Below is my column in The Hill on a pesky problem facing California Democrats: their recent gerrymandering effort may have a racial discrimination problem. According to Ninth Circuit judge Kenneth Lee, the problem is District 13 and the public comments of the primary mapmaker, who declared his intention to create a Latino-dominated district.
Here is the column:
Democrats are bullish about retaking the House of Representatives and making Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) the next Speaker after the midterm elections. Part of that optimism is the cushion of five seats created through further gerrymandering of California’s U.S. House districts.
According to one respected Ninth Circuit judge, however, California may have a slight problem: Its new congressional map may be based on racial discrimination.
Judge Kenneth Lee this week dissented from a decision upholding the districts, and his detailed dissent could lay the foundation for a serious challenge that goes all the way to the Supreme Court. At issue is Congressional District 13, in the Central Valley, which Lee reveals was the result of openly racial criteria by the principal architect of the new districts.
Lee begins his dissent by quoting Chief Justice John Roberts for a 2006 decision, stating, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” When it comes to gerrymandering, it is all a sordid business of course — but this sordid business may be unconstitutional.
The court has accepted that gerrymandering is part of politics. Majority parties, like Democrats in California and Republicans in Texas, have openly redesigned districts, sometimes into absurd shapes, to achieve political ends.
One of the vehicles long used to help boost Democratic seats is the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits districts that discriminate against racial minorities. But this law has long been challenged as itself a statutory mandate for racial discrimination.
We are currently awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais on whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional in barring any district that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
The result of the law has been decades of protracted litigation over the design of districts to effectively guarantee minority — overwhelmingly Democratic — representation in Congress. That is viewed by many as flying in the face of the guarantee of the 14th Amendment barring the use of race to discriminate between citizens. As Chief Justice Roberts famously wrote in 2007, “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Once again, partisan gerrymandering is constitutional. Indeed, last December, the Supreme Court allowed Texas to keep its redrawn maps. In Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, the Supreme Court observed that “Texas adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.” In his concurrence, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch), called it “indisputable” that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Judge Lee (a Trump appointee) is now saying that it was not that “pure and simple” with regard to at least California’s District 13. He focused on the work of Paul Mitchell, whom he described as “a California redistricting expert paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House Majority PAC, and the DCCC to draw a redistricting map for California.”
“Race-based interest groups,” Lee noted, “wanted certain racial outcomes out of the process. He happily delivered.” Mitchell is quoted as openly embracing race as the critical element in his design, including publicly declaring that the “number one thing that I started thinking about” was creating a “Latino majority/minority district” in Los Angeles.
Judge Lee notes that the stated intent to create a Latino-controlled district ignores that this is already one of the most powerful and well-represented racial groups in California: “Latinos do not just make up the largest racial/ethnic group in the state … [but also hold] significant sway among California’s Democratic elected officials and leaders.”
Nevertheless, the plan was upheld by U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton (an Obama appointee) and U.S. District Judge Wesley Hsu (a Biden appointee). In fairness to the panel, there were respected key witnesses, including redistricting experts Dr. Bernard Grofman and Dr. Jonathan Rodden of the Hoover Institution, who rejected race as the key criterion. They helped create a record to support redistricting driven by political motives. The majority also stressed that there is a presumption of good faith in such plans.
This is where it gets particularly interesting. Lee notes that, while there is a presumption, it is not absolute. It became unsupportable, he argued, when Mitchell refused to answer questions about his motivations and assurances. “Mitchell went to great lengths to avoid testifying under oath about how he drew the California map — even though he publicly talked about it to the press and interest groups before this lawsuit.”
In such a circumstance, Lee insists, the court should “take Mitchell’s statements at face value and conclude they reflect his true motivations behind the Proposition 50 map. We have nothing else to go on.”
That sets up an interesting scenario. If the Supreme Court rules against the use of race in districting under the Voting Rights Act, the opinion could have blowback on gerrymandering cases that rely on the same criterion. The Roberts court has drawn a bright line against the use of race to discriminate in various areas, including college admissions.
Moreover, the court (and particularly its three liberal justices) has stressed that one cannot ignore legislative comments on such intent. Just this week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back on the claims of neutral intent of Idaho legislators in requiring student athletes to play on teams associated with their biological sex. Although the state argued that the record did not show anti-transgender intent, Sotomayor insisted that the record had to be considered and “there’s certainly a lot of comments” that could be weighed on the question.
While the panel wrote an equally detailed case in favor of the districting as politically (not racially) motivated, there remains the glaring incongruity of sheltering the key figure and his public statements that embrace a race-based motivation for District 13. That could prompt some to send the plan back with the rapidly approaching midterm elections at stake.
