Trump Gets Instant Karma by Texas Judge He Appointed!!!

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2:13Ben Meiselas:A panel of three federal judges in Texas, including a Trump appointee, just blocked Texas Republicans from using their new gerrymandered congressional map in 2026, ruling that it was an illegal racially gerrymandered map and ordering Texas to revert to its 2021 map as Trump's redistricting power grab collapses. The author of this massive opinion is a federal judge named Judge Jeffrey Brown, writing for the majority here, this three-judge panel. It's a three-judge panel because that's the type of panel that hears challenges to gerrymandering and challenges under the Voting Rights Act. and Judge Jeffrey Brown, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, ruled that Trump and Governor Abbott's efforts to gerrymander Texas to pick up five congressional seats is unlawful.

3:18Ben Meiselas:It was a powerful opinion. What you need to note as well, this has no impact on California's Prop 50 mid-decade redistricting. So as it stands right now, California, based on the popular referendum of the people that was not an unlawfully racially gerrymandered proposition, will get to pick up five congressional seats. And the Texas gerrymandered map has been deemed to be unlawful and racist. And it was a Trump judge who drafted the opinion. So Donald Trump can't be like, oh, Oh, wacko liberal judge. You appointed this guy, Donald, in 2019, Judge Jeffrey Brown. I want to go through with you what Judge Jeffrey Brown, the Trump appointed judge in Texas, wrote when he struck down the Governor Abbott Donald Trump mid-decade gerrymander in Texas.

4:18Ben Meiselas:So the judge starts off by quoting Chief Justice John Roberts himself, a right-wing chief judge on the United States Supreme Court. Because clearly this Trump appointed judge was basically speaking to the chief judge and saying, if this case ever gets to you, I'm quoting you here about what you said. This is why this Trump judge wanted to make this opinion stick. I mean, he stuck the dagger and twisted it in Donald Trump right there. So he quotes Chief Justice John Roberts as saying, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. And the Trump appointed judge finds that Donald Trump and Governor Abbott discriminated on the basis of race when they engaged in an unlawful gerrymander of Texas.

5:09Ben Meiselas:Here's what the opinion says. The public perception of this case is that it's about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map, but it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered that 2025 map. Here's why. Earlier this year, President Trump began urging Texas to redraw its U.S. House map to create five additional Republican seats. Lawmakers reportedly met that request to redistrict on purely partisan grounds with apprehension. When the governor announced his intent to call a special legislative session, he didn't even place redistricting on the legislative agenda.

5:54Ben Meiselas:But when the Trump administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board. On July 7th, Harmeet Dillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, sent a letter to the governor and attorney general of Texas, making the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were unconstitutional because they were coalition districts, majority non-white districts, in which no single racial group constituted a 50 % majority. In the letter, the DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn't immediately dismantle and redraw these districts, a threat based entirely on their racial makeup.

6:45Ben Meiselas:Notably, the DOJ letter targeted only majority non-white districts. Any mention of majority white Democrat districts, which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial, was conspicuously absent. Two days later, citing the DOJ letter, the governor, Governor Abbott, added redistricting to the special Sessions legislative agenda. In doing so, the governor explicitly directed the legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ's concerns. In other words, the governor explicitly directed the legislature to redistrict based on race, on racism. In press appearances, the governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority Hispanic districts.

7:42Ben Meiselas:The legislature adopted those racial objectives. The redistricting bill sponsors made numerous statements suggesting that they had intentionally manipulated the district lines to create more majority Hispanic and majority black districts. The bill sponsor statement suggests they adopted those changes because such a map would be an easier sell than a purely partisan one. The Speaker of the House also issued a press release celebrating that the bill satisfactorily addressed DOJ's concerns. Other high-ranking legislators stated in media interviews that the legislature had redistricted not for the political goal of appeasing President Trump, nor of gaining five Republican U.S.

8:29Ben Meiselas:House seats, but to achieve the DOJ's racial goal of eliminating coalition districts. The map ultimately passed by the legislature and signed by the governor. The 2025 map achieved all but one of the racial objectives that the DOJ demanded. The legislature dismantled and left unrecognizable not only all of the districts DOJ identified in letter, but also several other, quote, coalition districts around the state. For these and other reasons, the plaintiff groups are likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map. So we preliminarily enjoin what Texas did here, and it blocked Texas's map.

