California Republicans have sued Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Secretary of State Shirley Weber over Prop 50.
California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, which will allow the Democrat-led legislature to redraw five Congressional districts.
The districts will flip to Democrats.
The coalition claims Prop 50 is unconstitutional.
“Specifically, the California Legislature violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it,” they argued.
The Republicans reminded everyone that the Court said basing districts on race contradicts the meaning behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments: race does not matter.
Also, how can one invoke the Voting Rights Act when a minority group makes up the majority population of a state? Hhhmmm…
They point to the Equal Protection Clause and previous lawsuits over forming Congressional districts based on race (I added the emphasis):
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every citizen the equal protection of the laws and the Supreme Court has held that its central mandate is racial neutrality in governmental decision making Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 904 (1995); U.S. Const.,
amend. 14, § 1. While the Constitution entrusts States with designing congressional districts, the Supreme Court has also held that states may not, without a compelling reason backed by evidence that was in fact considered, separate citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race. Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285, 291 (2017). As that Court has found, race-based districting embodies “the offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,” Miller at 912, which “is more likely to reflect racial prejudice than legitimate public concerns.” Palmore v. Sidoti 466 U.S. 429, 432 (1984).
“The Court also feared that race-based districting encourages elected representatives ‘to believe that their primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole,’ which is ‘altogether antithetical to our system of representative democracy,’” added the Republicans.
