Republicans ask court to scrap California's new congressional map

LOS ANGELES (CN) — California Republicans, joined by the Trump administration, on Monday began their assault on California’s voter-approved congressional district map that would give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A three-judge panel will rule on the Republicans’ request for a preliminary injunction on using the map in next year’s elections because, they claim, it was the result of unlawful racial gerrymandering.

U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth Kiyul Lee, a Donald Trump appointee; U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton, a Barack Obama appointee; and U.S. District Judge Wesley Hsu, a Joe Biden appointee, will hear three days of testimony in Los Angeles federal court to decide whether race or politics predominated in the drawing of the state’s new voting districts.

The outcome of the hearing could be crucial for next year’s midterm election when Democrats will try to regain a majority in the House. California Governor Gavin Newsom pushed the ballot initiative, Prop. 50, in response to Texas lawmakers’ redrawing their state’s congressional districts to gain five more Republican seats in the House.

Mark Meuser, an attorney for the California Republican Party, started the evidentiary hearing by calling Sean Trende, a senior election analyst with the conservative political news site RealClearPolitics.

Trende testified that the new border of California’s 13th Congressional District, a swing district that voted for Trump last year, revealed that the mapmaker was more concerned with adding Hispanic voters to the district than Democratic ones.

Comparing demographic maps that showed democratic voters and Hispanic voters, Trende said some of the unusual shapes of the new district map can only be explained by the mapmaker wanting to include heavily Hispanic blocks around the city of Stockton in the district while ignoring heavily democratic blocks.

“District 13 was plainly drawn with a racial objective in mind,” Trende said. “It looks like an X-Acto knife job to me.”

Racial gerrymandering, where race is the predominant incentive in creating voting districts, is largely unconstitutional unless there are compelling reasons under the U.S. Voting Rights Act to ensure minority groups are able to elect representatives of their choice.

The U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, has washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering disputes, meaning states are free to create voting maps that benefit the party that controls a state’s legislature.

As such, the burden for the Republicans is to show that race, not politics, predominated in the choices Paul Mitchell, the mapmaker, made in delineating the voting districts.

Trende pointed out that in a presentation to Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, Mitchell had stated he sought to bolster the Hispanic performance in the Central Valley, where the 13th District is located.

Under cross-examination by Lali Madduri, an attorney representing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Trende conceded that the California redistricting map as a whole was more favorable to Democrats. He also agreed that the urban districts added to District 13 might lean more Democratic.

In addition, he admitted that in prior written testimony before the California Supreme Court — where a separate lawsuit was filed before California voters had approved the new map — he had argued that it was a politically motivated endeavor.

The Republican bid to invalidate the California voting might have been made more difficult by the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month to rebuff a similar challenge to Texas’ redistricting.

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the conservative majority reprimanded a lower court for throwing out Texas’ newly minted map “on the eve of an election.”

“The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the court wrote in an unsigned order.

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