Supreme Court Upholds California's Prop 50
as 2nd Kick to Gut of Week for Texas GOP
Capitol Inside
February 4, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court moved the Democrats one giant step closer to a U.S. House majority on Wednesday when it rejected the Department of Justice's attempt to block the Proposition 50 maps that California voters approved to counter a plan that Texas Republicans approved as the opening shot in a war on redistricting across the U.S.
The high court ruling was the second major blow that GOP partisans suffered in Texas in the past few days after losing a state Senate seat to the Democrats in a special runoff election that ended as a rout in a district that the Republicans had controlled since 1983. Local labor leader Taylor Rehmet's 14-point in a Senate district where President Donald Trump won by 17 points just over a year ago was made possible in part by a dramatic shift in support to the Democrat in Hispanic areas where he'd run strong in the past.
California Governor Gavin Newsom sought to rub it in on Wednesday in a post on X after the Supreme Court spurned a bid by Republicans in the Golden State to throw out the Prop 50 plan that he'd engineered and dubbed as the Election Rigging Response Act. The California plan was crafted to offset the gains the GOP expected to make in Texas on a new congressional map that the president ordered the Legislature here to draw last summer.
“Donald Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more Congressional seats in Texas,” Newsom said. “He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November.”
California Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court after a decision from a federal court upheld the Prop 5 maps three weeks ago. The DOJ joined the lawsuit that portrayed the California congressional redistricting plan as a product of illegal gerrymandering based on race. The Democrats in Texas had made the same argument without success in a bid to gets the courts to block the use of the new U.S. House map here.
Lawyers for both states contended that the dueling maps were redesigned simply for the sake of boosting the respective majority parties' representation in Washington D.C. without race as the driving factor. The Supreme Court's justices offered no dissent to the California ruling today.
Democrats are more confident about ever about reclaiming the majority in the U.S. House where a special election in a Democratic district in Houston on Saturday cut the GOP advantage to a single seat. A takeover in November would be a lose-lose proposition for Texas Republicans if the fight for the majority boils down to the difference in the number of seats that the GOP picks here and the number Democrats in California pick up in the fall. Trump and his allies in Texas would share the most culpability when the finger pointing got under way in such an event.
But the Supreme Court decision not to mess with the California counter-plan will be especially painful for the Republicans in Texas at a time when Latino voters have appeared to be migrating back to the Democrats in a trend that's been apparent in polling and the results in the special SD 9 runoff election seemed to confirm.
The five-seat gain that Republicans on the new Texas map hinged on the GOP faring as well in Hispanic areas as Trump had done in 2024. Without another strong turnont of Hispanic voters in the fall, the Republicans may be able to pick up two U.S. House seats at best in the Lone Star State. Newsom and his allies out west are confident of flipping all five targeted districts on the Prop 50 maps.
more to come ... | 
