The Justice Department stepped into California's redistricting fight on Thursday, seeking to intervene in a lawsuit that aims to stop the state from implementing new congressional maps approved by voters just last week. The maps would create five additional House districts favoring Democrats, and Attorney General Pam Bondi isn't mincing words about what's really going on.
Bondi accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of executing a power grab wrapped in the language of voting rights:
"California's redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process."
The DOJ's argument is straightforward. Justice officials contend the map violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act by factoring in racial demographics when drawing new districts. In other words, California Democrats used race as a tool to engineer a partisan outcome, then asked voters to bless it.
The story begins with a move that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it did. Newsom and Democrats in California overrode their state's independent redistricting commission and proposed a ballot measure for new congressional maps. That ballot measure, Proposition 50, went before voters and passed by an overwhelming margin.
The California Republican Party filed suit the day after the election. Now the DOJ is joining the fight, according to the New York Post.
DOJ lawyers laid out the core of the legal case plainly:
"Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50."
The lawsuit cites public comments from Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who helped draw the new maps, to argue that California Democrats factored in the distribution of Latino voters in each district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The legal theory here matters: compliance with the VRA doesn't give states a blank check to sort voters by race in ways that conveniently produce five extra Democratic seats.
Federal courts have been prohibited from policing partisan gerrymandering since a sweeping 2019 Supreme Court ruling. That decision essentially told voters and state legislatures that political line-drawing was their problem to solve, not the judiciary's.
But racial gerrymandering is a different animal entirely. The Constitution still bars it. And the DOJ argues that California dressed up a racial gerrymander in the clothing of partisan strategy, or perhaps the reverse. Either way, the use of racial data to achieve partisan ends lands squarely in territory the courts have never blessed.
The Supreme Court heard arguments last month in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further clarify where these lines fall. California's maps may soon become the next major test.
Bondi noted that Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has recused herself from the case. Dhillon was previously the vice chair of the California Republican Party, making the recusal both appropriate and notable.
California's map didn't materialize in a vacuum. President Donald Trump successfully pushed Texas to redraw its maps to create five GOP-leaning districts. Republicans in Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina followed suit with new maps of their own. Democrats, watching seats shift, responded with their own plays:
Both parties are fighting over the same chessboard. The difference the DOJ is drawing here isn't about partisanship. It's about the method. Using racial data to achieve political outcomes isn't just aggressive redistricting. It's a constitutional violation.
Newsom spokesperson Brandon Richards offered what might generously be called confidence:
"These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court."
The "losers lost at the ballot box" line captures everything wrong with how California Democrats have approached this. Voter approval doesn't immunize a law from constitutional challenge. Plenty of ballot measures have passed overwhelmingly and been struck down. Popular doesn't mean legal.
This is the same Gavin Newsom who championed an independent redistricting commission as a model of good governance, right up until the moment it stopped producing the results he wanted. Then he and his party simply went around it. They bypassed the very institution designed to prevent exactly the kind of partisan manipulation the DOJ is now alleging.
Bondi put it directly:
"Governor Newsom's attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand."
The legal fight will turn on whether California's mapmakers used race as a predominant factor in drawing district lines. The public comments from Mitchell, the redistricting expert, could prove damaging. When the people who drew the maps talked openly about sorting voters by ethnicity, they created a paper trail that DOJ attorneys will exploit relentlessly in court.
California Democrats are betting that voter approval provides political armor thick enough to survive judicial review. The Justice Department is betting that the Constitution still means what it says about equal protection.
One of those bets is going to lose. And if the DOJ prevails, five Democrat seats evaporate before anyone ever casts a vote in them.
