Was this man disenfranchising citizens by letting them vote on a congressional map?
Photo: Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

There’s not any doubt who started the ongoing bipartisan gerrymandering competition: Donald Trump, with his successful lobbying of Texas Republicans to conduct a rare mid-decade redistricting measure aimed at giving the GOP up to five new House seats. And it’s equally clear that in designing a new House map for California that voters approved overwhelmingly as Prop 50, Golden State Democrats were trying to counter what Texas had done and that Trump was encouraging other Republican-controlled states to do. It was mentioned in virtually every piece of literature promoting Prop 50 and in virtually every ad.

So it feels a bit disingenuous that Trump’s Justice Department, joining a lawsuit earlier filed by California Republicans, is suing to invalidate Prop 50 on grounds that it’s a “power grab,” per the Associated Press:

“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an emailed statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”

That’s an interesting characterization, since California, unlike Texas (or Missouri or Ohio, other states that have conducted off-schedule re-redistricting efforts this year), submitted its plan to the voters themselves. It’s hard to claim they were “silenced” or that “democratic processes” were somehow mocked.

Below the surface, what DOJ is up to is part of a broader GOP legal offensive designed to overturn voting rights as a legitimate motive in drawing legislative maps, as Democracy Docket explains:

The plaintiffs — including the California Republican Party — argued the state violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution by drawing congressional district lines based on race “to favor Hispanic voters …”

“The end result is a map that manipulates district lines in the name of bolstering the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race,” the complaint stated, adding: “[T]he professed goal of increasing Democratic representation was subordinated to increasing Hispanic-majority districts.”

If this sounds weird to you, it may be because it seems odd to adjudge partisan gerrymandering as entirely kosher while condemning efforts to ensure minority representation (the principal objective of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) as unconstitutional. That, however, is precisely the direction of conservative voting-rights jurisprudence these days. Under Chief Justice John Roberts’s direction, the Supreme Court has steadily reduced the influence of the VRA is redistricting decisions while rejecting any judicial role in policing blatant partisan gerrymandering. In the case of California, the argument is that if Democrats had screwed over Republicans without trying to protect Latino voters, it would have been just fine from the perspective of constitutional law.

For the moment, there is no SCOTUS precedent holding that race-conscious redistricting to vindicate voting rights is unconstitutional, but one could arrive soon, whenever the Court decides Callais v. Louisiana, a pending case in which white southern Republicans argue that VRA-based efforts to protect minority voting rights are obsolete and contrary to equal-protection guarantees. A decision in this case is expected to come down at some point between now and the end of the current SCOTUS term next June or July. If the plaintiffs win and it’s early enough, it could become the basis for a massive re-redistricting push in southern Republican-controlled states prior to the midterms that could decimate Black and Latino representation.

It looks like the administration is trying to get a jump on a possible decision by applying the thinking of the Callais plaintiffs to Prop 50. The suit may not make it out of the starting gate, or it could get caught up in the Callais litigation. Prop 50 architect Gavin Newsom doesn’t appear to be worried: “These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court,” a Newsom spokesperson said in a statement. Under current Supreme Court precedents, that’s true, but it’s a rapidly moving landscape.

A wrinkle in this lawsuit is that California Republicans are being represented by the Dhillon Law Group, a firm founded by Harmeet Dhillon, the conservative activist who now runs the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which is in charge of the administration’s involvement in the case. Dhillon has recused herself from the California dispute, but it’s clear DOJ is faithfully pursuing the administration’s implicit view that the only real civil-rights problem in this country involves discrimination against white Republicans.

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