When Texas’ new GOP-friendly congressional map was struck down on Tuesday, state leaders blamed the “radical left” and “activist judges.” But the opinion was authored by Judge Jeffery Brown, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and appointee of President Donald Trump with a long history in the conservative legal movement.
Republicans pushed for the new map after being pressured by Trump to add more GOP seats to preserve the party’s slim U.S. House majority in the upcoming midterms. The legislation sailed through the state’s Republican-led Legislature despite Democrats’ insistence that the effort would illegally disenfranchise voters of color.
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Brown’s ruling, which found there was “substantial evidence that Texas racially gerrymandered” its maps, immediately inflamed the right. Attorney General Ken Paxton quickly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, blaming the “radical left” for “once again trying to undermine the will of the people.” And Gov. Greg Abbott said the ruling was “clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”
But Brown — up until Tuesday’s ruling — has been widely supported by Texas Republicans, including Paxton and Abbott, and has a track record of backing conservative policies.
Brown’s judicial career in Texas began in 2001 when then-Gov. Rick Perry appointed him to the 55th District Court, followed by an appointment to the 14th Court of Appeals six years later. He later was tapped by Perry again in 2013 to join the Texas Supreme Court.
When Brown was later nominated for the federal bench in 2019, Democrats criticized his track-record of conservative rulings while on the all-Republican state Supreme Court. He joined several rulings against same-sex marriage, including one he authored where he emphasized that marriage had been between a man and a woman for “all of Western Civilization from the beginning of Christendom to the modern day.”
He has also spoken about his anti-abortion views, including posting quotes from the dissenting opinions in Roe v. Wade on social media on the anniversary of the decision. He was endorsed by Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group during his judicial campaigns.
Paxton applauded Brown’s federal confirmation that year, writing in a statement at the time that he “has a proven record of excellence, professionalism, and fidelity to the Constitution. He decides cases based on the rule of law rather than personal preference.”
Abbott echoed the sentiment after Brown was appointed by Trump, praising the justice’s “commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law” dating back to when Brown clerked for him during his own stint as a Supreme Court justice.
Since becoming a federal judge, with the exception of Tuesday’s ruling, Brown has largely defended Trump’s policies. For example, he criticized a federal court for striking down the president’s executive order banning travelers from several Muslim-majority countries in 2017. Brown called the ruling “an attempted coup” in a speech, according to the Houston Chronicle, and said the judges’ “reasoning is not based in law but in their belief that we have an illegitimate president.”
But just because Brown was appointed by Trump doesn’t mean he has to vote in line with Republican opinions, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School. He’s a judge, not a politician, Levitt said.
“I don’t like assuming that judges necessarily are in the tank for the party or president that appointed them,” Levitt said. “I think you’ve now seen several judges rule against the presidents that appointed them, I think that’s to be expected. I think that most judges look at the law and look at the facts and do their best to think, ‘What is the right legal outcome here?’”
Brown drew particular outrage from 5th Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a fellow conservative who was the sole dissenter on the case. In a 104-page opinion, Smith accused Brown of “pernicious judicial misbehavior” for cutting him out of the process. He alleges that Brown and Judge David Guaderrama, the Obama appointee who also sat on the panel, did not give him sufficient time to prepare a dissent.
“If these judges were so sure of their result, they would not have been so unfairly eager to issue the opinion sans my dissent, or they could have waited for the dissent in order to join issue with it,” Smith wrote. “What indeed are they afraid of?”
In a withering critique of Brown’s handling of the case, Smith decried his fellow jurist as an “unskilled magician” caught in an “illogical straitjacket,” who was handing a victory to Democratic billionaire George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
This is not the first time Brown has been at odds with his party over redistricting. In 2023, he ruled that Galveston County’s new commissioner court map, which eliminated the county’s one majority non-white precinct, was a “stark and jarring” violation of the Voting Rights Act.
That case then went to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned Brown’s ruling, upheld Galveston’s map and reversed 40 years of its own legal precedent that said multiple racial groups could band together to bring voting rights lawsuits. In this case, titled Petteway v. Galveston County, the court ruled that an individual group needed to form a majority on their own to have standing in court.
It was that 5th Circuit ruling that the Department of Justice cited in its letter to Texas, directing the state to redistrict this summer and kicking off the legal hullabaloo that culminated in Brown’s ruling Tuesday.
In that ruling, Brown rejected the DOJ’s understanding of the Petteway case as “clearly wrong,” saying the agency’s letter contained “so many factual, legal and typographical errors” it was difficult to understand.
“Legally and factually, DOJ had no valid argument that the Legislature should restore the House map to some preexisting racial equilibrium since Petteway supplanted [the previous precedent,]” Brown wrote. “Far from seeking to ‘rectify . . . racial gerrymandering,’ the DOJ Letter urges Texas to inject racial considerations into what Texas insists was a race-blind process.”