Four California Republicans filed an emergency petition Monday at the California Supreme Court to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrats from calling a special election to approve a new congressional map.
The map is an openly partisan effort by Newsom to gerrymander the districts to remove at least four GOP-held seats, in supposed retaliation against an effort in Texas to redraw district lines to favor Republicans.
The emergency petition argues that the district map, which must be approved by the California legislature before being set before the voters, had been presented in violation of a rule requiring 30 days for review.
“In Article IV, § 8(a) [of the state constitution], the citizens of the state of California enshrined a right to have proposed legislation published for 30 days before the Legislature can hear or act upon it,” the petition states.
The petition notes that the new map would have a particularly sharp impact on minority communities, who are typically Democrat voters and who would have to be spread among Republican districts in the new plan.
It says that Democrats tried to evade the constitution’s 30-day rule by stuffing the new map into two old and unrelated pieces of legislation to create “the newly named ‘Election Rigging Response Act’ (‘ERRA’).”
The New York Times notes that any delay would likely doom the gerrymandering proposal, given the time needed to prepare for the special election. California’s constitution already enshrines an “independent” redistricting commission, passed by the voters before the 2010 Census.
Early poll suggests that registered voters in California prefer the existing, nominally independent system over Newsom’s partisan model.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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