Judge’s dissent is one of the most unhinged opinions ever.

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On Wednesday, one day after a federal court struck down Texas’ new Republican gerrymander, Judge Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, published his belated dissent from the 2–1 decision. It is one of the most unhinged opinions ever published by an American jurist. Smith’s 104-page screed, released a day after the majority opinion, is a rancid gumbo of feverish conspiracy theories and character assassination: He invokes the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros no fewer than 17 times, deriding the plaintiff’s expert witness as a “Soros operative” who draws millions from “his Soros piggybank.” He accuses Soros and his son Alex of having “their hands all over” the case, darkly warning that the plaintiffs’ lawyers were doing the bidding of their “Soros connections” and the “Democrat Party.” He impugns the integrity of his own colleagues on the bench, including a Donald Trump appointee who sided against him, charging them with “disingenuously false” claims to serve “Soros a victory” on “a silver platter.”

Smith, a 79-year-old who has served for nearly four decades, also reveals private communications between judges about the case, a startling breach of judicial protocol. He denounces the author of the majority opinion—Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a conservative Trump nominee—for what he deems “the most outrageous conduct by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved.” Indeed, his dissent begins with a flamboyant “preliminary statement” airing various grievances against Brown that are irrelevant to the law. (These boil down to Brown’s “unthinkable” desire to … release his opinion as quickly as possible to avoid interference with the 2026 midterms.) Smith precedes all this with a quote from Bette Davis in All About Eve: “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

We may never see a better argument for judicial term limits than this dissent, which (at best) exposes an elder jurist’s brain pickled in the brine of Fox News conspiracy theories and (at worst) raises serious questions about competence and senility. But there is a silver lining to this unfortunate episode: Smith utterly failed to refute the majority’s conclusion that the Texas Legislature unlawfully re-sorted voters on the basis of race. Beneath all the rhetorical Sturm und Drang, his rejoinder amounts to a credulous belief that Texas’ main mapmaker accidentally created a near-textbook racial gerrymander without ever considering race. It’s a theory that evaporates upon contact with reality, and is nowhere near enough to overcome the overwhelming racial data that the majority meticulously dissects. The Supreme Court’s GOP appointees will still do whatever they want with this gerrymander, but Smith fails to provide a convincing fig leaf behind which to hide their partisan aims.

Brown’s majority opinion in the case, LULAC v. Abbott, presents a straightforward theory of unconstitutional racial discrimination. He explains that Trump wanted the Texas Legislature to redraw its congressional map before the 2026 midterms to give Republicans additional seats in the House of Representatives. The Legislature was resistant, in part because it feared backlash from such brazenly partisan map-rigging. So the president’s Department of Justice provided a pretense: It asserted (falsely) that the state’s existing map was an unlawful racial gerrymander and threatened to sue unless lawmakers redrew it. The DOJ insisted that the earlier map, in effect, gave Black and Hispanic communities too much power by combining them as majority “coalitions” in several districts. So it ordered the legislature to dismantle these districts. The Legislature complied, dispersing Black and Hispanic voters across districts to eliminate their “coalitions” while keeping majority-white districts largely intact.

Smith’s chief response to this argument is that … George and Alex Soros funded a coterie of lawyers and expert witnesses who fabricated this sequence of events to trick the judiciary into helping the “Democrat Party.” He accuses the plaintiffs’ attorneys and witnesses—by name, one by one—of having dark financial ties to Soros. For instance, Smith dismisses the credibility of one expert witness because he leads the UCLA Voting Rights Project, an initiative “Soros has been pumping money into” for “years.” (I found no evidence that Soros funds this project, an esteemed academic research center that promotes “equitable and accessible voting for all Americans.”) If, Smith writes, “we are to tell it like it is, we must recognize that the well-funded machinery that I have just identified is all about” a “political crusade” to give Democrats a House majority. “And the public is entitled to know who’s really driving this bus.”

A surprising amount of the opinion is also consumed by outrage that Brown released his majority opinion before Smith could finish his dissent. (Election cases like this one are heard by a three-judge district court: Brown and David C. Guaderrama are federal trial judges, while Smith sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.) He provides a blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the ruling’s publication, including internal communications between the judges that, as a rule, are never shared with the public. Yet they reveal nothing nefarious whatsoever: Brown wanted to release his opinion as quickly as possible so lawmakers would have enough time to implement it, as the Supreme Court requires.

Smith writes, “This outrage speaks for itself,” but does it? SCOTUS sometimes hands down orders before a dissenter has had time to finish an opinion—this occurred most recently just seven months ago. When a case is time-sensitive, as LULAC v. Abbott surely is, it makes practical sense to release the decision when it’s ready. Otherwise, the dissenter could thwart the majority’s will by dragging their feet to run out the clock. Which is, a cynic might assume, exactly what Smith wished to do here.

Once Smith finally arrives at the substance of the case, he can no longer hide what a weak hand he is playing. Beneath all the bluffing lies a determination of credibility. Put simply: Was Adam Kincaid, the Republican operative who drew Texas’ new map, telling the truth when he claimed he didn’t consider race in the process? Or did the plaintiffs persuasively demonstrate that these districts were drawn, at least in part, along racial lines? Brown finds ample reasons not to “credit Mr. Kincaid’s testimony.” For example, Kincaid achieved nearly all the “explicit racial directives” that the DOJ laid out with suspicious precision—including the creation of three districts with almost exactly 50 percent minority composition to create the appearance of diversity while still maximizing Republican advantage.

On top of all this, Kincaid appears to have played a role in the concoction of the DOJ letter itself. He “saw a preliminary draft of it in the West Wing of the White House,” Brown writes, “and discussed it with key White House and DOJ officials—and Governor Abbott—a week before DOJ released it.” So Kincaid “would have us believe” that he hit the exact racial targets laid out in a letter he allegedly helped craft and was told to execute, yet somehow never considered race at any point. Does that seem likely? Of course not. But Smith announces that he finds Kincaid “credible in every respect,” embracing his “solid testimony” as “credible and irrefutable.” Why? He just seemed trustworthy—“calm and straightforward” on the stand, and therefore “wholly convincing and unassailable.”

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Smith also defends Rep. Todd Hunter, the new map’s sponsor, who gave testimony that conflicted with Kincaid’s. The majority charged Hunter with promoting a racially gerrymandered map that would help Republicans while maintaining the illusion of minority inclusion. This allegation, Smith complains, “unfairly paints Hunter, a former democrat, as an unreformed, unrepentant racist, maintaining a flagging veneer of partisan nastiness over Strom Thurmond-like segregationism.” (It is grimly amusing that the judge invokes Hunter’s former political affiliation to defend his honor but still cannot bring himself to capitalize democrat.) Smith spends this stretch of the opinion seething that the majority dared to question the credibility of the white men who drew an obviously racist map. By the end, he abandons any pretense of legal reasoning, quoting lines from the majority and waving them away as “misleading,” without any explanation.

In fairness, Smith has long been a bit of a drama queen. But this dissent is not just a theatrical temper tantrum; it is a cry for help. Those closest to Smith ought to intervene and coax him into retirement before he can embarrass the federal judiciary more. The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are still going to steer this case wherever they want. But rather than give them an excuse to side with Texas, Smith may have made it harder for the supermajority to reverse, because doing so may make it look as if the justices are endorsing his ultra-partisan fixation on liberal donors who just so happen to be Jewish. George and Alex Soros are wealthy men indeed. But the rent-free space they occupy in Smith’s Fox News–addled brain is beyond anything money can buy.

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