Right-Wing Legal Group Sues to Block California’s Voter-Approved Congressional Map

A conservative legal group with a long record of attacking voting rights filed a lawsuit against California’s Proposition 50, seeking to block the state’s voter-approved congressional map.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) — known for pushing aggressive lawsuits aiming to purge voter rolls and undermine federal voting protections — filed the new complaint Tuesday in federal court.

The lawsuit is the second aiming to overturn Proposition 50 since voters overwhelmingly passed it November 4.

The measure authorizes a temporary congressional map to counter the extreme gerrymandering demanded by President Donald Trump in Republican-controlled states, like Texas.

PILF has significant influence in Trump’s Washington, D.C. A former lawyer for the group now leads the voting section at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). And its founder, Christian Adams, was a member of Trump’s short-lived voter fraud commission, launched in 2017.   

PILF’s lawsuit against California is more ambitious than the earlier challenge brought by the California Republican Party and later backed by DOJ.  Where the GOP and DOJ’s main claim is the map improperly considered race under the 14th Amendment — a standard that allows states to defend maps when needed to protect minority voters — PILF makes a broader claim: that the 15th Amendment, which was created to prevent racial discrimination in voting, categorically bans any use of race in redistricting, even when the goal is ensuring Black and Latino voters are not suppressed.

Under PILF’s view, even maintaining existing minority districts that voters rely on for representation could be unconstitutional.

“Outside the context of a remedial map under the Voting Rights Act, drawing district lines to preserve specific racial percentages, maintain racial majorities, or the deliberate preservation of racial influence districts violates the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act,” the complaint reads. “California’s racially motivated and racially drawn districts violate the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition of state action for which any racially discriminatory intent or racial means are used, even to gain political or partisan advantage.”

The group also attacked two districts in Los Angeles that have elected Black members of Congress for decades. 

PILF frames those districts — which preserve Black voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice despite being surrounded by larger populations — as unconstitutional racial favoritism.

“Proposition 50 places Plaintiffs in racially engineered districts. It is a deliberately racially engineered outcome,” the complaint adds. “This enables the Black populations in Districts 43 and 37 to effectively politically control the district despite lacking any majority or plurality in the census data. By intentionally walling off surrounding Hispanic and White racial populations, California deliberately and illegally created two Black influence districts.”

That argument — which casts attempts to protect Black political representation as a constitutional harm — is a significant escalation from the GOP’s earlier filing.

The Republicans’ lawsuit focused mostly on legislative process, public comments from mapmakers and claims that the districts were designed to boost Latino-elected Democratic candidates.

PILF instead constructs a mathematical conspiracy theory around the map’s demographic patterns, asserting that minority communities were “passed” between districts in an “implausible band of 52-55% Hispanic population” to maintain the same number of Latino opportunity districts that existed before Prop 50.