California GOP urges Supreme Court to freeze new congressional map before midterms

WASHINGTON (CN) — The California Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to throw out the Golden State’s new congressional map before the midterm election in November, challenging it as a racial gerrymander.

In an emergency application to Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday, the Republicans are requesting an injunction as the appeal moves forward that would temporarily reinstate the 2021 California Redistricting Committee map.

Specifically, the party is seeking action from Kagan, as the Barack Obama appointee is the justice assigned to the Ninth Circuit, by Feb. 9, the start of California’s candidate filing period.

The Golden State, led by California Governor Gavin Newsom, pushed to redraw the state’s congressional map after Texas Republicans first moved to increase the number of GOP-friendly seats at President Donald Trump’s urging.

Texas’ new map will be on the books for this year’s midterms after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority approved it last month over racial gerrymandering concerns, finding a lower court had wrongfully “inserted itself into an active primary campaign” and thrown the map out “on the even of an election.”

California’s new map — which was ultimately approved by the state’s voters in Proposition 50 — would eliminate as many as five Republican-held seats and boost Democrats efforts to retake control of the House of Representatives in November.

California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin slammed the new congressional map in an emailed statement, calling it a “backroom redraw that picks winners and losers based on race.”

“California cannot create districts by race, and the state should not be allowed to lock in districts that break federal law,” Rankin said. “Our emergency application asks the Supreme Court to put the brakes on Prop. 50 now, before the Democrats try to run the out the clock and force candidates and voters to live with unconstitutional congressional districts.”

The Republicans sued to challenge the new map on Nov. 5, 2025, the day after Proposition 50 was approved by voters.

In that case, Tangier v. Newsom, a three-judge panel of the lower court rejected the state party’s arguments in a 2-1 decision, finding no evidence of a racial gerrymander, only a partisan one.

“The record contains a mountain of statements reflecting the partisan goals of Proposition 50, from which challengers have culled a molehill of statements showing race consciousness on the part of the mapmaker and certain legislators,” U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton, an Obama appointee, wrote for the majority. “But that is not enough to make the necessary showing that the relevant decisionmakers — here, the electorate — enacted the new map for racial reasons.”

In their emergency application, the California Republicans argue that while the state claimed it was engaged in partisan and not racial gerrymandering, the court should have seen that California used “race as a ‘proxy’ for politics.”

Specifically, the Republicans argue that California moved to maximize Latino voting strength to “shore up Latino support for the Democratic Party,” pointing to statements by mapmaker Paul Mitchell, who stated his goal was to bolster Latino districts, particularly in the Central Valley.

According to the Republicans, Mitchell redrew Congressional District 13 to bypass heavily Democratic white neighborhoods near Stockton in favor of capturing less Democratic Latino areas. Further, expert testimony and alternative maps presented to the panel showed race rather than politics predominated in drawing that district’s lines.

“The two-judge majority, however, rejected that evidence and the conclusion of racial gerrymandering it compelled,” the Republicans said. “As Judge [Kenneth] Lee explained in dissent, the majority did so only through a series of legal errors that directly contravenes the [Supreme] Court’s case law — and failing to correct those errors would uphold California’s ‘unlawful path’ and ‘inevitably sow [the] racial divisions’ the 14th Amendment exists to prevent.”

In his dissent, Lee called it “outrageous” that California lawmakers invoked their legislative privilege to avoid explaining their motives behind the redistricting law that put Proposition 50 on the ballot and that Mitchell did not appear to testify during a three-day hearing. 

“Why shouldn’t we take Paul Mitchell’s statements at face value that he wanted to bolster the Hispanic vote?” Lee, a Trump appointee, asked.

Michael Columbo, attorney of Dhillon Law Group and representing the Republicans, said in an emailed statement that the emergency application centers on the constitutional limits on using race in redistricting.

“The Supreme Court has been clear for decades that states cannot sort voters by race unless they can meet strict scrutiny,” Columbo said. “This filing explains why the record includes direct admissions and supporting evidence that race predominated in key line-drawing decisions, and why immediate, temporary relief is warranted to prevent candidates and voters from being forced to operate under unconstitutional districts while the appeal is pending.”

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