U.S. President Donald Trump's administration sued California on November 13 over its new redistricting maps after a ballot measure adopting new congressional districts passed in the state last week.
The measure could give the Democratic-led state five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and was intended as a counterweight to Republican efforts to give their party more congressional seats in Texas and elsewhere amid a push by Trump.
The Justice Department (DOJ) intervened as a plaintiff in a November 5 lawsuit by the California Republican Party and 19 registered voters in the state. The case challenges California's ballot initiative Proposition 50, which allows temporary use of new congressional district maps.
The DOJ's grounds for a lawsuit against California's redistricting plan are that it constitutes racial gerrymandering in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Full text of the lawsuit at https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1417291/dl?inline
Causes of Action
Racial Gerrymandering
The suit alleges that the new congressional map was drawn with race as the primary factor to create more Latino-majority districts to advance political interests, rather than focusing solely on traditional redistricting principles like population equality and compactness.
The suit asserts that using race as a proxy to create a new map violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Violation of the Voting Rights Act
The DOJ asks the court to declare that the plan was adopted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote based on race or color, which is a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Political interests over neutral principles
The DOJ argues that the map's design prioritizes increasing the number of Hispanic-majority districts and promoting Democratic representation by using race as the main criterion, rather than adhering to neutral, non-racial criteria.