The question is whether a court can simply ignore the stated intentions of the map-maker in determining the purpose of the map. At some point, Judge Lee suggests, an assumption of good faith becomes a willful blindness to racial discrimination.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.” It will be released on Feb. 3 for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
California Democrats, already successful in eliminating Republican influence in state matters, now aim to do the same at the federal level. The folksy myth that a state senator/assemblyman represents the interests of, or is answerable to, his/her district’s constituents has been debunked. In California, the only interests being served are those of the Democratic Party, which, because it has successfully built and nurtured a parasitic voting block, will almost certainly maintain its hold — until bankruptcy.
For this reason, I suggest something like this: for federal offices voters (currently 46% D, 24% R, 30 % Various Others) be allowed to vote for candidates running statewide, sending to the House politicians representing their particular interests, with the understanding that (using the current breakdown) no less than 46%, and no more than 76% of the seats be awarded to the top vote-getters in the majority party. This will pay the majority party its due (prompting each party to work harder recruiting members), give Independents a fighting chance (at attracting both R & D voters), and allow minority party (i.e, Republicans) voters a chance to have their interests represented (and their party energized).
The loss of meaningful local representation would be minimal, because there is not much to lose. I’ve never had local representation, at the state or federal level. A more significant loss would be for the truly dismal wannabes, the half-wit, local puppets California regularly sends to Congress. But the big loss would be Democrat’s cynical hegemony, which, given its track record in California, can’t be quashed soon enough.
Conflation: fusing two or more things or ideas into one: Legal and illegal into an unaccepted equality of law.
Confusion: enfeebled matization, a disturbed mental state.
‘The limits of thematization’ Charles H.P. Zuckerman | J.J. Enfield
Abstract:
“A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally acces sible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein’s 1981 paper, the “Limits of Awareness,” set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers’ “awareness” of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential “awareness” of aspects of language has since been foundational to linguistic- anthropological understandings of language ideolo gies. Here we consider Silverstein’s argument with reference to our research in Laos, exploring the limits of metalinguistic discourse. We argue that the appar ent constraints on our capacity to talk about aspects of language do not evidence limits of awareness of elements of language, but rather constraints on our ability to thematize those elements, that is, to bring them into joint attention. The central issue is the matization, and the relation of interest is a relation of joint attention between speakers. Metalanguage is thus constrained not (only) by psychological lim its but by the social and semiotic limits on what peo ple can bring into mutual focus within interactions. To present our framing of the issue and show what it helps us see, we distinguish two kinds of thema tization and describe their subtypes, affordances, and constraints. We then demonstrate how social conventions— broadly understood— can circumvent these constraints, allowing people to thematize oth erwise difficult to thematize forms.”
”
The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission”
~ Ted Kennedy on the 1965 Immigration act
It was all lies
Like Teddy ever told the truth.
Wait I thought that women could hold her breath.
The American Founders ensured that racism could not occur in the United States by allowing admission to become a citizen as prescribed in their immigration law.
To wit,
Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798, 1802
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof….
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Civil War was the brutal insurrection, overthrow, and conquest by kinetic force of freedom and the America of its Founders by anti-American fellow travelers of Karl Marx.
To wit,
“The workingmen of Europe…consider…that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln…to lead his country through…the RECONSTRUCTION of a social world.”
– Karl Marx Letter To Abraham Lincoln, 1865 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
The Naturalization Acts didn’t “ensure” the absence of racism. They governed citizenship, not equal protection, and the Constitution itself tolerated slavery.
The question here is simple and modern: can a government committed to equal protection intentionally sort citizens by race? If yes, say so. If no, the debate ends.
What is the status and disposition of people who could not be admitted to become citizens and whose status changed, by illicit and unconstitutional brute force, from legal “property” to inadmissible person, aka illegal alien, if not compassionate repatriation or deportation?
The Israelite slaves were out of Egypt before the ink was dry on their release papers, but then, they had the capacity and acumen sufficient to the task.
1.4% of Americans owned slaves in 1860, which is inconsistent with “fundamentally transforming” the entirety of the United States of America and its Constitution and Bill of Rights to align better with the Communist Manifesto.
What say you, comrade?
What say?! You are living totally in the past to make irrelevant arguments to revive and agitate racial animosities that were long past, paid for, and laid to rest both in blood, legislations, and TIME.
Olly – there is a giant gulf between what a Nation can and can not do regarding its own citizens, and what it can and can not do with respect to immigration.
A US citizen who commits a crime can lose their freedom, they can not lose their citizenship.
Conversely the US is not obligated to accept people who are criminals.
Forms of discrimination which are absoltuely forbidden to government with regard to citizens are perfectly fine regarding immigration.
We can not ban, censor, deport, jail … a citizen for their political views. Btu we are not obligated to give visa’s to communists, jihadi’s ….
I’ve noticed that the length of these debates seems directly proportional to how absent first principles are. When the principle is clear, the argument is short. When it isn’t, complexity rushes in to fill the gap.
