Judge enjoins Texas GOP gerrymander. Is Prop. 50 next?

Serious implications for constitutionality of Proposition 50 in California. But Texas may still have the upper hand as California’s reapportionment is now in some doubt.

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Just as Governor Newsom and the U.S. Department of Justice (with the California GOP) are gearing up for a December 3 show-down in Federal Court in Los Angeles on the constitutionality of Newsom’s Proposition 50 Democrat gerrymander of California’s 52 Congressional seats, a Federal three-judge panel in Texas has ruled today that the Texas Legislature’s partisan Republican gerrymander, which inspired Proposition 50, (and has lead to the word “Texas” to now appear in the California state constitution) is illegal.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the ruling striking down the new lines. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

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I have written previously here that racial considerations are also quite present in the facts in California as presented in the DOJ’s Complaint in Intervention in the Proposition 50 case. I cannot imagine now that the two cases, California and Texas, will not end up quickly being resolved through the Federal appeals process all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have ultimate authority to decide the issue, especially if there is a divergence of opinion between the two Federal circuits the states reside in. The SCOTUS will have it’s say, especially to ensure the whatever the law is found to be, it is applied equally in both situations.

The only variation here in the cases will be the facts and how the judges perceive them. I know more about the facts in the California case, especially involving a very problematic map for “District 13” in California, where race was surely a consideration according to evidence in the filings. Will there be a difference in the facts presented to the two Courts regarding how race was considered? Yes, but if race played any role, the lines will have violated the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act in both states. A prediction will be either both cases stand, or both cases fall. My hunch is that both cases will fall, because to stretch dominant Democrat or Republican districts in either state, it is highly likely that the relevant number crunchers ran a Latino identifying software program, such as a “Latino name file”, against the voter files, and treated a name like “Hernandez” differently from a name like “Smith” in writing the new lines. While this is an unsophisticated presentation of what they likely actually did, you can grasp it this way, and it is illustrative of what the Courts will be looking for if they are to find illegal racial gerrymandering, in either or both states.

Click here to read the full article at James V. Lacy’s Substack