The Justice Department on Thursday joined a lawsuit challenging California’s new congressional map, saying the state was too focused on race when it drew its new lines.
The government sided with California voters and the California Republican Party, which sued last week to try to block the map that voters approved in the recent election.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democrats, who control the state, drew the map to cut Republicans’ share of the congressional delegation from nine down to four seats, out of 52.
But the legislature, which drew up the map and put it to voters in a referendum last week, cast the debate as one of racial representation as much as political parties, the Justice Department said. The result was a map that took pains to carve out Hispanic-heavy districts to counter Texas, which earlier this year redistricted away several majority-minority districts in its state.
The Justice Department said that focusing on race makes the maps invalid.
“Our Constitution does not tolerate this racial gerrymander,” the department said in its intervening complaint.
It asked the federal court in Los Angeles to block the use of the maps for next year’s election and into the future.
The department’s lawyers pointed to one newly drawn district that was crafted to snare Hispanic voters, including Republican areas, while leaving White Democrats out.
They said if the goal was purely party politics, those White Democrats would have been roped into the same district with the Hispanic voters, and the Hispanic GOP areas would have been left out.
The referendum to adopt the new map won easily, with roughly 65% of the vote.
Justice Department lawyers said the consultant California relied on to draw the maps has bragged publicly about his intention to use race in crafting the lines. And the department pointed to members of the state assembly who said they were acting to counter Texas’s move to delete majority-minority districts.
The fight comes at a time when the Supreme Court is deciding a case out of Louisiana involving race and map drawing.
Under current interpretations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states have felt compelled to carve out “opportunity districts” that maximize the voting power of racial and ethnic minorities.
Louisiana, with a population that’s roughly one-third Black, was ordered by a lower court to craft two of its six U.S. House districts to give Black voters majority power. Non-Black voters challenged that map. The justices were sharply divided on the matter during oral argument last month.
The Justice Department, in its complaint Thursday, said the situation of Hispanic voters in California didn’t rise to the threshold where carving out another district for them was necessary under the Voting Rights Act.
That would mean proving that the state risked violating the VRA if it didn’t focus so heavily on race. The Justice Department said California can’t make that showing, given that the basic outlines of its previous map had been approved by the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in announcing the government’s intervention. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”
The Justice Department said it has the right under the law to intervene because the case involves Equal Protection Clause issues and Ms. Bondi has declared it to be “a case of general public importance.”
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton, an Obama appointee.
She has already granted the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the political arm of House Democrats in Washington, the right to intervene and defend the new map alongside California.
California’s previous map was drawn by an independent commission.
The state’s effort was spurred by Texas, which redrew its map this summer, seeking to cut Democrats from 13 of its 38 seats down to eight, or 21% of its seats. Vice President Kamala Harris won 42% of the vote in Texas in 2024.
In California, President Trump won 38% of the vote last year. The new map could reduce Republicans to just 8% of the state’s delegation.