A constitutional system committed to equal protection cannot permit the state to intentionally classify citizens by race. If that statement is controversial, we’ve already answered why these debates never end.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Olly. The less people know (absent first principles), the more confident and long-winded they become. Much-speaking, more often than not, hides everything from obfuscation to confusion.
When people do not have any grounding in principles – all debate with them – presuming they are willing to debate becomes long and tedious, as they have no anchors of their own to determine the validity or correctness of anything they say.
It is quite common for X as an example to be unable to write 3 words without making two fundimental errors.
OT – It’s National Popcorn Day! Hurray!
Today is also MLK day. In the face of rage, racism, bigotry used to demean, debase, humiliate and punish those who are categorized as being such, it helps to remember this great soul’s words and wisdom. Our actions are truly more important than our words. We should all be above racism used to “stretch” moral values.
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
We WERE above the prevalence of racism, and well on our way to improving even further—that is, until the extreme-left (democrats) revived it for the purposes of agitating and dividing, for the outcomes of political power, one-party control.
It is all the more a cheap facade when MLK is painted as purer than Jesus himself, as you have done here. Tone it down on the virtue-signaling. Moral values are better learned and STRETCHED by loving and forgiving those you hate the most….
So says the beneficiary of unconstitutional abortion (i.e. homicide), public assistance, and affirmative action.
??? . Nothing you say makes any sense.
The issue is the revived racism, historically appropriated, for maximum damage to the UNITED States, so central to democrat control.
Turley: The question is whether a court can simply ignore the stated intentions of the map-maker in determining the purpose of the map. At some point, Judge Lee suggests, an assumption of good faith becomes a willful blindness to racial discrimination.
The gerrymandering issue goes to the Marxist tool of cultural racism, affixing their false morality (social and economic) using street-sweepers to maintain political supremacy.
Why has speech that is free been censored here on the Turley blog of Mr. Free Speech himself?
OT
Knock out recipe:
Popcorn
Fritos corn chips
Melted white chocolate drizzled and tossed. ☺
I simply hope that the “swing” Justices (into which group I place CJ Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney-Barrett) are reading the good Professor’s articles.
The mental gymnastics that gives you “it is Racism only if it dis-empowers a minority”
*As long as the minority is not white
Fixed it for you.
Or empowering a minority, as we saw with Saddam Hussein. During his presidency, positions of power in the country were mostly filled with Sunni Arabs, a minority that made up only about a fifth of the Iraqi population.
Gerrymandering in California is not going to happen. Minnesota is now the new Fort Sumter, SC and Tim Walz is their Jefferson Davis. US Civil War #2 is here, and all other news is tertiary
The US Civil War was the nation’s bloodiest and most divisive war, and it began at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. After South Carolina seceded from the Union, much like Minnesota is seceding from the US by claiming the US Feds leave Minnesota, the Confederacy demanded that the United States evacuate its fort in Charleston Harbor. Tim Walz is demanding the US Feds evacuate Minneapolis’s Federal buildings, the Whipple Bldg and surrounding regions. Lincoln refused, provoking a Confederate attack. Trump is refusing Walz’s demand, provoking Democrats sponsored an anti-ICE insurrectionists attacking Fed troops. The outbreak of war in 1861 forced wavering states to choose between the Confederacy and the Union, and four more—Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee—now seceded. In 2026, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, California, New York and Virginia are sure to follow. Virginia’s new Governor Spanberger, a commie’s commie, has already rescinded the previous Governor’s order (Glenn Youngkin) of police cooperating with the US Feds.
Jefferson Davis had extensive military experience before he assumed the presidency of the new Confederate States of America. A graduate of West Point, he had fought Indians for several years along the frontier and later served with distinction in the Mexican War. He had experience in Congress as both a representative and senator, and had been secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Tim Walz claims to have military experience, if one considers the national guard as military experience, and lied extensively about his “military” service. Walz was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019. He was a failed Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2024 along with Democrat U.S. presidential nominee Camel-uh Harris, Hindu Indian miraculously turned black.
Jefferson Davis expressed his hope that separation from the Union would come peacefully. But he warned, “If this be denied to us . . . it will but remain for us, with firm resolve, to appeal to arms.” Tim Walz is following in the foot steps of Jefferson Davis, along with his butt plug friends Mayor Frey of Minneapolis and failed CNN mistress Don Lemon.
forget Newsom. He will be hiding under his wife’s bed when Minnesota Democrats kill their first US Federal Officer.
https://www.americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/price-of-freedom/online/civil-war/civil-war-begins
Before using the Fort Sumter as an example, it is helpful to understand why Charleston defended its harbor based on the intent of the Buchanan etal. In the current case, Walz, Frey, and the DNC leadership have ascertained they are not subject to Federal Acts of Laws – even if their violation of those acts is being paid for by everybody but themselves (look where the money is coming from and who is profiting).
