Nov. 13 (UPI) — California Republicans are challenging their state’s voter-approved redistricting plan, adding to the ongoing partisan court struggle over gerrymandering.
The lawsuit, filed a day after voters decisively approved Proposition 50 in a special election, claims the new congressional map was drawn in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments because race was unjustifiably a factor.
Proposition 50 amends the state constitution to allow state legislators to redraw California’s congressional map in an effort to counteract Texas’ new map. The map will remain until 2031 when the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission draws a new congressional map.
The congressional map approved by Texas this year was drawn at the behest of President Donald Trump who called on state lawmakers to add five more likely-Republican congressional seats before the 2026 midterm election.
Richard Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, told UPI voters historically are opposed to partisan redistricting, making this a novel development.
More than 5.6 million Californians voted in favor of Proposition 50 while about 3.2 million voted against it, according to the vote count by the California Secretary of State’s office.
“It is unusual to say the least for voters to approve a partisan gerrymander through a ballot measure,” Hasen said. “Instead we have typically seen voters approving measures that make redistricting less political. But this can be seen as the voters’ response to Donald Trump for pushing Texas to do a new Republican partisan gerrymander. It is a kind of tit-for-tat that may become the new normal in future redistricting wars.”
The California Republican Party is joined in the lawsuit by several residents, state lawmaker David Tangipa and former congressional candidate Eric Ching. Tangipa represents District 8 at the state assembly. Ching ran an unsuccessful campaign to represent District 38 in 2024.
The complaint by the California Republican Party and co-plaintiffs says the new congressional map was drawn to boost the voting power of Hispanic voters by creating two new districts to “empower Latino voters to elect their candidates of choice.”
“However, California’s Hispanic voters have successfully elected their preferred candidates to both state and federal office, without being thwarted by a racial majority voting as a bloc,” the lawsuit reads. “This is unsurprising because Latinos are the most numerous demographic in the state and California voters nearly always vote based on their party affiliation, not their race.”
State legislatures are not prohibited from considering race when drawing district lines, Justin Levitt, constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, told UPI.
The issue for the complainants is whether they can prove race was considered too much. If that can be proven to a court, they must also prove that there was no justification for considering race.
“The complaint seems to lower the standard or wants to wishcast a far lower standard where the simple act of drawing the district to be compliant with the Voting Rights Act is racial predominance,” Levitt said. “They want to skip past the racial predominance subordinating all others line and suggest that because some of the districts pay attention to race that means they’ve got to be super closely justified. But that is not where the line is currently.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Alexander vs. the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP raised the standard for proving racial gerrymandering. A lower court ruled that South Carolina lawmakers diluted the voting power of Black voters by drawing one majority-Black congressional district, violating the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court overturned the decision. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the opinion for the majority, said that state legislatures must be presumed to be working “in good faith” when submitting redistricting plans.
Alito added another requirement, ordering that plaintiffs must submit an alternative congressional map proving that districts could be drawn in a way to meet “greater racial balance.”
The questions at hand in the Proposition 50 complaint are at the heart of a case in the U.S. Supreme Court: Louisiana vs. Callais. The court heard rearguments over the case, which weighed whether the Voting Rights Act is in conflict with the Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment, in October.
Levitt expects an opinion on Louisiana vs. Callais may be months away, as late as June, but it could have a bearing on the California GOP’s lawsuit and other redistricting cases.
“Only nine people know what the court’s going to do and I’m not one of them,” Levitt said. “And if the Supreme Court sets off an earthquake then that earthquake will also reach California.”
The California GOP lawsuit already faces challenges set out by the Supreme Court. The court has agreed that partisan gerrymandering does not fit the principles of the democratic process but it also has also ruled that the courts are not the place to resolve these issues.
In the 2019 ruling on the case Rucho vs. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion said partisan gerrymandering presents a “political question beyond the competence of the federal courts.”
Because of this limitation, lawsuits alleging gerrymandering must demonstrate that race was a predominant but unjustifiable factor in redistricting.
“The Supreme Court said that it’s really hard to prove that race predominated, particularly when there are political reasons for drawing the lines as a jurisdiction has,” Levitt said. “That standard in the South Carolina case made it really difficult for plaintiffs to win these types of cases. And in a context like Prop. 50, where it’s pretty apparent to everybody that the overriding reason to draw the districts was to try to pick up Democratic seats, that makes it super hard to prove.”