North Carolina’s latest legal fight over its election map moved closer to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with a three-judge federal panel expected to reject a state call that its current congressional district lines remain in place for the March 15 primary. The state Supreme Court and a three-judge panel of state judges upheld both the congressional and legislative districts.
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Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent, asked why it was “permissible to draw boundaries to provide adequate representation” for rural voters, union members, Hasidic Jews, Polish Americans and Republicans, but not for “members of the very minority group whose history in the United States gave birth to the Equal Protection Clause”.
In 2014, less than a month before the general election, a divided Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision that found some of North Carolina’s new election laws unconstitutional.
In its court filing requesting the ruling be stayed until after the March 15 primary, attorneys for the state said the task of re-drawing districts and re-printing ballots in time for the primary would come at a huge price to taxpayers.
“A voting district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when a redistricting plan ‘cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to separate voters into different districts on the basis of race, and that the separation lacks sufficient justification, ‘” Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote in the February 5 ruling, citing the majority 1993 opinion in Shaw v. Reno authored by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as part of a narrow 5-4 majority.
The judges have ordered North Carolina not to hold congressional elections before redrawing the districts.
Republican lawmakers said they’ll appeal.
Given the calendar, the high court could again side with election logistics. In North Carolina and other Southern states, that’s a hard distinction to make. Political motivations are allowed by the court; race, as a predominant factor, is not. The 12th District, which once traveled all the way from Charlotte to Durham, was debated by the U.S. Supreme Court several times during the 1990s, when it was first created.
“We don’t know what the impacts of this decision will be yet, but for now I am concentrating on doing my job as the Congresswoman for the 12th District, and running a campaign on the basis of my strong record of doing what is right for North Carolina and my District”, she said.
The courts have long held that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional while racial gerrymandering is not.
In 2011, Republican lawmakers increased the black population to 53 percent in the 1st and 51 percent in the 12th.
The lawyers filed a response Tuesday to the state of North Carolina’s request to delay the court’s order for new lines to be drawn.
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“Pulling one of them out could make the districts (affected) a little more competitive”, Bitzer said, but would not likely mean any change in which party represents the districts.
