Trump's week in review: Syrian president visits White House, gov't shutdown ends, BBC apologizes
5. DOJ sues California over new congressional map
Just a week after California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, which replaces the map of congressional districts enacted by the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission with a map explicitly designed to add Democrats to the state’s congressional delegation, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California alleging that the new congressional districts are unconstitutional.
The map transforms three Republican-held seats, California’s 1st, 3rd and 41st Congressional Districts, into districts that backed Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris by double digits in the 2024 presidential election.
A fourth Republican-held district, California’s 48th District, becomes a seat that backed Harris by 4 points. A fifth Republican-held district, California’s 22nd District, sees Trump’s margin of victory shrink from 6 to 2 points.
Under the new map, just four of the state’s 52 congressional districts backed Trump by double digits. The 43 seats currently held by Democrats are designed to remain in Democratic hands.
The implementation of the new California map comes as states across the U.S. are engaging in mid-decade redistricting in an attempt to create more favorable maps for the dominant party in their state ahead of next year’s midterm elections. The DOJ alleges that the maps implemented by Proposition 50 violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by using race as a predominant factor when drawing the districts.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to issue a ruling “prohibiting Defendants from implementing or using Proposition 50’s congressional district map in any future elections” and requiring the use of the existing map in the three remaining elections before the creation of new maps based on the 2030 U.S. Census.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
