How Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50 is Reshaping California - For Better or For Worse

In the closing weeks of 2025, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court moved our democracy in the wrong direction by clearing the way for a gerrymandered congressional map in Texas to be in place for the 2026 midterm elections in its Abbott v. LULAC decision. Aside from the fact that the new Texas map illegally discriminates to weaken the voting power of the state’s Black and Latino voters, the Supreme Court’s ruling is deeply problematic on a number of other levels.

Most disturbingly, the majority in this opinion takes an appalling new turn on the issue of partisan gerrymandering. To illustrate the Court’s backward slide, consider that in 2004 then-Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote as a concurrence to an opinion in a key redistricting case that, if a state declared it would redistrict with the goal of denying a certain group of voters “fair and effective representation” for partisan reasons, then the Court “would surely conclude the Constitution had been violated.”