Last fall, California voters passed Proposition 50, which authorized the California legislature, in a one-time good deal, to bypass the State’s voter referendum-mandated independent commission that was created for the purpose of drawing Congressional district boundaries in as politically neutral fashion as could be. Proposition 50 was passed though, based explicitly on this premise:

…the move was a political necessity: California, [supporters] said, could not unilaterally adhere to neutral redistricting standards while Republican-controlled states entrenched their own power through aggressive gerrymandering.

Prop 50 is now likely headed to the Supreme Court after the case wends its way through lower courts. Its opponents are centering their argument on the premise that the redrawn map relies too heavily on racial gerrymandering, which the Court has virtually outlawed with its Louisiana v Callais ruling.

There’s another reason, though, that the Court should overrule Prop 50, albeit it would be a more difficult case to make. That reason flows from the backers’ basic premise. The law creating the commission—at those voters’ demand and approval—says what it says, and there is no place in the text for setting aside neutrality whenever one or another political party does something the State’s legislature or governor doesn’t like.

The State should be held to what the law says, not what politicians want it to say. What makes this argument difficult to make in the Court, though, is that voters are allowed to change their minds, and this may be what California’s voters did last fall. The question would hinge on the underlying premise’s intrinsic disregard for then-extant law.

The racial gerrymandering beef itself will be hard enough to prove with the Court in Callais having also said that actual racial animus must be shown; relying on a racial component that’s merely a statistical byproduct of a move wouldn’t fly.