Gavin Newsom is gloating, and Trump may fume, but the Supreme Court has denied review of the case in which Republicans were, hypocritically, trying to challenge California's tit-for-tat gerrymandering effort.

Prop 50 will stand, and the Supreme Court, without entirely saying so, is essentially saying "Fair is fair," and political gerrymanders are simply the way of the world.

The high court similarly, in December, ruled in favor of Republicans in Texas, where a lower court had temporarily blocked a gerrymandered congressional map there — a map authorized not via ballot proposition, but by writ of the Republican legislative majority.

In today's decision from the court's emergency "shadow" docket, there was only a one-sentence order, as NBC News reports, with no explanation provided, no dissents, and no vote count listed.

Governor Gavin Newsom, who spearheaded the Prop 50 effort after Trump essentially decreed that Texas Republicans should squeeze five more House seats out of their state maps, was predictably gleeful on Xitter about the ruling.

"Donald Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more Congressional seats in Texas. He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November," Newsom wrote.

As in the Texas case, the argument used was that this was a racially, and not politically motivated gerrymander effort. A lower court ruled last month that Prop 50 was perfectly legal, with a two-judge majority opinion saying "the evidence presented reflects that Proposition 50 was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats." Those judges cited the Supreme Court's December opinion in their ruling.

In a brief supporting the redistricting effort, Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber argued that Republicans' claim that the map would unfairly advantage Latino voters was spurious, since the new map has the same number of majority-Latino districts as the old map.

California Republicans had sought an emergency decision from the Supreme Court by February 9, and today's ruling clears the way for the very strenuously chopped-up California district map to shape the 2026 midterms. The map, as proposed, will theoretically remove five of the nine Republican-held congressional districts in the state, handing them to Democrats — if all the votes go according political calculations.

Under Prop 50, the state will return to using its nonpartisan commission to remap  the districts after the results of the 2030 census come in.

Republicans are clearly anxious about the midterms, and how Trump's bluster, and the chaos and tragedy being wrought by his immigration-enforcement tactics, will impact their political fates.

In Texas, they may or may not gain the five seats they're counting on, but seats in other parts of the country could wind up canceling out those gains, on top of the five presumed new Democrat seats out of California.

Meanwhile, Trump is talking about "nationalizing" elections, which is pretty goddamn frightening, and hopefully the courts can stop him in his tracks.

As the New York Times notes, the Supreme Court is expected to rule by June on a case they heard on two occasions last year, in the spring and again in the fall, that could gut the final pillar of the Voting Right Act. The case, brought by a group of white plaintiffs in Louisiana, argues that race should never be used in drawing congressional district lines, either to advantage or disadvantage a minority group. The conservative justices are clearly skeptical of how race is used in drawing districts, and should they rule in favor of the plaintiffs, the result will be the likely dismantling of Black-majority districts across the South in particular.

Previously: Federal Court Says Prop 50 Gerrymander Is Good to Go, Cites Supreme Court Ruling on Texas Maps