In that instance, December 9, 1860, the commander of another critical harbor blockading Fort Moultrie, Major Robert Anderson (later the commander of Fort Sumter) wrote, “Fort Sumter is a tempting prize, the value of which is well known to the Charlestonians, and once in their possession, with its ammunition and armament and walls uninjured and garrisoned properly, it would set our Navy at defiance, compel me to abandon this work[Moultrie], and give them the perfect command of this harbor.”
His “our Navy defiance” was, of course, illustrated by the January 5, 1861, when the war ship, Star of the West, departs from New York with some 200 reinforcements and provisions for the Sumter garrison to blockade the largest commercial port of the soon to be “Confederacy”. In this case, it was to (illegally) enslave the commerce of the south. In the Minneapolis case, it is to protect the “open border” of illegal immigration funding $9BB to Somali Terrorist Organizations (US Tax dollars) in defiance of the Immigration and Nationality Acts – enacted by US Congressional Actions and signed by US Presidents [in other words, the law]. To give an idea of relative value, the US Coast Guard budget for fiscal year 2026 is approximately $14.4BB. The two are quite different, though the actions of the Governor, Mayor, and The Democratic Party seem quite similar over the years – the causes are completely different.
All Lincoln ever had to do was pass a bill to abolish reprehensible slavery through Congress in this nation of elected representative self-governance.
One important fact. Secession is not prohibited by the constitution and is fully constitutional, and secession is constitutional per the 10th Amendment.
Lincoln illicitly and unconstitutionally denied the power of secession and the right to secede.
Just as Roe v. Wade was retroactively rescinded and revoked after 50 years by Dobbs, every act of Lincoln and his successors, subsequent to Lincoln’s illicit and unconstitutional denial of secession, remains unconstitutional and must be rescinded and revoked, beginning with the “Reconstruction Amendments” of Karl Marx, which were ratified with a gun to America’s head.
America must be returned to the freedom of the original Constitution and Bill of Rights.
“Secession is prohibited because secession is not prohibited.”
This is the irrational rationale of those anti-Americans who oppose the Constitution.
People must adapt to the outcomes of freedom.
Freedom does not adapt to people.
Dictatorship does.
You wrote “Tim Walz claims to have military experience, if one considers the national guard as military experience,” I would hope that you got over excited when writing this as the National Guard are Military, trained and retained for service at the call to duty. They have served and died while serving and should be honored as any other military service member is. The donkey does have a tail, and its Walz for his abandonment of call to duty.
While Trump and MAGA are destroying NATO Turley keeps running interference.
NATO wreck it’s self years ago. They fight tooth & nail to meet their funding comment.
While we fund their protection.
Trump IS NATO. the rest of ‘nato’ are useless.
Thank you – that was a much better response than mine.
The US currently has 11 Nuclear powered Aircraft carriers.
In mothballs we have perhaps 30 non nuclear and 1 nuclear super carrier.
the non-nuclear USS America which we deliberately Sunk in the Caribean as target ship
is superior to any carrier that the Chinese, Indian, Russians, French or English have.
One Ford Class carried can put more aircraft in the air faster with more fire power and more range than all other NATO Carriers combined.
Trump is not destroying NATO.
But lets say he was – is Europe capable of defending itself without the US ?
If not, why not ?
Congress should establish a bi-partisan commission to establish detailed and neutral criteria, esp. based on existing geographical lines, for drawing up congressional districts. The federal government has an obvious interest in dosing so, since the composition of the most important branch of the federal government is determined by the results of the state districting. Then the federal courts should follow their recommendations in evaluating the constitutionality of the new districts. This is the only way out of the problem of the continuing effort to game the system.
Careful, :edwardmahl. What you may be asking for is “bi-partisan commission” appointed by the ruling party (with simple majority) to be executed by the Autopen and ruled by the OSF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations) funded and purchased Judges. There is a reason these powers were left locally in the creation of the US Constitution. While it may be within the power of NYC and VA voters to choose sole power oligarchy to create enslavement of their own freedom, at least those blights are limited.
@Paul
Precisely. Let them. Just don’t put them in a position of power again to revoke those separations, because they will, and happily. The modern left is no longer sane.
“establish detailed and neutral criteria”
There is no such thing. This is one of the reasons we do not want our courts involved.
It is trivial to come up with 10 different was to create congressional districts following “neutral” rules that sound perfectly reasonable,
and that some army of experts can tell us why this is the correct way to do things, Only to have a rival set of experts with a different set of neutral rules and a completely different result and another army of experts.
In some things it is best NOT to pretend they are not political. And just to aloow things to be done overtly without false claims of neutrality and then let voters judge.