California officials, Democrats and civil rights groups told the Supreme Court on Thursday the state should be able to use its new congressional map in the midterm elections this fall, arguing the lines were drawn for political rather than racial reasons.
The filings were in response to an appeal from the state Republican Party and Republican state officials, who have asked the justices to set aside a 2-1 lower court decision that allowed the state to use the map. That ruling found the evidence of gerrymandering in favor of the state’s Hispanic and Latino communities was “exceptionally weak.”
The Republican challengers asked for a decision by Feb. 9, a deadline for candidates to submit petitions to run in races under the new map. The Trump administration filed a brief last week supporting the emergency appeal, which the justices are teed up to decide in the coming days.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in its filing defended the map as “an openly partisan effort to aid Democratic Party candidates in California as a counterbalance to similar efforts by the Republican Party in Texas,” noting the Supreme Court previously has allowed that kind of partisan gerrymandering.
All three filings Thursday leaned heavily on the fact that the state’s election process has already started, making it too late for courts to intervene. California officials argued in their filing that tossing the map would “wreak havoc” on the congressional primary campaigns, since candidates have started to collect signatures and the state starts counting mail ballots in May.
“To be clear, any changes to the district boundaries at this late stage — even changes to two districts — would be quite burdensome for state and local officials and would threaten interference with the orderly administration of the upcoming election,” the state officials wrote.
The map, passed by ballot initiative last year, would target seats held by five Republicans in the state and was the second in a wave of partisan mid-decade redistricting that swept the country last year.
The California case is the second high-profile, fast-moving appeal over the ongoing redistricting arms race to hit the Supreme Court. Last month, the Supreme Court’s majority blocked a 2-1 lower court ruling that found new Texas districts were likely racially gerrymandered.
In the Texas case, a majority of the justices wrote that the lower court committed two errors when it found legislators drew the new lines based on race. Because of that decision, Texas will be allowed to use its new congressional map in this year’s midterm elections.
The Texas ruling repeatedly surfaced in the briefs filed Thursday. The brief from state officials said that the highly partisan nature of the ongoing redistricting arms race nationwide makes it fraught for the court to decide to intervene. California legislators pitched the redistricting push as partisan, and if the justices stepped in now it could tip the balance of the House.
“Plaintiffs are asking the Court to treat California’s map differently from how it treated Texas’s map, thereby allowing a Republican-led State to engage in partisan gerrymandering while forbidding a Democratic-led State from responding in kind,” the state officials wrote.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights organization that intervened in the case, wrote in its filing that conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “had it right” when he wrote last month that Texas’ redistricting was based on partisanship rather than race.
The filing called it an “affront” to Latino voters to suggest the state’s new map was a racial gerrymander after the long fight for voting rights and state lawmakers’ stated goals to draw the map for partisan advantage.
The challengers, in their appeal, told the Supreme Court that while the officials in charge of drafting the map did so for partisan advantage, “those officials harbored another purpose as well: maximizing Latino voting strength to shore up Latino support for the Democratic Party.”
The 2-1 panel decision in favor of California earlier this month came after a three-day hearing in the fall, and the majority wrote that evidence of partisan motivations for the lines was “overwhelming.”
Voters passed the map after the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a measure to override the state’s nonpartisan mapdrawing commission following Texas’ effort to target five Democrat-held seats.
The challengers used a legal procedure that brought the case before a three-judge court and allowed a direct appeal to the Supreme Court.
Texas and California were the first two states to engage in a new wave of partisan mid-decade redistricting last year, spurred by President Donald Trump’s effort to obtain more Republican-friendly seats in the upcoming midterm election.
The California case is David Tangipa et al. v. Gavin Newsom et al.
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