Newsom’s Prop 50 Could Be at Risk Thanks to Texas Judges

O n May 11, 1846, President James K. Polk told the nation that Mexico had invaded Texas “and shed American blood.” Two days later, Congress declared war, and, just a few weeks after that, a tiny band of Americans living in Mexico’s Alta California took over the wee town of Sonoma and raised the first Bear Flag. It featured the state’s iconic grizzly (looking more bovine than ursine) loping toward a red star, a vexillographic display of solidarity with the state of Texas.

Relations between the two peoples have often been strained since then — they were sworn enemies in the Civil War — but each state remains almost obsessively interested in the political machinations of the other. Take the recent fight over redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterms. It began with Governor Greg Abbott’s July announcement that Texas would redraft its voting map to serve up more Republican House wins next year; Governor Gavin Newsom responded almost immediately with his own redistricting plan, Proposition 50.

“They’ve triggered this response,” Newsom said. “We’re not going to roll over. . . . Whatever they are doing [in Texas] will be neutered here.”

The neutering began immediately in California’s Democrat-controlled legislature. There, lawmakers blew through the mandated 30-day cooling-off period — and wrote, introduced, and passed the bill, and drafted the maps, in just three days. Newsom signed it, then put Prop 50 on the ballot just 75 days later, on November 4. On Election Day, 64 percent of California voters approved a constitutional amendment to blow up their state’s once-popular independent redistricting commissions and adopted the Democrats’ bespoke electoral map — a map Newsom declares will boost his party’s hold on California’s 52 congressional seats from 43 to 48.

But on Tuesday, everything changed. A three‑judge district court blocked Texas’s map and, in doing so, laid out logic that may also take down Prop 50 (though on late Friday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito temporarily reinstated the map while the case is being considered). California conservatives opposed to Prop 50 might find reason to cheer.

The Texas decision turned on a familiar constitutional fault line. The three judges agreed that politics played a role in the Republican-engineered map, but that sort of partisan gerrymandering is largely beyond the reach of federal courts after Rucho v. Common Cause.

But two of the judges also found substantial evidence that race — specifically the dilution and reconfiguration of black and Latino voters — was the predominant factor in Texas’s cartography. That conclusion places the map under strict scrutiny, the standard that governs racial gerrymandering under the equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act.

Liberals cheered and conservatives raged. Among the latter, Judge Jerry E. Smith, the lone dissenter on Texas’s three-judge panel, declared, “The main winners” in the majority’s decision “are George Soros and Gavin Newsom.”

Newsom’s Prop 50 moves in the opposite political direction, of course, but it features the same constitutional flaws identified by the court that enjoined the Texas map. In its November 13 complaint, the U.S. Department of Justice argues that California’s legislature relied heavily on racial and ethnic data when designing its new districts. In debate before the vote, the DOJ notes, California lawmakers defended the Prop 50 redistricting plan in clearly racial language. They declared “a Latino voice in Texas is worth one-third of the representation as a white voice,” asserting that Texas would “slid[e] back” to the days of “Black Codes and Jim Crow” and that Proposition 50 is necessary “so that minorities in California can ‘stand up and be counted.’”

“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 DOJ concludes. “Our Constitution does not tolerate this racial gerrymander.”

The gerrymandering controversy is likely to end at the Supreme Court. By that time, the legal landscape may shift dramatically for plaintiffs in both Texas and California. Justice Clarence Thomas has called for a systematic reassessment of the Voting Rights Act, arguing persuasively that race-conscious mapmaking probably violates the equal protection clause.

Taken together, the Texas injunction, California’s Prop 50, and Justice Thomas’s call to reconsider the Voting Rights Act signal that the rules of redistricting are in flux. States may soon face greater latitude — or stricter scrutiny — depending on how the Supreme Court balances race, politics, and constitutional guarantees.

But for the moment, California’s conservative voters may offer thanks to two Texas judges for returning the favor of 1846.