‘I dissent,’ judge says 16 times in 100-page broadside against colleagues in Texas redistricting case

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — A federal judge on Wednesday issued an extraordinary broadside against his two colleagues over their decision to publish their opinion in a major redistricting case in Texas before he had a chance to finish writing his dissent, saying they had lost “any pretense of judicial restraint, good faith, or trust.”

The statement issued by Judge Jerry Smith, who sits on the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, accuses the two other judges of unfairly rushing to get their ruling out on Tuesday even after he told them he had not wrapped up his part of the case.

On Wednesday, the Ronald Reagan-appointed judge issued a 100-page dissent that says the majority ruling is “replete with legal and factual error, and accompanied by naked procedural abuse.”

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 to block Texas from using its newly drawn congressional map in next year’s midterms, ruling that the map is likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, wrote in the majority decision that the challengers were “likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” (The majority opinion was 160 pages.)

But Smith vigorously disagreed throughout his dissent. He said the “’obvious reason’” behind the decision to redraw the state’s congressional maps “’of course, is partisan gain,’” and that Brown was wrong to conclude that state lawmakers are “more bigoted than political.”

“It’s all politics, on both sides of the partisan aisle. George and Alex Soros have their hands all over this,” Smith wrote, referring to the billionaire father and son who have supported liberal causes.

The judge also repeatedly invoked California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who successfully pushed lawmakers and voters in the Golden State to redraw its maps to counteract the Texas effort.

“Gavin Newsom took a victory lap in Houston to celebrate the Democrat redistricting win with Proposition 50,” he wrote. “That tells you all that you need to know – this is about partisan politics, plain and simple.”

Smith also argues that Brown wrongly described the standard the court needed to use when deciding whether to block the map quickly, writing, in part, that his colleague understated how strong the challengers’ arguments against the redrawn districts needed to be.

“With his creative formulation of the preliminary-injunction standard, Judge Brown is intentionally misleading at best and disingenuously false,” he wrote.

Sprinkled throughout the stinging opinion issued by Smith are more insults but also lighter, zippier lines, including references to the 1950 movie “All About Eve.”

“’Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!’” Smith’s dissent began.

He closed with: “Darkness descends on the Rule of Law. A bumpy night, indeed.”

Texas has appealed the ruling. But should it stand, it will be a major setback for Trump and Republicans, who had made Texas the centerpiece of a national campaign to redraw maps ahead of the midterms.

‘The outrage speaks for itself’

In his four-page statement accompanying the 100-page dissent, Smith describes in detail the timeline that precipitated the release of the majority decision, penned by Brown and joined by District Judge David Guaderrama, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

Smith says that Brown told him last week that the majority intended to issue their ruling in coming days because they believed they could not wait any longer due to an election law principle that says courts should avoid making last-minute changes to how elections are run before the contests get underway.

On Tuesday, Smith said, Brown wrote him a note in the morning that said: “I’m sorry that we can’t wait on your dissent. Purcell compels us to get the ruling out as soon as we possibly can. It turns out that’s today.” The majority opinion was issued shortly thereafter.

“This outrage speaks for itself,” Smith wrote in his statement. “Any pretense of judicial restraint, good faith, or trust by these two judges is gone. 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. What indeed are they afraid of?”

The majority’s decision to release the ruling Tuesday without the dissenting opinion attached, Smith said, diminished “the impact of the dissent and the public’s access to it.”

“In the interest of justice, one can hope it is only a Pyrrhic victory,” he added.

“Judges in the majority don’t get to tell a dissenting judge or judges that they can’t participate,” Smith wrote. “If the two judges on this panel get away with what they have done, it sets a horrendous precedent that ‘might makes right’ and the end justifies the means.”

The judge’s statement skewering Brown ended on an ominous note.

“When I was … newer on the bench, a friend asked me, ‘Now that you’ve been a judge for a few years, do you have any particular advice?’” Smith wrote.

“I replied, ‘Always sit with your back to the wall.’”

CNN’s Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.

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