Supreme Court won’t block California’s Prop 50, allowing new maps for midterm elections
California will be able to hold elections for new, Democratic-leaning congressional districts this year, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to overturn a lower court’s ruling in the state’s favor.
The ruling comes in advance of highly consequential midterm elections that could decide which party controls the Congress halfway through President Donald Trump’s term.
Last year, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a measure to redraw five districts with a partisan slant toward Democrats after Texas and other Republican states moved to redraw their districts to accommodate a request from Trump to make them favor Republicans.
California Republicans sued immediately after the election, saying that the new maps discriminated on the basis of race. But a federal district court and an appellate court declined to stop the maps from going into effect. Republicans, joined by Trump’s Justice Department, then asked the Supreme Court of the United States to issue an injunction stopping the new districts from being used while their lawsuit was being litigated.
That request was denied by the court in an unsigned order issued Wednesday.
The move was cheered with combative statements by California Democratic leaders.
“Donald Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more congressional seats in Texas,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the order was “good news not only for Californians, but for our democracy.”
“With this latest win, my office has now successfully defended this critical ballot initiative on behalf of Governor Newsom and Secretary of State (Shirley) Weber on seven occasions—and we stand ready to continue defending it as necessary,” Bonta said.
In making their argument against the new districts, California Republicans and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said that the new maps favored Latino voters. And while districts can be drawn to ensure votes for under-represented minorities, they argued that Latinos were well-represented in California, making the districts illegal.
“The Supreme Court properly rejected the plaintiffs’ ill-conceived and offensive theory that Proposition 50 was a racial gerrymander that favored Latinos,” said Jon Greenbaum, founder of Justice Legal Strategies, one of several groups that provided legal counsel, working with the group Democracy Defenders Action.
The ruling “upholds fair representation and makes one thing clear: Politicians do not get to rewrite the rules after the people have spoken,” said Roman Palomares, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Sacramento Bee on Wednesday. But a partner in Dhillon’s private law practice who has been working on the case said his clients, who include Assemblymember David Tangipa, R-Fresno, would continue to pursue the case in district court even though they did not win the preliminary injunction they had requested.
“The federal district court applied a standard that would permit any state to use a racially gerrymandered election district map if the voters approved the map without knowing what their officials had done,” said Michael Columbo, partner at the Dhillon Law Group. “This is a novel interpretation of the law that we believe is incorrect and dangerous.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2026 at 11:57 AM.