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11:01Ben Meiselas:Now, you go through more of the ruling and it says, background, the law governing racial discrimination challenges in redistricting plans. Because racial discrimination in voting cannot coexist with democratic self-government, federal law provides various avenues for challenging an electoral map as racially discriminatory. There are at least three avenues to do so. One, racial gerrymandering. First, a plaintiff can bring a racial gerrymandering claim under the 14th and 15th amendments. A racial gerrymandering claim alleges that the state without sufficient justification has separated its citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race.

11:46Ben Meiselas:The plaintiff must prove that the state subordinated race neutral districting criteria to racial considerations such that race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature's decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district. Two, intentional vote dilution. Second, a plaintiff can bring an intentional vote dilution claim, which is analytically distinct from a racial gerrymandering claim and follows a different analysis. An intentional vote dilution claim alleges that the state has enacted a particular voting scheme as a purposeful device to minimize or cancel out the voting potential of racial or ethnic minorities.

12:29Ben Meiselas:Intentional vote dilution violates both the Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. To prevail in an intentional vote dilution claim, the plaintiff must show that the state's districting plan has the purpose and effect of diluting a minority vote. Three, effects-based vote dilution, we call it Gingles claim. Both of the first two claims require plaintiff to prove that the legislature acted with some sort of unlawful intent. To supplement these intent-based causes of action, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act Section 2 to enable plaintiffs to challenge electoral maps based on their racially dilutive effects alone.

13:11Ben Meiselas:Then the court says, for the foregoing reasons, the court grants the plaintiff's motion for a preliminary junction as to their racial gerrymandering claims, and it enjoins, it blocks the 2025 Texas map and says the state must use the 2021 map. And its main piece of evidence, the smoking gun, it said, look at the DOJ letter. The DOJ letter said, we want you to gerrymander on the basis of race because I suppose the DOJ thought that it would have a harder time selling this to Texas if they said, we want you to do it based on politics and partisanship alone. So the DOJ said, do it on race. And the court said, DOJ said, do it on race.

13:58Ben Meiselas:You complied with this bizarre letter from the DOJ, an unlawful letter. And thus it's clearly racial gerrymandering. One of the things that the Trump appointed judge, by the way, all of this is written by a Trump appointed judge. And one of the things the Trump appointed judge said was he was very critical of the DOJ letter. It's challenging to unpack the DOJ letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General, who professes to be a political ally of the Trump administration, describe the DOJ letter as legally unsound, baseless, erroneous, ham-fisted, and a mess.

14:46Ben Meiselas:Now, the Republicans who are likely going to lose their seats in California are livid right now because they're saying, Maga Mike, why did you allow this unlawful gerrymandering to take place in Texas and elsewhere? Because now you screwed us over in California. We're going to lose our seats in California and Republicans are likely not going to gain any seats nationally. In fact, we may lose seats based on the incompetence with which this plan was implemented. California Republican Kylie tears into the redistricting push after the court just struck down the Texas map. Quote, to the extent there was any point to begin with, which I don't think there was, I don't think even if you got a partisan advantage on this, it in any way, shape or form justifies it.

15:37Ben Meiselas:But that's not even going to happen, it looks like. And with this court decision, it's even more in doubt. So it's just utterly foolish. It was a total failure of the leadership, Maga Mike Johnson, to let this happen in a way that is going to be bad for our own members, bad for the House, bad for representation across the country. And Kylie said that Johnson should have publicly opposed redistricting and just struck a truce with Hakeem Jeffries to leave the status quo in place until the decade is up across the country, in which case everybody would have basically disarmed and we would have just had normal elections.

16:16Ben Meiselas:But no, MAGA Mike had to keep it going and it backfired in their face. As Paul Mitchell said, since everybody's asking, no, this doesn't undo Prop 50. The trigger language was removed in the legislative process as it was clear that Texas was redistricting. So even if their map is invalidated and postponed in Texas, the Prop 50 map stays in place. Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom is mocking Donald Trump. Quiet, piggy, piggy, quiet, piggy, because Donald Trump calls female reporters that horrible name. Governor Newsom is telling Donald Trump that you're the piggy, Donald. you're the piggy and a loser.

16:58Ben Meiselas:Anybody, everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million. Thanks for watching this analysis.

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