{"id":164820,"date":"2026-02-05T07:20:28","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T07:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/164820\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T07:20:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T07:20:28","slug":"supreme-court-refuses-to-overturn-new-california-districts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/164820\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court refuses to overturn new California districts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied an effort to overturn California\u2019s new voter-passed congressional map, letting the map go into effect for this year\u2019s midterm elections.<\/p>\n

The unexplained, unsigned order<\/a> ends a bid from the Trump administration and California Republicans to overturn a lower court ruling that found the state\u2019s new congressional map was likely not an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wednesday\u2019s order means the state will be able to use the new map \u2014 which targets five seats currently held by Republicans \u2014 in November.<\/p>\n

California was the second state to enter the nationwide partisan mid-decade redistricting arms race after the Texas Legislature passed its own partisan map last summer targeting five seats held by Democrats there.<\/p>\n

California\u2019s legislature then set up a ballot measure to override the state\u2019s independent redistricting commission and adopt a new map to target five Republican-held districts. That ballot measure passed in November with more than 60 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n

The map\u2019s challengers, which included the state Republican party and the Trump administration, argued that mapmakers illegally prioritized the drawing of Hispanic and Latino communities in the new lines. That included increasing the share of Hispanic and Latino voters in one district in the state\u2019s Central Valley.<\/p>\n

A 2-1 majority of a three-judge lower court disagreed<\/a> with those allegations, finding the evidence there \u201cexceptionally weak\u201d in a ruling last month. The legal procedure used to challenge the map, which included going before the three-judge panel, allowed the direct appeal to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Map challengers then asked the Supreme Court to overrule that panel decision and keep the state from using the new map this year.<\/p>\n

California and the map\u2019s defenders argued<\/a> that lawmakers intended the new map as a partisan, not racial, gerrymander, and overturning the map now would unleash chaos on the state\u2019s ongoing primary process.<\/p>\n

The unexplained ruling did not elaborate on how the justices may rule on the case in the future, as it only denied the request to overturn the lower court ruling in advance of this year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

The case came months after the Supreme Court separately ruled allowing Texas to use its redrawn map for this fall\u2019s elections. In that case, the court\u2019s conservative justices overturned a lower court ruling finding the state\u2019s new map was likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.<\/p>\n

There are still pending court cases about congressional redistricting in several other states, including in state courts in New York and Virginia.<\/p>\n

The California case is David Tangipa, et al. v. Gavin Newsom, et al.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied an effort to overturn California\u2019s new voter-passed congressional map, letting the map…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,32623,1751,204,989,21630,4694,1748,5931,2214,564,1519,14424],"class_list":{"0":"post-164820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-conservatives","12":"tag-democrats","13":"tag-election","14":"tag-elections","15":"tag-independents","16":"tag-new-york","17":"tag-republicans","18":"tag-summer","19":"tag-supreme-court","20":"tag-texas","21":"tag-trump","22":"tag-virginia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}