California Democrats Attempt Illegal Mid-Decade Redistricting

It is often said that politics is downstream from culture, but in California today, the rule of law appears downstream from partisan expedience. The effort by California Democrats to seize control of congressional redistricting through the Election Rigging Response Act (ERRA) is not only cynical, it is unconstitutional under California law. The comparison to Texas’ current redistricting effort makes the contrast all the more stark. Texas is engaged in a legal and court-required redistricting process designed to bring its maps into compliance with the Equal Protection Clause following the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Petteway. California, by contrast, is engaged in a naked power grab to override voter-approved constitutional reforms, violate established legislative procedures, and gerrymander districts for partisan advantage.

Let us begin with Texas. Prior to Petteway v. Galveston County, Texas operated under the understanding that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required the creation of minority coalition districts. These districts bundled together disparate racial or ethnic groups for the express purpose of electing non white candidates, often at the expense of compactness, community integrity, and, as the Fifth Circuit has now held, constitutional neutrality. Petteway clarified that such coalition districts are not required, and when drawn without legal compulsion, they violate the Equal Protection Clause by imposing racial classifications without sufficient justification. Consequently, Texas is not merely allowed but required to redraw districts that previously depended on now-invalid racial engineering. The state is acting in accordance with constitutional obligations, not partisan whim.

California, however, is attempting to do the opposite. In 2008 and 2010, voters removed redistricting authority from the legislature and entrusted it to an independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. The goal was clear: to prevent exactly what California Democrats are now attempting, which is to draw districts behind closed doors for their own political benefit. The ERRA purports to justify this mid-decade takeover by invoking the threat of Republican gerrymandering elsewhere, but this pretext does not withstand scrutiny. California’s own laws and constitution do not allow the legislature to reclaim redistricting power simply because politicians in other states are following their own laws. If they did, then every constitutional safeguard would collapse whenever a majority party claimed exigency.

The legal infirmities of the ERRA are multiple and severe. Start with the most basic: Article IV, Section 8(a) of the California Constitution requires that bills be published and made available to the public for at least 30 days before any hearing or legislative action, unless overridden by a three-quarters supermajority in both chambers. The ERRA’s core provisions, contained in gut-and-amend replacements to AB 604 and SB 280, were first introduced on August 18, 2025. Any vote or hearing before September 18, 2025, therefore violates the public review requirement. This is not a trivial technicality, it is a procedural firewall meant to prevent exactly the kind of legislative ambush Democrats are attempting.

To circumvent this requirement, the California legislature deployed the illegal “gut-and-amend” tactic, in which the contents of unrelated bills were completely replaced with redistricting provisions. AB 604 originally concerned voter registration; SB 280 addressed minor technical adjustments to the Political Reform Act. Neither bill had anything to do with redistricting until August 18. As the Strickland petition rightly notes, publishing empty bill numbers while hiding the substantive content defeats the very purpose of the 30-day rule. The California Constitution requires transparency. Publishing the skeleton of a bill without its organs does not satisfy that mandate.

Moreover, the ERRA fails to meet the supermajority threshold necessary to override the 30-day requirement. It is not enough for the majority party to want expedited action. Without the required votes, the hearings and votes currently planned are unconstitutional. As precedent from states like Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky confirm, procedural rules are not optional. When legislatures attempt to short-circuit constitutional procedures, courts must intervene. Even California’s own Assembly and Senate rules require amendments to be germane to the original subject of a bill. The ERRA violates these internal rules as well.

But the procedural abuses, while egregious, are matched by the substantive damage. The ERRA’s most glaring offense is its bypassing of the independent commission. Voters did not authorize mid-decade redistricting, nor did they approve giving this power back to the legislature. The 2021 maps remain valid, and there is no new census data or court order requiring redrawing. Without such a trigger, mid-decade redistricting is not only unnecessary but likely illegal. It’s only plausible purpose is partisan gain.

And partisan gain is exactly what the ERRA seeks. The proposed maps dissect and distort communities in ways that betray any pretense of neutral redistricting. They split counties 114 times and cities 141 times, far more than current maps. They fragment Asian-American communities in Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, separating historically unified regions like Walnut, Diamond Bar, and Chino Hills. They carve up Hispanic strongholds in Baldwin Park, Pico Rivera, and Stockton. San Joaquin County, already a coherent geographic and demographic unit, is shattered into five districts. Long Beach is joined with coastal Orange County suburbs that share no logical community interest. All of this is classic gerrymandering, the very evil the Citizens Commission was created to prevent.

California Democrats attempt to justify these maneuvers by invoking redistricting efforts in Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio. But this argument is both hypocritical and irrelevant. It is hypocritical because Democrats have long insisted that independent commissions are the gold standard for redistricting. It is irrelevant because California’s redistricting process is governed by its own constitutional rules, not by what Florida’s legislature may or may not do. Redistricting elsewhere does not license illegal redistricting at home. If anything, California should be a model of adherence to democratic norms, not their calculated abandonment.

The ERRA’s rushed timeline only compounds the damage. It proposes placing the new maps on a ballot measure in November 2025, giving voters a binary choice to accept or reject maps they had no role in drafting. This is not public participation, it is a fig leaf for one-party control. The Citizens Redistricting Commission held dozens of public hearings, received thousands of public comments, and operated under transparent criteria. The ERRA offers none of this. Instead, it reduces the public’s role to a yes-no vote on maps drawn behind closed doors. It turns representative democracy into representative theater.

The costs are not just procedural or political. There is material harm to communities, taxpayers, and the constitutional order. The special election required to approve the ERRA would cost millions. The communities carved apart by the proposed maps would suffer from diluted representation and legislative confusion. And the public’s trust in democratic institutions, already under strain, would take another hit. When rules are bent or ignored for political convenience, the public rightly concludes that rules are for suckers.

That is why the petitioners in Strickland v. Weber are right to seek writ relief. They argue, correctly, that the only way to preserve the integrity of California’s legislative process is to freeze the ERRA until proper procedures are followed. Without such a stay, any vote or enactment will be constitutionally defective, and the damage will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. The courts are not being asked to weigh partisan outcomes. They are being asked to enforce the law as written.

Contrast this with Texas once more. There, Republicans are redrawing maps because federal courts have declared prior districts unconstitutional. That is not manipulation, it is compliance. The changes are being pursued through open legislative sessions, subject to court review, and grounded in a clear constitutional mandate. Texas is not subverting the rules, it is following them. California, by contrast, is violating its own Constitution, overriding citizen-approved reforms, and doing so for purely partisan purposes. One effort is law-bound. The other is lawless.

This is not a matter of partisan tit-for-tat. It is a matter of principle. If California can suspend its own constitutional safeguards whenever it sees fit, then those safeguards mean nothing. If gut-and-amend tactics can substitute for transparent legislation, then the public is no longer a participant in governance but a spectator. And if redistricting can be hijacked mid-decade with no census, no court order, and no public process, then there is no guardrail left to prevent tyranny by cartography.

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