In the summer of 2023, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown had a decision to make.

For days, he had presided over a case challenging a Galveston County, Texas, plan to redraw voting precincts on the grounds that it illegally diluted the voting power of Black and Latino residents.

In what he called a “grave and difficult conclusion,” Brown ruled that the county’s plan was “fundamentally inconsistent” with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Almost a year later, the full bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed his decision. The revived case remains pending before Brown.

On Tuesday, Brown jumped feet first back into the national debate about redrawing election maps, joining with another federal judge to block Texas’ newly drawn congressional map on the grounds that it was racially gerrymandered. That map would have netted Republicans five GOP-leaning seats before Brown intervened.

Brown’s opinion this week, joined by Barack Obama appointee David C. Guaderrama, struck down the centerpiece of a nationwide redistricting effort aimed at protecting the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms. Texas has appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The current redistricting effort is being led by Trump — who nominated Brown to the federal bench — and Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who was Brown’s first boss out of law school and once cheered the nomination of his former law clerk.

“I applaud President Trump for nominating Jeff Brown,” Abbott, who served as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court in the late 1990s, said in a 2019 statement praising Brown’s “sharp legal mind” and “commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

A lifelong Texan, Brown, 55, earned his law degree at the University of Houston Law Center in 1995 before going to clerk for Abbott and another Texas Supreme Court justice, Democrat Jack Hightower. Following his clerkships, Brown went into private practice, working for the law firm Baker Botts in Houston, according to his Texas Supreme Court biography, which also noted he is an Eagle Scout.

Brown didn’t remain a litigator for long. In 2001, he was appointed by then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry to the bench of Texas’ 55th District Court, a state trial court in Harris County. He was reelected twice before Perry appointed him to the Texas 14th District Court of Appeals in 2007. Six years later, Perry appointed Brown to the state supreme court, where he remained until 2019.

Brown did not respond tom a request for comment.

While he’s in the middle of the nationwide redistricting fight for control of the House now, Brown’s nomination drew little notice when he appeared before the Senate committee six years ago.

In written questions, committee Democrats pressed Brown on previous statements he’d made expressing opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and “activist judges” who had overturned Trump’s first attempt at a travel ban aimed at Muslim-majority countries.

He made many of those statements during political campaigns when he was running for election as a Texas state judge, Brown told the committee. He pledged to follow all binding Supreme Court precedent if confirmed.

Brown was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 50-40. No Democrat voted for him and only a single Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, opposed him.

His commitment to follow precedent is clearly present in Tuesday’s ruling, which begins with a quote from Chief Justice John Roberts: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Brown has also issued contentious rulings against Democrats in the past. In 2022, he blocked a Biden administration policy that mandated federal employees receive the Covid-19 vaccine as a condition of employment. That ruling was later overturned by a panel of the 5th Circuit before being affirmed and reinstated by the full bench of the appeals court.

Despite Brown’s conservative bona fides, his ruling on Texas’ maps prompted a Wednesday opinion from the dissenting judge on the panel, Ronald Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, filled with personal attacks against Brown and accusations that his fellow Republican had committed “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.”

“The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom,” Smith wrote. “The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law.”

Smith, 79, sits on the 5th Circuit, the appeals court that overturned Brown in the Galveston case, a matter he repeatedly referenced to attack Brown in Wednesday’s dissent.

“Judge Brown could have saved himself and the readers a lot of time and effort by merely stating the following: … ’Just as I did to the lawmakers in Gavelston County … I’m using my considerable clout as a federal district judge to put a stop to bad policy judgments. After all, I get paid to do what I think is right,’” Smith wrote.

Brown, who himself referred to judges that ruled against Trump policies as “activist judges” before joining the federal bench, would likely not place himself in that camp.

“Judicial activism is when a judge puts his or her own policy preferences ahead of what the law plainly is,” Brown told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during his 2019 confirmation hearing. “And I don’t think that judicial activism is ever appropriate.”