NC Republicans appeal gerrymandering decision to US Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court should overrule the recent state court decision on gerrymandering, North Carolina Republican lawmakers told the high court Friday.
The N.C. Supreme Court recently found that the legislature’s version of districts for North Carolina’s 14 U.S. House seats was unconstitutionally gerrymandered. GOP lawmakers redrew the map but a trial court found that it was not good enough, so that court had a panel of outside experts draw a replacement map instead.
N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore announced the emergency appeal Friday, saying he didn’t believe the state court should have that power.
“The United States Constitution is clear – state legislatures, not state judges, are responsible for setting the rules governing elections,” Moore said in a press release. “By striking the General Assembly’s congressional map and redrawing their own, with the help of Democrat partisans, the courts have, once again, violated the separation of powers.”
One of the groups fighting the legislature in the case, the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, called the appeal “disappointing, but not surprising.”
“As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court said state courts are empowered to rely on state constitutions and state law to reign in partisan gerrymandering,” the coalition said in a press release Friday. “We are confident this specious attempt to undermine our judiciary will be rejected.”
That 2019 case involved North Carolina and Wisconsin. In it, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering was not an issue for federal courts to rule on but that state courts could.
Michael Bitzer, a Catawba College political scientist who studies state politics and recently published a book on North Carolina’s lengthy history of gerrymandering and the associated court battles, said it has been fairly obvious that the legislature was going to ask the nation’s highest court to take up this case.
But the bigger question, he said, is whether the justices actually do so. Because to rule in favor of what Republican lawmakers are arguing, Bitzer said, the court would be required to overturn one of its own relatively recent precedents, from 2015 in a case involving Arizona.
But “it’s within the realm of possibilities,” he said, since the legislature’s argument is largely similar to a dissent in that case written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee. The majority in that 2015 Arizona case, on the other hand, consisted of the four more liberal justices on the court at the time — it was written by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bitzer said — plus Anthony Kennedy, who was the court’s swing vote on political cases until his retirement in 2018.
“That’s what Republicans are appealing on,” Bitzer said of the the dissent in that case. “Roberts was in the minority. But now there’s a totally new court. .... Ginsburg and Kennedy have been replaced by conservatives. Elections matter, and so do Supreme Court appointments.”
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 4:55 PM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
