NC can go ahead with political maps, court rules in win for GOP ahead of 2022 midterms

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article257130202.html

North Carolina’s new political districts do not violate the state constitution, a panel of three judges ruled unanimously Tuesday.

The GOP-drawn maps would give Republicans a built-in advantage in future elections — but none of the reasons why challengers said the maps are unconstitutional stand up to legal scrutiny, the judges ruled.

In other words, politicians may use the redistricting process to give their party an edge. Indeed, the judges wrote in their 260-page ruling, redistricting is an inherently political process and is meant to be that way.

 

“Redistricting and the political considerations that are part of that process do not impinge on the right to vote,” they wrote. “Nothing about redistricting affects a person’s right to cast a vote.”

The challengers immediately announced Tuesday that they plan to appeal the ruling. It’s possible that it could go straight to the Supreme Court, which has a Democratic majority.

The three superior court judges who ruled Tuesday were two Republicans, Wake County Judge Graham Shirley and Catawba County Judge Nathaniel Poovey, and one Democrat, Anson County Judge Dawn Layton.

Their ruling upheld both the congressional map — which is expected to give Republicans a 10-4 advantage among North Carolina’s 14 U.S. House of Representatives seats in a 50-50 election — and the maps for state legislature, which are expected to produce strong Republican majorities even if Democrats win the majority of the vote.

The judges wrote that there is no guarantee that the number of seats a political party wins in Congress or the state legislature should be proportional to how much of the statewide vote that party wins.

‘RESULT OF A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS’

The challengers in the case had put forward numerous expert reports that the maps were skewed far to the right — more Republican leaning than 99.99% of a set of billions of hypothetical maps that one expert created, for instance. And the judges sounded almost apologetic in parts of their ruling.

 

 

“Despite our disdain for having to deal with issues that potentially lead to results incompatible with democratic principles and subject our State to ridicule, this Court must remind itself that these maps are the result of a democratic process,” the judges wrote.

They added: “Judges, just like many of the citizens they serve, do not always like the results they reach.”

Republican leaders, however, ignored the thinly veiled critiques and focused on the big picture: Their maps will get to be used in every election through 2030, as long as Tuesday’s ruling stands on appeal.

“I am pleased the trial court has ruled in our favor, upholding the maps drawn by the General Assembly in the most transparent process in North Carolina history,” N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore said in a press release.

“Now that a bipartisan court unanimously validated the maps, the people of our state should be able to move on with the 2022 electoral process,” Sen. Warren Daniel, a Morganton Republican and top redistricting official, said in another news release.

 

HEADING TO THE SUPREME COURT?

Tuesday’s ruling, however, may not be the final word due to the imminent appeal.

The 2022 primary elections are in May. So if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Tuesday’s ruling and forces the maps to be redrawn, that decision would have to happen soon to take effect in 2022 rather than 2024.

“While this ruling is disappointing, all signs ultimately point to the N.C. Supreme Court resolving this case,” said Hilary Harris Klein, an attorney for some of the groups who challenged the maps, in a news release.

She added: “We remain confident that our conclusive evidence of partisan bias, obfuscation, and attacks on Black representation, from expert testimony to the mapmakers’ own admissions, will convince the state’s highest court to protect voters from nefarious efforts to entrench partisan power at the expense of free elections and fair representation.”

 

Republicans quickly criticized the Supreme Court’s Democratic majority as “conflict-riddled,” foreshadowing the legal battles that are to come over whether certain justices should recuse themselves. But potential conflicts abound on both sides of the court.

Republicans have already asked Democratic Justice Sam Ervin to recuse himself from hearing the case because he is up for reelection this year. And they have routinely criticized Democratic Justice Anita Earls. She is the founder and former executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, one of the main law firms for the challengers in the case.

On the GOP side, there could be even more calls for recusals. Republican Justice Phil Berger Jr. is the son of the N.C. Senate leader who is a main defendant in the case, and fellow Republican Justice Tamara Barringer was herself a GOP lawmaker until 2019.

NC’S GERRYMANDERING HISTORY

States redraw their political districts at the start of every decade, after new U.S. Census data comes out. In North Carolina, that process has created near-constant controversy. Various courts, both state and federal, ruled the legislature’s maps unconstitutional in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

 

Nearly all of those cases, however, were over racial gerrymandering. The lawsuits over the maps for the 2020s have been over partisan gerrymandering, which is a much less settled legal question.

A 2019 ruling in one of the lawsuits over last decade’s maps did find that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. But Republican lawmakers didn’t keep fighting after losing at trial — which means there’s no legal precedent from an appellate court to bind the judges who were hearing this new lawsuit.

And unlike the judges in 2019, who said that the N.C. Constitution’s guarantee of free elections means partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, the judges this year disagreed.