Court battle begins over Republican challenge to California’s Prop. 50

Republicans and Democrats face off in court Monday in a high-stakes battle over the fate of California’s Proposition 50, which restructures the state’s congressional districts and could ultimately help determine which party controls the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections.

Dozens of California politicians and Sacramento figures, from GOP House members to Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, have been called to testify in a Los Angeles federal courtroom over the next few days.

The GOP wants the three-judge panel to temporarily block California’s new district map, claiming it is unconstitutional and illegally favors Latino voters.

An overwhelming majority of California voters approved Proposition 50 on Nov. 4, after Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced his redistricting plan as a way to counter partisan gerrymandering in Texas and other GOP-led states. Democrats acknowledged that the new map would weaken Republican voting power in California, but argued that it would be a temporary measure to restore national political balance.

GOP lawyers can’t challenge the new redistricting map on the grounds that it disenfranchises some California Republicans. US Supreme Court in 2019 decided Partisan gerrymandering complaints have no recourse in federal court.

But the GOP could make claims of racial discrimination. Them to dispute California lawmakers drew new congressional maps based on race, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the 15th Amendment, which prohibit governments from denying citizens the right to vote based on race or color.

The hearing comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas to temporarily withhold its new congressional map; Newsom’s office says it’s a bad sign for Republicans trying to block the California map.

“In allowing Texas to use gerrymandered maps, the Supreme Court held that California maps, like Texas’s, were drawn for legal reasons,” Newsom spokesman Brandon Richards said in a statement. “This should be the beginning and the end of Republican efforts to silence California voters.”

In Texas, GOP leaders drew new congressional district lines after President Trump publicly pressured Republicans to give them five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A federal court blocked the map and found that racial considerations likely made the Texas map unconstitutional. However, a few days later the Supreme Court privileged Texas’ request to pause this decision signals that they view the Texas case and the California case as part of a national politically motivated redistricting battle.

“The impetus for adopting the Texas map (like the map later adopted in California),” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. defended“partisan advantage was pure and simple.”

Richard L. Hasen, a law professor and director of the Project on Protecting Democracy at UCLA School of Law, said the Supreme Court decision and Alito’s concurrence in the Texas case talking about California do not bode well for California Republicans.

“It’s hard to prove racial superiority when drawing a map; that race trumped partisanship or other traditional zoning principles,” Hasen said. “There’s a greater burden now in trying to get an injunction because things are going to change as we get closer to the election, and the Supreme Court signaled in the Texas decision that courts need to be careful about making changes.”

Many legal experts argue that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas case means California will likely keep its new map.

“Before the Texas case, it was really difficult to claim racial gerrymandering as the plaintiffs stated, and it has become even more difficult in the last two weeks,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Hours after Californians voted in favor of Proposition 50 on Nov. 4, Assemblyman David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno) and the California Republican Party filed a lawsuit alleging that the map for California’s congressional districts adopted in Proposition 50 was designed to favor Latino voters over others.

The Ministry of Justice also applied complaint In this case, he argues that the new congressional map uses race as a proxy for politics and manipulates district boundaries “in the interest of increasing the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race.”

Mitchell, the redistricting expert who prepared the maps, is likely to be a key figure in this week’s battle. In the days leading up to the hearing, attorneys argued over whether Mitchell would testify and whether he should turn over his email correspondence with lawmakers. Mitchell’s lawyers argued that he has legislative privilege.

GOP lawyers heeded public comments that Mitchell’s “number one thing he started thinking about” was “drawing a new Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles” and that the “first thing” he and his team did was “reverse” the California Citizens Redistricting Commission’s earlier decision to eliminate a Latino district from Los Angeles.

But some legal experts say that in itself is not a problem.

“What [Mitchell] “I paid attention to race,” Levitt said. “But there’s nothing wrong with that under current law. The problem comes when you pay too much attention to race to the exclusion of all other redistricting factors.

Other legal experts argue that what matters is the California voters who passed Proposition 50, not the intent of Mitchell or California lawmakers.

“Regardless of what Paul Mitchell or the legislative leaders thought, they were just making a suggestion to the voters,” said Hasen, who filed an amicus brief in support of the state. “So what really matters is the intent of the voters. And if you look at what’s actually presented to voters on the ballot, there’s almost nothing there that has to do with race.”