Dhillon Law Group, Assemblyman David Tangipa, Voters, and CAGOP File Federal Lawsuit Challenging Prop 50’s Racial Gerrymandering

California Governor Gavin Newsom unconstitutionally overturned the voter-approved California Redistricting Commission with Proposition 50, which was just passed by voters. That is bad enough, but the new congressional district maps were drawn based on racial lines, a brand new lawsuit alleges.

In August, the legislature jammed through in record speed a 3-measure package on Congressional redistricting: Senate Bill 280, Assembly Constitutional Amendment 8, and Assembly Bill 604.

California Republicans announced at a press conference shortly after passage of the bills that they filed an emergency Writ of Mandate with the California Supreme Court to stop the special election scheduled for November 4th because the California Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom violated the California Constitution in putting this ballot initiative on the ballot.

Prior to passage of the three measures, Republican lawmakers and the Dhillon Law Group filed an emergency petition filed with the California Supreme Court to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders from rushing through the unconstitutional redistricting plan without the 30–day public review period required by the California Constitution, the Globe reported.

The California Supreme Court denied Republicans’ injunction request to halt Governor Gavin Newsom’s and Democrats’ redistricting scheme.

It became evident that California courts would not hear the case until it passed and became law.

The Dhillon Law Group, Assemblyman David Tangipa, 18 California Voters, and the California Republican Party announced Wednesday November 5, 2025 they have filed Federal lawsuit challenging Prop. 50, alleging it unconstitutionally racially gerrymanders districts in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

🚨We just sued Governor Newsom.🚨
We said we’d fight for the people of California and we meant it. This is only the beginning. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/OUBZfYWVr5

— David Tangipa (@DavidTangipa) November 5, 2025

Specifically, the lawsuit says:

“the California Legislature violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or
evidence to justify it.”

“The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every citizen the equal protection of the laws and the Supreme Court has held that its central mandate is racial neutrality in governmental decision making.

While the Constitution entrusts States with designing congressional districts, the Supreme Court has also held that states may not, without a compelling reason backed by evidence that was in fact considered, separate citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race.

As that Court has found, race-based districting embodies “the offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,” Miller at 912, which “is more likely to reflect racial prejudice than legitimate public concerns.”

This, the Court found, “may balkanize us into competing racial factions” and “threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters— a goal that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments embody, and to which the Nation continues to aspire.”

The Court also feared that race-based districting encourages elected representatives “to believe that their primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole,” which is “altogether antithetical to our system of representative democracy.”

And “[w]hen racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multiracial, multireligious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together
as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion rather than to political issues are generated; communities seek not the best representative but the best racial or religious partisan.”

The bottom line: “When a state unlawfully engages in racial gerrymandering, it also violates the Fifteenth Amendment, which provides that the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied or abridged on account of race or color.”

More from the lawsuit:

“The California Legislature issued a press release announcing that Proposition 50 creates two new districts to “empower Latino voters to elect their candidates of choice,” adding them to the pre-existing fourteen such districts. The Legislature characterized these sixteen districts as “Voting Rights Act districts,” meaning districts that are specifically designed to favor one race or ethnicity of voters. The consultant who drew the lines also explained that the first thing that he did when drawing the Proposition 50 map was to add a “Latino District” that the Independent Citizens District had previously eliminated and that he altered the lines of a district to make it a “Latino-influenced district” by ensuring its voting age population was “35 percent Latino.”

The lawsuit states that because California’s Hispanic voters are well represented by Latino candidates to both state and federal office: “California’s Hispanic voters have successfully elected their preferred candidates to both state and federal office, without being thwarted by a racial majority voting as a bloc. This is unsurprising because Latinos are the most numerous demographic in the state and California voters nearly always vote based on their party affiliation, not their race.”

“The Supreme Court requires states to prove that, among other things, they in fact
adopted the new district lines based on evidence that a minority race usually could not elect its preferred candidates due to the concerted opposition of voters of a white majority race. Without proof of this condition, states have no lawful basis to enact race- based congressional districts.”

The map approved hastily by the Legislature’s Package of bills was not drawn by legislators or paid for by the state of California. It was drafted by Paul Mitchell of Redistricting Partners. Paul Mitchell is Gov. Newsom’s redistricting map creator who was tasked with creating five new Democratic members of Congress. He did the “setting the lines for Democrats’ mid-decade gerrymander of California’s congressional map.” And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) campaign disclosures show that they paid Redistricting Partners to draw the map, the lawsuit says.

“Mitchell acknowledged during a public presentation that his work on the Legislature’s plan was guided by racial considerations and that his “number one thing that [he] first started thinking about” was ‘drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles,’ a district he had ‘worked with HOPE on in the last redistricting process.’”

The lawsuit says “the following sixteen districts are the racial gerrymanders subject to this Action that were paid for by the DCCC, drawn by Paul Mitchell, adopted by the California legislature and are about to be implemented by Defendants Gavin Newsom and Shirley Weber: CD 13, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46, and 52. On information and belief, CD 42 is the Congressional district identified by Mitchell as a “Latino-influenced district.”

Racial gerrymandering.