Federal court upholds California’s new congressional districts
In a major victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party, a federal court in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that California can use its newly configured congressional district boundaries for the 2026 midterm elections, increasing Democrats’ odds of winning five additional U.S. House seats and seizing control of the chamber.
Attorneys for the GOP had sought to temporarily block California’s new map, arguing that the redrawn districts, placed on the ballot by the Democratic-led state Legislature as Proposition 50 last November, were unconstitutional because they illegally favored Latino voters.
But two judges in the three-judge panel rejected Republican arguments. The maps, they found, were engineered by Democrats to favor their party’s candidates and counter similar partisan gerrymandering from Texas and other GOP-led states.
“The evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats,” District Judge Josephine L. Staton wrote in an opinion.
Whatever the intent of those who drew up the maps, Staton added, “the voters are the most relevant state actors and their intent is paramount.”
Staton, who was appointed by former President Obama, was joined by District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of former President Biden. Judge Kenneth K. Lee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, an appointee of President Trump, dissented.
Lee argued that public comments made by Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who drew up the new California map, showed race was a key factor.
“The Democratic supermajority in the California state legislature wanted to curry favor with Latino groups and voters — and to prevent Latino voters from drifting away from the party,” Lee wrote in his dissent.
The California Republican Party said it would seek an emergency injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The map drawer’s plain statements acknowledging that he racially gerrymandered the Proposition 50 maps, which he and the Legislature refused to explain or deny, in addition to our experts’ testimony, established that the courts should stop the implementation of the Prop. 50 map,” Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing this fight in the courts.”
An overwhelming majority of California voters approved the new district boundaries during a Nov. 4 special election. On Wednesday, the state’s Democratic leaders were quick to tout the judges’ decision as a victory for voters.
“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed,” Newsom said in a statement. “California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop. 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded.”
“Today’s decision upholds the will of the people,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a statement. “It also means that, to date, every single challenge against Proposition 50 has failed.”
Newsom pitched the redistricting plan last summer as a way to boost Democrats’ prospects of flipping the House in the midterms after Trump pressed Texas to redraw its map to prop up the GOP’s narrow majority.
Using the new California map would not only give Democrats a better chance of shifting the balance of power in Congress and blocking Trump’s agenda during the second half of his term. It also could elevate Newsom’s status among Democrats as he weighs a 2028 White House run.
Legal experts say the odds are against Republicans getting the Supreme Court to block California’s new congressional districts. In December, the high court allowed Texas to temporarily keep its newly drawn congressional map, which could give Republicans up to five extra seats.
A federal court previously blocked Texas’ map, finding racial considerations probably made it unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court indicated it viewed the redrawing as motivated primarily by partisan politics, not race. In its ruling, the court explicitly drew a connection between Texas and California, noting that several states have redrawn their congressional maps “in ways that are predicted to favor the State’s dominant political party.”
As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued in a concurrence: “The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California), was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said he thought it unlikely that GOP attorneys could now get an injunction from the Supreme Court. The standard to get an injunction from the nation’s highest court if the lower court didn’t grant one, he noted, is supposed to be higher than the standard to get a stay if the court granted an injunction.
“The Supreme Court has already telegraphed something about what it thinks about California in that Texas ruling,” Hasen said. “Certainly, to have a majority of Republican-appointed justices side with the Republicans in both cases coming out the opposite way would not be a very good look for a Supreme Court that’s trying to say that it’s about politics.”
Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, said that attorneys for the California GOP and the federal Department of Justice might posture about an appeal, but California would likely use the new maps this year.
“You might see a filing purporting to fight it out further, but I wouldn’t expect to go anywhere,” Levitt said. “I think that the outcome … is we have an election under the lines that were passed in Proposition 50. And that’s sort of the end of the line, practically speaking.”
Even before the Supreme Court’s Texas decision, legal experts said they thought Republicans faced an uphill battle in blocking California’s maps.
“This was a long shot of a claim from the beginning,” Levitt said. “It’s a claim that, under current law, just isn’t supported by the facts … and the Supreme Court just turned a dramatically uphill case into Everest.”
One of the quirks of the legal battle over gerrymandering in California and Texas is that it is not possible to challenge the new maps on the grounds that they are drawn to give one political party an advantage. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court. That left the GOP in California challenging the new maps on racial grounds.
As attorneys presented their closing arguments last month in a Los Angeles courtroom, Staton reminded prosecutors that the burden was on the map’s challengers to prove racial intent.
But legal experts note that thinking about race when drawing district lines is not, in itself, illegal.
“Under the law at present, what matters is not whether you think about race,” Levitt said. “What matters is whether you think about race so much that you subordinated every other criterion to race in deciding where to put people.”
The GOP’s legal team tried to demonstrate racial intent by bringing to the stand RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende, who said the new 13th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley had an “appendage” that snaked northward into Stockton. Such contorted offshoots, he said, are “usually indicative of racial gerrymandering.”
Attorneys for the GOP also tried to prove racial intent by focusing on public comments made by Mitchell, the redistricting expert. Ahead of Nov. 4, they said, he told Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, a Latino advocacy group, that the “number-one thing” he started thinking about was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles.”
During December’s hearing, Staton suggested that GOP attorneys focused too much of their closing arguments on the intent of Mitchell and Democratic legislators and not of the voters who ultimately approved Proposition 50.
“Why would we not be looking at their intent?” Staton asked Michael Columbo, an attorney for California Republicans. “If the relative intent is the voters, you have nothing.”
Hsu took issue with the GOP attorneys’ narrow focus on the 13th Congressional District, arguing he engaged in a “strawman” attempt to pick out one district to make the case that there was a broader racially motivated effort to flip five seats Democratic.
Lee, however, reserved most of his criticism for the state’s legal team.
Lee questioned the idea, offered by an attorney for the state, that Mitchell’s statement about wanting to create a Latino district in Los Angeles was just “talking to interested groups” and “he did not communicate that intent to legislators.”
Lee also said Mitchell’s closeness to Democratic interest groups was an important factor. He questioned why Mitchell did not testify at the hearing and invoked legislative privilege dozens of times during a deposition ahead of the hearing.
In his dissent, Lee said Mitchell’s public statements “confirm that race was a predominant factor in devising Congressional District No. 13.”
“We should accept the state’s mapmaker’s own words at face value when he said that he wanted to bolster a majority Latino district in the Central Valley,” he argued.
While the judges’ decision is a win for Newsom, Christian Grose, a professor of political science at USC, said the major victory was the Proposition 50 vote.
“It is a win for the excellent team of lawyers with the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and the California DOJ versus an incoherent and hard-to-follow legal argument presented by the Trump Department of Justice and the California Republican Party,” Grose said.
Times staff writer Christopher Buchanan contributed to this report.
