California's New Congressional Maps Favoring Dems Could Be Struck Down by the Supreme Court: Report
California’s redistricting ballot measure, passed in November, could face a U.S. Supreme Court reversal, based on a recent ruling by the justices.
Last month, the Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais that congressional districts formed based on race are unconstitutional.
Californians passed Proposition 50 last fall, which seeks to add up to five additional Democratic seats in the state’s congressional delegation. It was sold as a means to counter Texas’s redistricting, where the legislature had redrawn its map to add up to five GOP seats.
California’s U.S. House delegation could go from a 43-9 split in favor of Democrats, with two current vacancies, to a 47-4 with one toss-up. Meanwhile, Texas could move from 25-13 in favor of the GOP, with one vacancy, to 28 to 9, with one toss-up.
But Just the News reported that opponents of Proposition 50 argue that, in making its new districts, California relied too heavily on race, thereby violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais.
“Now, with multiple federal lawsuits moving through the courts, the battle over Proposition 50 has evolved into a high-stakes constitutional fight. Challengers argue that California’s maps violate the Equal Protection Clause because race allegedly eclipsed traditional redistricting principles such as compactness, contiguity, and respect for existing political boundaries,” Just the News said.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in Callias, said that race cannot be the “predominant motivating factor.”
“Democratic lawmakers used it to draw district lines designed to maximize Democratic electoral performance,” Just the News said. “Partisan gerrymandering alone generally cannot be challenged in federal court. But challengers argue California’s maps did something more: They relied so heavily on racial demographics that they crossed into constitutionally prohibited territory.”
The question that will be litigated is whether race was the overriding criterion.
Earlier this year, before the Callais ruling, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Proposition 50 in a 2-1 ruling. However, Judge Kenneth Lee, in his dissent to Tangipa v. Newsom, used the same reasoning the Supreme Court later employed.
Citing other Supreme Court precedent, he wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
“To be sure, California’s main goal was to add more Democratic congressional seats. But that larger political gerrymandering plan does not allow California to smuggle in racially gerrymandered seats. In other words, a state can create a map with the larger goal of political gerrymandering but still run afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment if it relies on race as a predominant factor in drawing certain districts,” Lee added.
In light of this, the judge would have enjoined California’s entire new congressional map from being implemented, because “it is infected with racial gerrymandering.”
SCOTUSblog reported in February that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 9th Circuit’s ruling at that time.
“In a one-sentence order, the justices turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place for the last several federal elections in the state while their challenge to the map moves forward. There were no public dissents from the court’s ruling,” SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe said.
She noted that those representing Democratic lawmakers argued in their brief to the Supreme Court that the new map was not based on race.
Further, they contended challengers of the 9th Circuit’s ruling were “asking the Court to treat California’s map differently from how it treated Texas’s map, thereby allowing a Republican-led State to engage in partisan gerrymandering while forbidding a Democratic-led State from responding in kind.”
Assuming California is allowed to keep its map, looking at the political landscape nationwide, political watchers believe that Republicans have still gained a net of 10 to 12 seats in the congressional redistricting fights going into the midterms.
Democrats, who have aggressively gerrymandered for years in blue states, so far this election cycle have the four or five-seat pick-up in California and one in Utah, due to a court ruling.
Redistricting Update:
Passed:
🔴 TX: +5
🔴 FL: +4
🔴 OH: +1
🔴 NC: +1
🔴 MO: +1
🔴 TN: +1
🔵 CA: +5
🔵 UT: +1Total Passed:
🔴 R: +13
🔵 D: +6Pending (Odds it Passes Per @Kalshi)
🔴 LA: +1 (91%)
🔴 AL: +1 (80%)
🔴 SC: +1 (79%)Final Total:
🔴 R: +16
🔵 D: +6 pic.twitter.com/afqaM856NE— OSZ (@OpenSourceZone) May 14, 2026
Switching to the Republican side, the GOP could pick up five seats in Texas, as previously mentioned, up to four in Florida, one in Missouri, one in North Carolina, one in Ohio, and one in Tennessee.
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