Judicial Watch: Legislature Keeps Stalling on Fixing Unconstitutional Districts
Will North Carolina’s unconstitutional legislative and Congressional districts ever be fixed? The answer is hazy, while the Supreme Court continues to place remedies ordered by lower courts on hold.
Late last week, a three-judge federal panel ordered the use of new state legislative maps for several districts, drawn by a neutral expert selected to advise the panel on eliminating racial bias in the legislature’s plan. In issuing its ruling, the court found that the NC General Assembly had failed to fully comply with the court’s earlier August 2016 order to eliminate bias in the maps, despite multiple opportunities to do so.
Republican leaders of the General Assembly immediately announced their appeal of that ruling to the US Supreme Court. This legislative leadership has fought at every turn against judicial orders to redraw their unconstitutional maps, since the aggrieved voters’ lawsuits were first filed in 2011.
The day before, the US Supreme Court delayed the order of a different federal court panel. That panel, also composed of federal judges in North Carolina, had directed the General Assembly to immediately redraw its Congressional districts plan. The judges in that case found the Congressional districts drawn by the General Assembly to be unconstitutional due to partisan bias.
The US Supreme Court has never yet thrown out a redistricting plan solely on the basis of purely partisan gerrymandering. (For those who came in late, “gerrymandering” means manipulating legislative district lines in order to give one party an unfair advantage in elections.) However, the current Supreme Court has already accepted two cases from other states, in which lower courts ruled on the question of the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering.
Therefore, it was not surprising that the Supreme Court chose to put a hold on implementation of the North Carolina case decision regarding Congressional maps, while deciding whether to add it to the mix of cases to be reviewed on this issue. This reasoning doesn’t keep the delay from frustrating fair election advocates, who see it as the latest example of the Supreme Court blocking a powerful positive ruling by lower courts on the North Carolina cases.
Those frustrated fair election advocates include conservationists who see more competitive legislative districts as a central part of our efforts to achieve a legislature more willing to listen to citizens’ environmental concerns. That work is still in progress.
