RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina’s new political district maps are unconstitutional, the N.C. Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The maps, drawn by Republican lawmakers late last year, would have given GOP candidates a sizable advantage in elections throughout the next decade. Republican leaders argued in favor of the maps in court, saying redistricting is an inherently political process and that courts shouldn’t get involved by banning partisan gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court, which has a Democratic majority, disagreed.
The ruling divided the court along party lines. All three Republican justices dissented and said they would have allowed the maps to stand. But all four Democratic justices joined in the majority opinion, which struck down the maps for both the N.C. General Assembly and North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The justices ruled that the maps were skewed so far to the right that they violated the state constitution — specifically that they “are unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause and the freedom of assembly clause of North Carolina’s constitution.”
Their ruling orders new political districts to be redrawn. That’s expected to happen quickly, before this year’s elections.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat who had filed a legal brief in the case arguing that the maps were unconstitutional, was the first to announce the news Friday.
“Under our constitution, political power must be ‘vested in and derived from the people’ (and) our government must be ‘founded upon their will only,’” Stein wrote in a series of tweets on his personal account. “Our elected leaders flout that principle when they seek to perpetuate their power irrespective of the will of the voters.”
Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, wrote in his dissent that he didn’t believe the courts have the authority to override the legislature on redistricting. He wrote that the majority’s ruling “violates separation of powers by effectively placing responsibility for redistricting with the judicial branch, not the legislative branch as expressly provided in our constitution.”
A top GOP redistricting official, Sen. Ralph Hise of Mitchell County, wrote in a statement that he thought the decision was based in politics, not law. North Carolina’s Supreme Court elections have already been among the most intense and expensive in the nation, with outside political groups on both sides of the aisle spending millions to elect their favored candidates, and Hise predicted that will continue.
“This perverse precedent, once set, will be nearly impossible to unwind, as monied interests line up to buy their own justices to set law favorable to them,” Hise said. “I’m certain Democrats will come to regret it.”
What next?
The court’s full ruling is still yet to come, but the short version released Friday did give some important scheduling instructions, specifically on how the maps must now be redrawn.
The legislature will have a second chance to draw them, the justices ruled. And the job of reviewing those maps to see if they pass muster unlike the current maps will be up to the trial court that initially heard the case. That adds an extra layer of intrigue since that trial court panel has a Republican majority, which had originally ruled in favor of the legislature in this case, a ruling now overturned by the Supreme Court.
In addition to the legislature, all other parties involved in the lawsuit will also be allowed to submit their own proposed replacement maps to the trial court for review. Everything must filed within two weeks, by Feb. 18, and then the court will have until Feb. 23 to make a decision.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said in a tweet Friday that the redrawing process will be important to watch over the coming days.
“A healthy democracy requires free elections and the NC Supreme Court is right to order a redraw of unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts,” Cooper tweeted. “More work remains and any legislative redraw must reflect the full intent of this decision.”
The Feb. 23 deadline is right up against the current date for the start of candidate filing for the 2022 primaries, currently scheduled to begin Feb. 24. That could complicate things, especially if either side appeals whatever decision the trial court ultimately makes on the new maps.
In an interview with McClatchy on Friday before the ruling came out, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the court should move back the election, if necessary, to ensure new maps could be in place in time. Holder now leads a group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which was behind this lawsuit as well as a similarly successful one in 2019.
“The one thing that’s most important is to get it right, and to have the elections take place, the line drawing done, have that done, done correctly, and then have the elections take place under those correctly drawn districts,” Holder said.
The court has already moved the primary once, from March until its current date of May 17. Republican lawmakers recently passed a bill that would have pushed it back another three weeks, to June 7, to give more time for the redraw. Cooper vetoed that bill, however, saying the decision should be up to the court, not the legislature.
Reactions around the state
If the maps had stood, The News & Observer previously reported, around one-fourth of the Black lawmakers in the state legislature would have been at risk of losing their seats in this year’s elections. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice — a Durham group whose Executive Director Allison Riggs was a main attorney for the challengers fighting the maps — celebrated the ruling in a written statement to The News & Observer.
“Today’s ruling is an unequivocal win for North Carolina’s Black voters who were most harmed by this extreme partisan gerrymander,” Riggs said. “At every level, North Carolina’s GOP leadership diluted representation of communities of color to entrench their own political power in ways that were both obvious and egregious.”
The GOP legislative leaders who drew the maps did not immediately release a statement of their own on the ruling. But one Republican congressman, Charlotte Rep. Dan Bishop — whose district would have been made safer under the new maps if they hadn’t been ruled unconstitutional — criticized the ruling and urged his followers to vote in this November’s Supreme Court elections, when Republicans will have a chance to flip control of the court.
“What a shock,” Bishop tweeted. “4-3 decision. Only Democrat judges struck down maps drawn by a Republican legislature. For 140 years of unbroken Democrat rule, they failed to see a problem. Elections for the Supreme Court majority are around the corner.”
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(Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent for McClatchy Washington Bureau, contributed to this report.)
