{"id":353617,"date":"2025-12-17T07:09:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T07:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/353617\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T07:09:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T07:09:16","slug":"gop-sues-to-block-californias-new-voting-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/353617\/","title":{"rendered":"GOP sues to block California’s new voting maps"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maya C. Miller<\/a> and Mikhail Zinshteyn<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""A\"
\n\t\t\t\tA \u201cNo on Prop 50\u201d sign at the Kern County Republican Party booth at the Kern County Fair in Bakersfield on Sept. 26, 2025. Republicans are seeking to overturn the congressional maps voters approved last month. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters\/CatchLight Local<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Just last week California\u2019s secretary of state officially certified that nearly two-thirds of Californians voted to pass Proposition 50<\/a>, Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s plan to temporarily gerrymander the state\u2019s congressional maps in favor of Democrats.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Republicans and the Trump administration are hopeful that a federal district court panel meeting in Los Angeles this week will intervene to bar the state from using the new maps next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

California Republicans, who sued Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber the day after the election, are staking their challenge on the argument that California\u2019s primary mapmaker illegally used race as a factor in drawing district lines, giving Latino and Hispanic voters outsize influence at the expense of other racial and ethnic groups, including white voters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This, the Republicans argue, means the maps amount to an illegal racial gerrymander and a violation of the 14th and 15th amendments. Although Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act allows for race-conscious redistricting, they add, case law and judicial precedent have set a strict standard that requires a minority group to prove they have been systematically outvoted by a majority that consistently votes together to deny the minority their chosen candidate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the Prop. 50 opponents\u2019 odds look slim, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s conservative majority recently blessed<\/a> Texas\u2019s new maps, overturning a lower court\u2019s finding that Republicans there had engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,\u201d wrote conservative Justice Samuel Alito in a concurring opinion<\/a> supported by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the looming possibility that the Supreme Court, in a separate case, could outlaw entirely the use of race in the redistricting process, which could render California\u2019s new maps \u2014 as well as the previous ones drawn by the independent citizens commission \u2014 unconstitutional. That would also give Republicans a major advantage in Southern states, where several districts drawn to increase Black Americans\u2019 voting power are currently represented by Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite the long odds, the ailing California GOP<\/a> has run out of other options for resistance. The passage of Prop. 50 is likely to mark the beginning of the end for several of California\u2019s Republican House members, who have been forced to decide whether to run in their current, now less favorable Republican districts, switch to new seats or drop out entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of them, Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents parts of San Diego County, even considered relocating to Texas and running for a Dallas-area seat that would be more friendly to Republicans, but the president reportedly refused to endorse him for the already contested Texas seat, so he decided to stay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The legal challenge claims the Prop. 50 maps cause \u201cstigmatic and representational injury\u201d by placing certain candidates, such as Republican Assemblymember David Tangipa<\/a> of Fresno, who is Polynesian, into districts drawn with a specific racial or ethnic minority group in mind.<\/p>\n

Case is in Los Angeles court this week<\/p>\n

The challengers, who include Tangipa, the California Republican Party, several Republican voters and the Trump White House, are asking a three-judge panel for the Central District of California to grant a preliminary injunction on the maps before Dec. 19, the date when candidates can start collecting signatures to get their names on the 2026 primary ballot. A preliminary injunction would temporarily prevent the maps from being used in an election.<\/p>\n

On Monday in court, the Republican challengers presented their case, arguing that since supporters of Prop. 50 publicly touted that the maps increased representation for Latino voters, state lawmakers and consultant Paul Mitchell, who was hired to draw the maps, took race into account. Therefore, they must justify how their new districts meet the standard for permissible racial gerrymanders, attorneys argued.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is legal to race-based redistrict under the Voter Rights Act. Section 2 protects it. But it also gives you guidelines,\u201d Tangipa told CalMatters in an interview after testifying in court on Monday in Los Angeles. \u201cIn Sacramento, they did not follow those guidelines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tangipa asserted that even though Democratic lawmakers intended primarily to increase their party\u2019s ranks based on political ideology, \u201cThey used race to justify that end goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs sought to have Mitchell testify, but the court denied a request to force him to take the stand to explain whether he intentionally tried to increase the voting power of specific racial and ethnic groups. Since Mitchell lives more than 100 miles away from the court, he was out of the reach of a subpoena. Still, the judges questioned his blanket use of \u201clegislative privilege\u201d to resist producing documents the plaintiffs requested.<\/p>\n

At one point, as a redistricting expert testified, the plaintiffs focused on a line from Democratic former Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire<\/a>\u2019s public statement after the Legislature passed the package of bills paving the way for the Nov. 4 special election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new map makes no changes to historic Black districts in Oakland and the Los Angeles area, and retains and expands Voting Rights Act districts that empower Latino voters to elect their candidates of choice,\u201d McGuire\u2019s statement said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

McGuire announced last month that he will challenge Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa<\/a> in one of the newly configured Prop. 50 seats.<\/p>\n

But proponents of the new maps argue they intended purely to create a partisan advantage for Democrats, and any increase in voting power for certain ethnic or racial groups was incidental.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ultimately, ‘it was endorsed by the voters’<\/p>\n

Also complicating the GOP\u2019s challenge is that California voters overwhelmingly approved the maps.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if we assume that the Legislature improperly considered race, ultimately it went into effect because it was endorsed by the voters,\u201d Emily Rong Zhang, an assistant professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, previously told CalMatters. \u201cThey would have to show that the voters had the intent to create districts that disproportionately favor the voting power of a racial group over another.\u201d<\/p>\n

One unknown is how the Supreme Court will rule on a case that questions whether it\u2019s constitutional to even consider race as a factor when redistricting.<\/p>\n

The justices are weighing in another ongoing case, Louisiana v. Callais, whether to strike down a part of the federal Voting Rights Act that requires the creation of districts in which racial and ethnic minorities have a chance to elect their preferred candidate. If the ruling is retroactive, a decision to strike it down could invalidate both California\u2019s old and new maps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, other states have jumped into the redistricting effort or are contemplating entering the fray. In addition to Texas and California, four other states have already implemented new congressional maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures<\/a>. Virginia, Maryland and Florida have also taken some steps toward redistricting.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Maya C. Miller and Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters A \u201cNo on Prop 50\u201d sign at the Kern County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,88491,3,145641,9799,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-353617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-california-republicans","tag-news","tag-proposition-50","tag-u-s-congress","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}