Jerry's jeremiad: A wild dissent roils Texas redistricting debate

[In It to Win It]

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/19/texas-redistricting-case-dissent-00660625

When a judge warns readers to “Fasten your seatbelts!” before a 104-page legal diatribe — best to buckle up.

Jerry Smith, a judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, delivered that admonition before launching into an invective-laden, unusually personal excoriation of a legal decision Tuesday throwing out congressional boundaries Texas just redrew at the urging of President Donald Trump.

Smith, on the losing end of that 2-1 ruling, attacked the plaintiffs as tools of left-wing donors George and Alex Soros, who featured at least 17 times in the ruling. (“George and Alex Soros have their hands all over this.”) Smith swiped at Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom (“The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom.”) And Smith went after the plaintiffs’ lawyers and advocates in intensely personal ways.

“That tells you all that you need to know — this is about partisan politics, plain and simple,” Smith wrote.

But Smith, a Reagan appointee, saved his most intense disdain for a fellow jurist, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Galveston-based Trump appointee who authored Tuesday’s ruling scrapping the new Texas map that gave Republicans a five-seat pickup opportunity.

JERRY'S JEREMIAD: Judge Smith's invective-laden dissent from yesterday's Texas redistricting ruling is a journey — attacking the plaintiffs as pawns of George Soros, needling Gov. Newsom and skewering his colleague in personal terms.

w/ @joshgerstein

www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) 2025-11-19T23:20:17.301Z

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Texas Redistricting opinion-There is a crazed dissent that is really strange

I have read a ton of opinions over the years and this is the strangest dissent that I have ever seen. I have been volunteering on election law/voting rights matters since 2004 and Prof. Hasen is a great source of information in this area. This dissent is nuts

Judge Jerry Smith Issues His 104-Page Dissent to Yesterday’s 3-Judge District Court Holding that Texas’s Re-Redistricting is Likely an Unconstitutional Racial Gerrymander. Along the Way He Calls Out the “Pernicious” & “Outrageous” Behavior of Judge Brown in the Majority electionlawblog.org?p=153106

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social) 2025-11-19T20:44:24.987Z

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=153106

It begins with a remarkable attack on Judge Brown (a Trump appointee) explaining that Smith was not responsible for any delay in issuing the decision:

In my 37 years on the federal bench, this is the most outrageous conduct by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved.
In summary, Judge Brown has issued a 160-page opinion without giving me any reasonable opportunity to respond. I will set forth the details. The readers can judge for themselves.

And then turning to the merits:

The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros andmGavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law. I dissent.
In the interest of time, this dissent is, admittedly, disjointed. Usually, in dissenting from an opinion of this length, I would spend more days refining and reorganizing the dissent for purposes of impact and readability. But that approach is not reasonably possible here because these two judges have not allowed it.

The resulting dissent is far from a literary masterpiece. If, however, there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate.

[This post is in progress]

See also

Link to tweet

I tried to read this dissent but is very disjointed and poorly written.

I am curious to see if any of the other lawyers on this board have seen a dissent this strange