The Department of Justice joined a lawsuit Thursday brought by California Republicans that seeks to block the state from adopting a new congressional map and thwart Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to help Democrats seize enough seats in 2026 to control the U.S. House.
The redistricting plan, which Democrats say openly is an attempt to dilute Republicans’ voting power in California, was championed by Newsom as a way to offset GOP gerrymandering in Texas and other GOP states.
But the complaint, filed by the Department of Justice in a Central California federal district court, claims the new congressional map that was approved by California voters last week uses race as a proxy for politics, manipulating district lines “in the name of bolstering the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race.“
“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 Justice Department alleges in its complaint. “The recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines.”
The 18-page complaint, joining a lawsuit filed last week by GOP Assemblymember David J. Tangipa of Fresno and the state’s Republican Party, alleges that the new Proposition 50 map focused on race and favored Latino voters, constituting racial gerrymandering in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. It also claims the map intentionally discriminates on racial grounds in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The Justice Department is asking a judge to block California from using the new map in any future elections and instead require the state to use the 2021 map, drawn up by the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission, for all elections through 2030.
“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”
In a news release, the Justice Department said that there is “substantial evidence” in California officials’ public statements and the legislative record “that the legislature created a new map in which Latino demographics and racial considerations predominated.”
For the record:
4:10 p.m. Nov. 13, 2025An earlier version of this article said Proposition 50 was approved Nov. 5. It was on Nov. 4.
On Nov. 4, California voters approved Proposition 50, a measure to scrap a congressional map drawn up by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replace it with a map drawn up by legislators to favor Democrats through 2030. The California GOP filed its lawsuit the next day.
The legal clash over the map escalates the ongoing high-stakes political and legal battle between the Trump administration and Newsom, who has expressed interest in running for the White House in 2028.
Over the last few months, Democrats have expressed confidence that the new Proposition 50 map will withstand a legal challenge.
“These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court,” Brandon Richards, a Newsom spokesman, said Thursday.
According to legal experts, there is no viable federal legal challenge against the new map on the basis that they disenfranchise a large chunk of California Republicans. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Rucho vs. Common Cause that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court.
Attorneys can bring claims of racial discrimination in federal court, alleging California lawmakers used partisan affiliation as a pretext for race. But that, according to legal experts, would be difficult to prove.
“It’s a real long shot to prove that a Democratic partisan gerrymander was actually a racial gerrymander where racial considerations predominated over everything else,” Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said Thursday.
According to Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, the complaint had no more likelihood of winning than the original complaint California Republicans filed last week.
“Under existing law, they’d have to prove that race predominated, subordinating all other factors, in moving people into or out of a Prop. 50 district, and in a map so thoroughly shot through with partisan political choices, I think that’s going to be exceptionally hard to prove,” Levitt argued.
“The notion that mapmakers considered race, and that the resulting maps seemed to improve matters for racial minorities, isn’t where the law is now,” Levitt added, noting that a Supreme Court decision last year on a South Carolina redistricting case “made it even harder to prove racial predominance in a partisan map.”
Ultimately, Hasen said, the federal complaint restates the allegations in the California Republican Party complaint and serves to put the weight of the Justice Department behind these arguments.
“It’s unsurprising the DOJ intervened here,” Hasen said, “given how they’ve regularly been used to further Trump’s political agenda.”
