Looking at the polls and the 2026 midterms, Donald Trump and his pliable Department of Justice today jumped into the effort to block Gavin Newsom‘s widely passed Proposition 50 redistricting plan and save the House of Representatives for the GOP.
And there is a lot of dog whistling, if you know what I mean?
“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50—the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the complaint in intervention filed in federal court Thursday to link up with an action put forth on November 5 by state Republicans and the Newport Beach-based Dhillon Law Group.
“The end result is a map that manipulates district lines in the name of bolstering the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race,” the 18-page document stomach-churningly speculates. “No one, let alone California, contends that its pre-existing map unlawfully discriminated on the basis of race. Because the Proposition 50 map does, the United States respectfully requests that this Court enjoin Defendants from using it in the 2026 election and future elections.”
The new filing, like last week’s filing by state Republicans, claims Prop 50 “in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
As Newsom’s office did when the initial suit was filed the day after the off-year election, the governor’s team cut to the chase with their out of court response this afternoon.
“These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court,” Newsom’s press secretary Izzy Gardon told Deadline today, a statement they posted online too.
Newsom’s team weren’t the only ones taking to social media to get their message out over Prop 50.
Kicked off by a “power grab”-alleging tweet by Attorney General Pam Bondi, the move by the partisan feds comes a week after the lone measure on the Golden State ballot pulled in almost 65% of the over 10 million voters who went to the polls.
Having galvanized Newsom’s national profile among Democrats for 2028, Prop 50 seeks to blunt the Texas-originating gerrymandering attempts by Republicans to retain control of the House next year. The California initiative permits a temporary four-year replacement of the independent commission that usually makes redistricting decisions to flip for the Dems up to five Republican seats from the state’s huge congressional delegation to DC.
With the MAGA White House once again desperate to distract attention from the new email revelations of what Trump calls the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” the administration also Thursday pounded on about the end of the government shutdown and sent its loyal prosecutors after ambitious Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) with threats of a criminal investigation over mortgage and tax fraud allegations.
Newsom’s people tried to stay on message:
