House Speaker Mike Johnson says he plans to derail California’s proposed congressional map after Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a proposal to redraw the state’s electoral boundaries.
Newsom and California Democrats proposed new congressional lines on Friday in an attempt to eliminate potential gains in Texas, where Republicans backed by Donald Trump launched a nationwide redistricting battle with nakedly partisan ambitions ahead of midterm elections in 2026.
Johnson accused Democrats of an “illegal power grab.”
“Gavin Newsom should spend less time trampling his state’s laws for a blatant power grab, and more time working to change the disastrous, far-left policies that are destroying California,” Johnson wrote Monday. “Newsom obviously wants to launch a presidential campaign on the backs of disenfranchised California voters, but it will not work.”
But unlike California, Texas lawmakers in the state legislature only need to vote on the maps before they are signed into law by Governor Gregg Abbott. Newsom, meanwhile, must hold a special election this fall so voters can decide whether to suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission until the end of the decade to advance the new map.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is vowing to derail California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plans to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries in response to a proposal for mid-decade Texas gerrymandering that would boost GOP seats in the House (Getty Images)
Johnson’s statement followed the return of a group of Texas Democrats who left the state to break quorum in the state House, leaving Republicans without enough members present to vote on legislation during a special 30-day legislative session that was requested by Abbott.
Dozens of Texas Democrats declared victory on Monday after staying out of the state for more than two weeks, blocking Republicans’ Trump-led gerrymandering campaign.
But redistricting is on the agenda for a second special session.
Texas Republicans are expected to quickly take up — and pass — a new congressional map that would create five more districts likely to elect Republican candidates, which would give the GOP 30 of the state’s 38 seats in Congress.
In a statement on Monday, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said that members returned “to launch the next phase” in the redistricting battle.
Democrats’ return to the state will allow them to create the “legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses,” Texas House of Representatives Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement.
GOP lawmakers were explicit that the new map was designed to improve “political performance,” an act of political or partisan gerrymandering — in which a controlling party carves out maps to “pack” likely opponents into a few districts, or “cracks” them across multiple districts, thereby diluting their voting power.
Critics accused Republicans of gerrymandering a map on racial lines, effectively letting Republicans choose their voters rather than the other way around.
While out of the state, Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton and GOP members of Congress put pressure on law enforcement to haul absent lawmakers back to the state capital in Austin.
“We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation — reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” Wu said.
Newsom accused Trump of leading efforts to ‘rig the system’ with a GOP gerrymander as he unveiled plans for a voter referendum to redraw California’s congressional boundaries (Getty Images)
California and Texas, the nation’s two most populous states, remain at the forefront of the brewing redistricting war, as Trump pushes Republicans to redraw electoral lines for control of the House of Representatives to avoid a repeat of 2018 midterm elections — when Democrats regained control of Congress and impeached him twice.
Democrats — who accused Republicans of illegally diluting the voting strength of Black and Latino voters — are planning to retaliate, triggering a race to reshape the electoral map by the time Americans cast their ballots in 2026.
Newsom has stressed that bypassing the state’s redistricting commission would be temporary, and that the state would only redraw its congressional boundaries if Texas shot first.
At a rally in Los Angeles last week, Newsom said Trump is “trying to rig the system” and, “as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done.”
“We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt,” Newsom said. “And we have got to meet fire with fire.”
Johnson called Newsom’s plans a “slap in the face to Californians who overwhelmingly support” the state’s redistricting commission.
“Unlike other states, California must shred its own Constitution to succeed in its desperate gambit to ‘end the Trump presidency.’ Voters in California and across the nation see through this partisan stunt,” he said.
Johnson said his office and the National Republican Congressional Committee will “use every measure and resource possible” to take on California.
The Republicans’ congressional campaign arm criticized Newsom’s move, accusing the governor of “shredding California’s Constitution and disenfranchising voters to prop up his Presidential ambitions.”
“The NRCC is prepared to fight this illegal power grab in the courts and at the ballot box to stop Newsom in his tracks,” chairman Richard Hudson said last week.
