Elected officials and community members rallied on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on Tuesday in support of a resolution to endorse California’s Proposition 50, which would temporarily redraw the state’s congressional district maps.
If passed, the Board of Supervisors resolution would make San Francisco one of the first cities to endorse Prop. 50, which comes in response to Texas’ recent mid-decade congressional redistricting in favor of Republicans.
The ballot measure would create new district maps for California’s congressional elections through 2030. Under Prop. 50, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, the state’s independent commission tasked with drawing nonpartisan districts every 10 years, would resume creating congressional district maps for the state in 2031.
Elected officials including California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, and San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who introduced the resolution, framed Prop. 50 as an appropriate and important response to attacks on democracy by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“We are the American people. We are rebels. We fight back,” Kounalakis said. “We are going to pass Proposition 50 in order to reach fairness in Washington, for the country, as the right wing seeks to take that away from us.”
Wiener framed Prop. 50 as a “fight that came to us.”
“Donald Trump went to Texas and said, ‘I want you to get me five more seats, I want you to rig this election,’ because Trump knows his policies are unpopular and can’t win a free and fair election,” Wiener said. “California said no.”
Chiu said that the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office had won seven lawsuits against the Trump Administration since the start of Trump’s second term. Still, Chiu argued that “we cannot fight this administration just in the courts.”
“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans have ripped up this playbook,” he said. “We can’t play by rules that no longer exist.”
California will conduct a statewide special election for Prop. 50 on Nov. 4.