The lawsuit filed on Wednesday accuses California of violating the Constitution “when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.” The lawsuit points to statements made by Democratic state lawmakers and a mapmaking consultant this year in which they referred to having intentionally drawn some districts with Latino majorities.
“These arguments are not frivolous, but they are not going to be easy, and the timing is going to present a major challenge,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The case is likely to hinge on whether race or partisanship was the predominant factor in drawing the new maps. A Supreme Court ruling in 2019 established that federal courts are powerless to hear claims about partisan gerrymandering, essentially allowing lawmakers to carve up districts for political gain. So California could argue that the maps were a raw political play, crafted explicitly to help Democrats even the score against similarly partisan maps in Republican-led states.
Michael Columbo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that the case would show that race was a predominant factor in drawing the new maps, even though Democrats said their main goal was to flip five seats for Democrats.
“There was a lot of rhetoric and maybe even an effect, but within that, we have clear statements that establish that there was racial gerrymandering going on,” Mr. Columbo said at a news conference on Wednesday….
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, said he thought it was unlikely the courts would act on the case early enough to change the course of California’s primary election in June 2026.
“A big procedural problem for this lawsuit is that legislatures and elected officials are allowed to make late changes to district lines, but the Supreme Court has been really stringent in saying that courts can’t do anything close to an election,” he said….