News Clips

"I think it's the worst decision the North Carolina Supreme Court perhaps has ever made," Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, told reporters.

However, Neal Katyal, who argued against the map on behalf of Common Cause in December, said he believes the high court still has jurisdiction. “It’s a pretty dangerous thing to allow state supreme courts to essentially test drive their opinion and go through oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court and then pull it back,” Katyal, a partner at Hogan Lovells, said in an interview for Bloomberg’s “Cases and Controversies” podcast.

One of the voting rights groups that brought the original challenge to the GOP-drawn map said Friday’s ruling was “one of the gravest assaults on democracy ever in North Carolina.” “Now, extreme partisan gerrymandering has been legalized and it will be weaponized against voters. That’s wrong,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina. “Undoubtedly, the justices who wrote this shameful decision know it’s wrong, as do the self-serving legislators who embrace gerrymandering.”

Lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative maps “will most definitely” be filed, said Wisconsin Common Cause Executive Director Jay Heck. As they prepare to ask the courts to evaluate political maps, lawyers will line up voter plaintiffs from areas where Democratic-leaning precincts were merged into Republican-dominated districts beginning in 2011, Heck said.

Sailor Jones, associate director of Common Cause North Carolina, alluded to those setbacks in addressing the audience. “This time, my friends, the courts will not save us,” Jones said. “Who will?”

Neal Katyal, an attorney for Common Cause, a voting rights group that was among the challengers to the map, disagreed: "The court should, if at all possible, decide this question now, rather than on an emergency basis during the 2024 election cycle."