Fed Judges Rejects GOP Claim That California Maps Were Racially Gerrymandered After SCOTUS Texas Ruling
The Trump administration’s pressure campaign to get red states across the country to engage in mid-cycle redistricting has hit another obstacle.
A panel of federal judges on Wednesday rejected a request from Trump’s DOJ and the California Republican Party to block California’s new map — once again calling into question the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s biggest gerrymandering crusade. And while Republicans could appeal, experts tell TPM that given the precedent of a recent Supreme Court decision upholding Texas’ gerrymandered map, it would be unusual for the Supreme Court to intervene.
In a 2-1 decision Wednesday, a panel of federal judges ruled in favor of California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and rejected Republicans’ argument that the maps were racist, specifically to favor Latino voters.
“We find that the Challengers have failed to demonstrate that racial gerrymandering occurred, and we conclude that there is no basis for issuing a preliminary injunction,” wrote Judge Josephine Staton, appointed by Barack Obama.
“After carefully reviewing and weighing the relevant evidence, we find that the evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was presented as: a political gerrymander designed to return five Republican-held seats to the Democrats,” Staton continued.
In response to Republicans’ adoption of a new hand-picked map in Texas last year, Newsom worked with the state’s Democratic lawmakers to spearhead an election referendum known as Prop 50, allowing lawmakers to temporarily bypass the state’s independent map-drawing commission and approve new congressional district lines for several Republican-dominated and swing districts in the state.
Voters approved Proposition 50 last November, paving the way for new congressional maps that will likely flip five Republican seats in California to Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives – offsetting the impact of Texas maps that are expected to flip five Democratic seats to Republicans.
Wednesday’s ruling comes against the backdrop of a recent Supreme Court ruling that approved the use of a hand-picked map in Texas for the midterm elections.
Wednesday’s ruling explicitly mentions that California’s map is similar to Texas’s in that both are partisan, but not racist. That earlier Texas decision appears to have laid the groundwork for Wednesday’s decision on California’s map.
Last month, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court ruling that initially blocked Texas’ three-dimensional maps from being used in the midterms, ruling that the district court’s decision was made too close to the midterm elections. The Supreme Court also ruled that the Texas map was indeed partisan, but not racist. The court ruled that a partisan motivation for the new congressional maps was acceptable, but that a racial motivation for the map would violate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
In a concurring opinion on the Texas map, Justice Sam Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, specifically referenced California, writing that “the impetus for adopting the map (like that subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage, pure and simple.”
In this context, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will step in and rule that California’s process is different from Texas’, experts say.
“The facts on the ground for the plaintiffs in Texas were always much stronger. And SCOTUS said there, despite an extraordinarily thorough opinion from the trial court, ‘not strong enough,'” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told TPM. “It’s not really credible for the Court to say that a much weaker set of facts in California are strong enough.”
