Trump administration urges Supreme Court docket to seek out California’s redistricting map unconstitutional

The Trump administration on Thursday urged the Supreme Court docket to dam the brand new congressional map adopted by California voters in November. U.S. Solicitor Normal D. John Sauer told the justices that the map, which the state says was supposed to create 5 new Democratic seats within the U.S. Home of Representatives in response to the creation of 5 new Republican seats in Texas, “is tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The submitting got here slightly below two months after the Trump administration submitted a brief supporting a request by Texas to have the ability to implement its new map, after a decrease court docket had dominated that the map unconstitutionally sorted voters primarily based on race. In December, the justices granted Texas’ request, over a dissent by the court docket’s three Democratic appointees.

A gaggle of Republicans from California got here to the Supreme Court docket earlier this week. They asked the justices to bar the state from utilizing the brand new map, referred to as Proposition 50, on this yr’s elections. A 3-judge district court docket, which hears challenges to the constitutionality of congressional redistricting, had rejected their competition that the brand new map relied on race as the first consider drawing 16 congressional districts. As a substitute, a majority of that court docket emphasised, when voters went to the polls in November to approve the map in a particular election, “the professionals and cons” of the map “had been outlined in purely political, partisan phrases.”

Of their request to bar the usage of the brand new map, the challengers careworn that they had been merely asking for a “slim injunction” that will protect the established order by “briefly reinstat[ing] the” map that California had used within the final two election cycles. However, they mentioned, “[f]rom the outset of California’s redistricting efforts, the goal of offsetting a perceived racial gerrymander in Texas was express.”

Within the Trump administration’s transient on Thursday, Sauer acknowledged that “California’s motivation in adopting the … map as an entire was undoubtedly to counteract Texas’s political gerrymander. However that overarching political aim,” he wrote, “isn’t a license for district-level racial gerrymandering.”

Sauer pointed to public statements by Paul Mitchell, an out of doors advisor who drew the brand new map, “by which he expressly acknowledged drawing district strains primarily based on race.” The district court docket’s conclusion “that California voters authorised Proposition 50, thus primarily curing any racial predominance that contaminated” the boundaries of not less than one district, was incorrect, Sauer insisted: even when the state’s voters are “the final word legislature for functions of this Court docket’s racial-gerrymandering precedents,” “that doesn’t license jettisoning essentially the most probative direct proof of racial gerrymandering: the mapmaker’s personal description of the particular strategy of ‘the drawing of district strains.’”

And in contrast to the Texas case, Sauer maintained, it isn’t too late for the court docket to intervene. The window for candidates to file paperwork declaring their candidacy doesn’t open in California till Feb. 9; against this, the decrease court docket’s order barring Texas from utilizing its new map “was issued 10 days after the monthlong candidate submitting interval had already begun.” “If something,” Sauer contended, a declaration submitted by a California election official “means that an injunction successfully requiring California to return to” its earlier map “can be much less disruptive to the State’s election equipment than permitting the Prop 50 map to enter impact.”

On Thursday, Justice Elena Kagan, who fields emergency appeals from the area that features California, ordered the state to reply to the challengers’ request by Jan. 29.