California Republicans have sued Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Secretary of State Shirley Weber over Prop 50.
California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, which will allow the Democrat-led legislature to redraw five Congressional districts.
The districts will flip to Democrats.
The coalition claims Prop 50 is unconstitutional.
“Specifically, the California Legislature violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it,” they argued.
The Republicans reminded everyone that the Court said basing districts on race contradicts the meaning behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments: race does not matter.
Also, how can one invoke the Voting Rights Act when a minority group makes up the majority population of a state? Hhhmmm…
They point to the Equal Protection Clause and previous lawsuits over forming Congressional districts based on race (I added the emphasis):
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every citizen the equal protection of the laws and the Supreme Court has held that its central mandate is racial neutrality in governmental decision making Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 904 (1995); U.S. Const.,amend. 14, § 1. While the Constitution entrusts States with designing congressional districts, the Supreme Court has also held that states may not, without a compelling reason backed by evidence that was in fact considered, separate citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race. Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285, 291 (2017). As that Court has found, race-based districting embodies “the offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,” Miller at 912, which “is more likely to reflect racial prejudice than legitimate public concerns.” Palmore v. Sidoti 466 U.S. 429, 432 (1984).
“The Court also feared that race-based districting encourages elected representatives ‘to believe that their primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole,’ which is ‘altogether antithetical to our system of representative democracy,'” added the Republicans.
Then there’s the Fifteenth Amendment, which states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The Republicans cited three Supreme Court cases:
When a state unlawfully engages in racial gerrymandering, it also violates the Fifteenth Amendment, which provides that the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied or abridged on account of race or color. U.S. Const., amend. 15, § 1. The Supreme Court has held that the Fifteenth Amendment “establishes a national policy … not to be discriminated against as voters in elections to determine public governmental policies or to select public officials, national, state, or local.” Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461, 467 (1953). Therefore, a racial gerrymander, “the deliberate and arbitrary distortion of district boundaries … for [racial] purposes,” is a form of circumvention of the Fifteenth Amendment. Shaw at 640. “[S]tate authority over the boundaries of political subdivisions, extensive though it is, is met and overcome by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.” Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U.S. 495, 522 (2000).
People point to the Voting Rights Act to justify race-based districting. It’s narrow, though, and the Republicans don’t think it applies because, well, Hispanics make up the majority of California’s population (emphasis mine):
While compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) may justify race-based districting under current law notwithstanding the Equal Protection Clause, Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285, 285, 292 & 301, the Supreme Court requires states to prove that, among other things, they in fact adopted the new district lines based on evidence that a minority race usually could not elect its preferred candidates due to the concerted opposition of voters of a white majority race. Cooper, 581 U.S. at 292–93, 301-302. Without proof of this condition, states have no lawful basis to enact racebased congressional districts.However, California’s Hispanic voters have successfully elected their preferred candidates to both state and federal office, without being thwarted by a racial majority voting as a bloc. This is unsurprising because Latinos are the most numerous demographic in the state and California voters nearly always vote based on their party affiliation, not their race.
How can Hispanics be a minority when they make up 40% of the population?
Assemblymember David Tangipa pointed out that “Prop 50 will diminish ‘the voices of other groups.'”
How did Newsom respond?
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