A federal court Wednesday ruled against a Republican challenge to California’s redistricting plan, rejecting the GOP claim that the state had engaged in illegal racial gerrymandering when drawing up its new congressional map.
The three-judge panel denied the GOP’s motion to block the map, finding there was no basis for a preliminary injunction.
California Democrats redrew their congressional map last year in response to President Donald Trump’s push for Republican-controlled states to conduct unprecedented mid-decade redistricting in favor of the GOP. Golden State voters overwhelmingly voted for the plan, which aimed to create five more Democratic congressional seats to balance out Trump’s efforts to pick up five seats in Texas.
But Republicans quickly challenged it, asking a federal court to block the California map because it was allegedly drawn “to favor Hispanic voters” in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They argued that Paul Mitchell, the California mapmaker, said his work on the legislature’s plan was guided by racial considerations and that the “number one thing that [he] first started thinking about” was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles.”
In the ruling, the court noted that Republicans didn’t express racial gerrymandering concerns during the legislative debate on the map.
“No one on either side of that debate characterized the map as a racial gerrymander,” the court wrote, adding that Republicans repeatedly described it as a political power grab.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court greenlit partisan gerrymandering in 2019, Republicans “abandoned the argument they made to the voters” and called it a racial gerrymander instead, the court concluded.
See here, here, and here for the background. A copy of the ruling is here. The judges who sided with the plaintiffs were Obama and Biden appointees, while the one who dissented was a Trump appointee. Go figure. Because of the nature of redistricting litigation, if this is appealed it will go straight to SCOTUS, and we know what happened the last time. I do expect there will be an appeal, and I think it’s more likely than not that SCOTUS bats it away, mostly on the grounds that they don’t want to be bothered with it. I’ve been wrong before, so we’ll see. If SCOTUS does uphold the map, it should at the least cancel out the gains that Texas Republicans hope to get with their new map. Give credit to the Democratic caucus of the Texas House if that happens, because none of it would have happened without their quorum break. Politico, Mother Jones, The Hill, and KCRA have more.