Just hours after Gavin Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Act — also known as Proposition 50 — squeaked through (while ballots were still being counted, naturally), the California Republican Party and 19 individual plaintiffs dropped the hammer.
They’ve filed a lawsuit against Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, demanding that the Prop 50 maps be thrown out. The suit argues that the maps blatantly violate the 14th and 15th Amendments by being drawn “based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.”
In other words, Democrats gerrymandered the state, and they’re not even pretending otherwise. This isn’t about “representation” — it’s about rigging the board before the game even starts.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, and plaintiffs are demanding an immediate injunction to block the state from using Gavin Newsom’s blatantly partisan Prop 50 maps while the case moves through the courts.
Attorney Mark Meuser of the Dhillon Law Group laid it out clearly at a morning press conference: this fight is on the fast track. He expects a hearing on the injunction within weeks and says whichever side loses will likely appeal straight to the Supreme Court. But time is short — a ruling must come down before December 19, when candidates begin pulling papers.
The Dhillon Law Group, Assemblyman David Tangipa, 18 California Voters, and the California Republican Party File Federal Lawsuit Challenging Prop 50 https://t.co/ZEi5R2OXSc
— California Republican Party (@CAGOP) November 5, 2025
Democrats in the California legislature, along with the DCCC’s hired gun who actually drew the lines, have been bragging about what Prop 50 was really designed to do — “empower Latino voters to elect their candidates of choice.” Translation: redraw the map to lock in Democrat power for a generation.
They created two new districts they claimed were “Voting Rights Act” districts, but as attorney Mark Meuser pointed out, they didn’t bother to follow the actual requirements of the VRA. Nor did they present a shred of evidence showing that the current maps violated the law in the first place.
In short, California Democrats played the race card without reading the rules — twisting the Voting Rights Act into a partisan weapon to cement one-party rule.
The complaint says, in part:
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 [Commission] 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.” While compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) may justify race-based districting under current law notwithstanding the Equal Protection Clause, 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.
However, 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 Legislature not only had no evidence that the existing Citizen Redistricting Commission’s 2021 maps violated the VRA and therefore racial gerrymandering was justified. But also, the consultant who drew the Proposition 50 map acknowledged two studies, one before and one after he drew the map, that confirmed the Commission’s map complied with the VRA.
Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response to the lawsuit was characteristically arrogant and false:
Statement from Gov. Newsom’s office on CAGOP federal lawsuit against Prop 50:
“Good luck, losers.” pic.twitter.com/j7FFdXNEPQ
— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) November 5, 2025
Newsom clearly thinks he’s untouchable — and to be fair, he’s gotten away with a lot in California’s one-party system. But he’s wrong on the facts here. The lawsuit may have been filed by the Dhillon Law Group, which Harmeet Dhillon founded, but she herself left the firm to join President Trump’s Department of Justice. While DOJ isn’t yet involved, it’s not hard to imagine that changing soon.
And Newsom might want to check his ego before he writes this one off. Sure, he’s used to winning in the friendly confines of California’s state courts, where judges treat him like a monarch. But his track record in federal court — especially when facing Dhillon Law or the Center for American Liberty, another organization she founded — is far less impressive.
We’ll keep you updated about how this all turns out.
