Why California’s Race-Based House Maps Will Fail

Listening to Gavin Newsom talk about “free and fair elections” is like listening to Yoko Ono sing. It just doesn’t sound right. In both cases, it’s very wrong. 

But Newsom, born without the encumbrance of integrity, insists on lecturing Republicans about election integrity. 

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” the leftist California governor stricken with political delusions of grandeur gloated on X this week after a federal court panel in a 2-1 ruling blocked Texas from implementing a mid-decade revision to its U.S. House map. Republicans have appealed the decision, which the dissenting judge excoriated as “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism” he has witnessed in his 37 years on the federal bench.

Newsom, who this month signed the most politically — and racially — twisted congressional map in the Left Coast’s history, insists the “ruling is a win for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”

It’s not, and, to borrow a bit of legal jargon, the governor with White House dreams dancing in his thickly gelled head has no standing on the subject of free and fair elections.  

Besides, election law experts say, California and its uber-gerrymandered maps are next to fall. 

“It seems to me that it’s pretty obvious. It’s pretty blatant that they were using race when they drew up new districts to get rid of Republicans,” Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told The Federalist this week in an interview. 

‘Newsom Threw a Grenade’

California Democrats went map crazy after the Texas Legislature passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed a mid-decade congressional map expected to help Republicans pick up five net seats in the House next year. The left went apoplectic. Newsom and crew quickly rolled out Proposition 50. The ballot issue to amend the state’s constitution gave deep blue California voters the opportunity to do away with their once-treasured independent redistricting commission-constructed congressional maps and allow the Dem-dominated state legislature to do exactly what liberals accuse Texas Republicans of doing. 

Proposition 50, bought and paid for by the likes of leftist billionaire George Soros and labor unions, was hastily assembled and pushed to the voters in a $120 million-plus campaign. Earlier this month, voters overwhelmingly approved the Democrat-friendly measure, all but guaranteeing another five seats in congress for the increasingly socialist state in next year’s midterm elections. 

As the California Policy Center noted, Newsom never tires of warning about President Donald Trump being a “threat to democracy even as the governor goes about burning representative democracy down.” The fight, according to the think tank, confirmed that Newsom truly is California’s “Gaslighter-in-Chief.”

“Newsom threw a grenade into California’s nonpartisan and independent redistricting process,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of Government Affairs at California Policy Center. “The people of California should not be held for ransom for the governor’s White House ambitions.”

‘On Account of Race or Color’

The California Republican Party quickly sued. Soon after, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit, calling the Golden State’s redistricting scheme “a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.” The complaints ask a federal court to block California’s maps. 

As the DOJ lawsuit notes, race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that’s precisely what the California General Assembly did in producing “a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines.” 

No big deal, leftist law professors assert. 

“I don’t think there are many grounds for a legal challenge against Prop. 50 to succeed,” Loyola Law School Professor Justin Levitt told ABC7 in Los Angeles. 

Levitt rightly notes that redistricting laws are mostly the domain of the states, and California changed state law to grab political advantages for the ruling party. But you can’t be racist about it all, and progressive California appears to have drawn its new lines with race in mind. As the DOJ lawsuit states, “California’s legislators and governor sold a plan [in the press] to promote the interests of Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. But amongst themselves and on the debate floor, the focus was not partisanship, but race.”

The Democrats’ mapmaker, Paul Mitchell (not the hair products guy), drew up districts that “will further increase Latino voting power over the current Commission map,” particularly in California’s Central Valley, according to the DOJ lawsuit. Hispanics make up nearly one-third of the state’s 26 million voting age Californians, as of 2023, in a state with no racial or ethnic group majority. 

Partisan map-making is fine. Race-based map-making (with some Voter Rights Act exceptions) well, not so much. In a press release, state Democrats boasted that their new map “retains and expands Voting Rights Act districts that empower Latino voters” while doing nothing to expand black majority districts in two of California’s largest cities, the GOP lawsuit asserts. 

California Democrat lawmakers during debate over Prop 50 characterized the Texas redistricting plan as an act of racism, a “sliding back to pre-VRA days of “black codes and Jim Crow.” That’s a lot of projection, according to the California GOP and DOJ lawsuits.

“Proposition 50 was adopted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color in violation of Section 2 of the VRA,” the DOJ’s lawsuit argues. It points to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling in which the majority cemented a dividing line. “If district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to strict scrutiny because ‘race-based decisionmaking is inherently suspect.’” 

And that’s where Newsom and his fellow Democrats stumble, von Spakovsky said. The new maps fly in the face of the one person, one-vote standard inherent in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, among other constitutional protections, the election law expert said. 

“When you expressly talk about race [in drawing congressional boundaries], that’s an outright violation of the 15th Amendment,” von Spakovsky said. “That’s easy to prove a direct violation. That seems to be the issue in California.” 

‘Race as a Proxy’

The people of Wisconsin have been down this road. 

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court in a  7-2 decision  reversed the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s selection of a redistricting plan drawn up by Democrat Gov. Tony Evers’ hand-picked and Communist China-sounding People’s Maps Commission. 

Evers, a DEI fanatic, argued for district maps that included an additional majority-black district in the Milwaukee-area, designed to spread out black voters among several legislative districts to create a “bare majority in each.” The Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) argued in its petition to the U.S. Supreme Court that the Democrats’ maps created a “racial gerrymander that violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.” 

“We agree that the court committed legal error in its application of decisions of this Court regarding the relationship between the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and the VRA,” the majority opinion states. 

The order, which remanded the case back to the state court, made clear that Evers’ maps were not justified under the Voting Rights Act. 

Institute Deputy Counsel Lucas Vebber said the Wisconsin case and the California gerrymander are very similar, close to identical. 

“Just like it was here, the California maps are a blatant partisan power grab, using race as a proxy for partisan purposes,” Vebber told The Federalist this week in an interview. 

“The Supreme Court will ultimately resolve that issue against them,” he added. 

Von Spakovsky agrees. And he’s confident the Republicans’ maps in Texas can survive. He pointed to a U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the Voting Rights Act does not require “coalition” districts formed by “opportunistic political combinations” of voters from different minority groups. Texas’ maps comply with the Fifth Circuit ruling. 

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which represented Galveston County in the lawsuit, called the ruling “a huge win … to stop the political weaponization of the Voting Rights Act, according to Texas Scorecard. 

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board opined, the law protects black and Hispanic voters, not coalitions. 

California Dems similarly are using race as a proxy in pursuit of political power and Gavin Newsom’s idea of “free and fair elections.” If history is any indicator, the U.S. Supreme Court will see through the scheme.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.