican maps drawn by the Texas state legislature were illegal and prohibited them from being used in the next election. The ruling prevents Republicans from eliminating five Democratic-held seats.

Texas's maps were the impetus for redistricting fights that occurred in multiple states.

Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer for Slate, described Brown's 160-page decision as an "extraordinary rebuke" in a new analysis of the case.

"Remarkably, Brown found that it was Trump’s own Department of Justice that had injected race into the plot as part of its 'hamfisted' effort to cook up a pretext for new maps," Stern wrote. "And he laid out a gobsmacking amount of smoking-gun evidence that all points in the direction of unlawful racism."

"The Texas Legislature, Brown noted, could simply have drawn a straightforward partisan gerrymander that benefited Republicans without regard to race," he added. "Instead, it colluded with the DOJ to reengineer congressional districts by skin color—the one thing that even this Supreme Court does not allow."

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