California Republicans' racial gerrymandering case runs into skeptical court

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The bid by the California Republican Party to defeat a voter-approved congressional district map that gives Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives was met by a skeptical court during closing arguments Wednesday.

A trio of three federal judges are to rule on the request, joined by the Trump administration, to stop the new map from being used in next year’s midterm elections because it purportedly is the result of unlawful racial gerrymandering.

U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton, a Barack Obama appointee, and U.S. District Wesley Hsu, a Joe Biden appointee, repeatedly expressed their incredulity with the argument that the new map that the state’s voters approved last month was anything other than the widely acknowledged partisan gerrymander in reaction to Texas overhauling its congressional map to add five more Republicans seats in the House.

Michael Columbo, an attorney for the Republicans, argued that statements by state lawmakers and the mapmaker Paul Mitchell showed that the intent behind the map was to benefit Hispanic voters. But the two judges challenged him to explain how that made race the predominant factor when, leading up to the vote on Proposition 50, the plaintiffs had characterized it as a political power grab by the Democrats.

To prevail on their challenge, the Republicans need to convince the judges that race was the predominant factor behind the new California map, not politics.

But Staton observed that there was no evidence that California voters weren’t duped into voting for a racial redistricting while believing that they were deciding on a political reacting to Texas’ overhaul of its congressional districts at the behest of President Donald Trump.

“They had the final say, the voters, and you haven’t said anything about the voters’ intent,” Staton told Columbo.

In Texas, the state legislature approved the map that created five Republican districts at the detriment of Democratic representatives, but in California it was state lawmakers that requested Mitchell to create a new map to add five Democratic districts in response and it was voters who approved this map last month.

“It was all about partisan gerrymandering in response to what Texas did,” Hsu observed. “The stated goal was to react to what Texas did by creating five more Democratic seats, not nine.”

Hsu also asked David Goldman, a lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department, why the Trump administration had decided to throw its weight behind the request for a preliminary injunction against the California redistricting map because of purported racial gerrymandering while opposing a similar request to void the new Texas map.

The third judge, U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth Lee, a Trump appointee, reserved his criticism for the state defendants, saying it was “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, the mapmaker, didn’t show up at all to testify at the three-day hearing in Los Angeles federal court.

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

Lali Madduri, an attorney for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of California, argued that the Republicans had focused on a single comment Mitchell made to Hispanas Organized for Political Equality in support of the new map.

In addition, Madduri said, it would be improper for the judges to draw an adverse inference from the legislative privilege invoked by California lawmakers because that has been standard practice in gerrymandering cases across the country, including in Texas.

Much of the testimony the last two days focused on the new borders of Congressional District 13 in the California Central Valley. That district was considered a “purple” swing district but under the new map is more solidly Democratic.

The California Republicans, however, argued that race was the deciding factor on how the new district lines were drawn because it added areas of Stockton that, they claim, were strongly Hispanic while ignoring neighboring areas with many Democratic voters.

In response, California and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee presented evidence that the border of that District 13 were determined to avoid removing too many Democratic votes from the neighboring District 9 and as such make that district more vulnerable for the Democratic incumbent.

The Republican bid to invalidate California’s redistricting might have been made more difficult by the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month to rebuff a similar challenge to Texas’ redistricting.

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the conservative majority reprimanded a lower court for throwing out Texas’ newly minted map “on the eve of an election.”

“The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the court wrote in an unsigned order.

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