It's time to halt redistricting gamesmanship

Published January 19, 2018

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, January 18, 2018.

The judges got it right: Give North Carolina’s Republican gerrymandering team another break and we’ll end up in the same mess we’ve been in for years now. “North Carolinians would cast votes in congressional elections conducted under unconstitutional maps in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 — virtually the entire decade,” three federal judges wrote Tuesday as they rejected state legislative leaders’ request for a stay of their order to redraw the map of the state’s 13 congressional districts.

The judges — U.S. Circuit Judge Jim Wynn and District Judges William Osteen and Earl Britt — had earlier ruled, in a 200-plus page decision, that Republican lawmakers had engaged in excessive partisanship in drawing this state’s congressional district boundaries. Those districts amounted to “invidious partisanship” and violate several sections of the U.S. Constitution, they ruled.

The General Assembly’s leaders have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the judges’ ruling, pending resolution of other political gerrymandering cases now before the nation’s high court. But the lower court judges said those cases are substantially different from a legal viewpoint. “Any decision the Supreme Court renders in those cases is highly unlikely to undermine all of the factual and legal bases upon which this court found the 2016 plan violated the Constitution and enjoined further use of that plan,” the judges wrote in their stay rejection.

There was equally strong language in legal briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to uphold the lower court’s order for an immediate redrawing of district lines. Lawyers for the League of Women voters wrote that, “In the 2016 election, Republican congressional candidates received slightly more than 50 percent of the statewide vote in North Carolina. With this slim majority, they won ten of North Carolina’s congressional seats. The resulting partisan asymmetry was the largest in the country in the 2016 election, and the fourth-largest, on net, of all congressional plans nationwide since 1972.”

Lawyers for Common Cause used stronger language: “Not only is there strong public interest in constitutionally drawn legislative districts, but moreover, a stay would tend to legitimize the flagrant partisan abuses of the North Carolina legislature — abuses that have continued now for more than a decade — and would invite legislatures across the nation to follow suit.” The lawyers ended with a nice flourish: “The Court should not signal that it will reward gamesmanship and obstinacy, especially when fundamental constitutional rights are at stake.”

If the Supreme Court agrees with those strong arguments, the General Assembly’s mapmakers will have until next Wednesday to redraw the boundaries of the state’s 13 congressional districts, and by the following Monday, they will need to get the maps and any hearing reports back to the three-judge panel. The legislature’s leaders have complained that the latest remapping will come too close to the filing period for those legislative seats, which begins in February. But the justices responded that the primary itself is in May, and there’s plenty of time for candidates to assess the new district lines before they decide to file.

Another delay should be unthinkable. It would mean that Republican lawmakers will likely succeed in dodging any consequences for their outrageous gerrymandering for a full census cycle — a decade of preventing all of the votes cast in this state from having equal weight. Republican is the third-largest voter registration in North Carolina, trailing both Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Even if those unaffiliated voters lean somewhat Republican, we should have something closer to an even party split in our congressional delegation, not the 10-3 Republican balance in the House delegation.

Rather than continue to find ways to delay creating a fairer legislative map, Republican leaders in the General Assembly might better spend their time crafting the nonpartisan redistricting commission they so fervently supported when they were the minority legislative party.

http://www.fayobserver.com/opinion/20180118/our-view-its-time-to-halt-redistricting-gamesmanship