News Clips

“This court gave the General Assembly an opportunity to draw remedial maps and cure their prior constitutional violations,” attorney Eddie Speas wrote for the Common Cause plaintiffs. “Although its process was not without flaws, the Senate has done so. But the House has not.”

Common Cause North Carolina, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the redrafting, will submit a formal comment on the maps later, its deputy director, Brent Laurenz, said. “We were a little disappointed in the lack of public engagement in the process,” he said, and legislators in the House appeared to have tweaked some districts “more than needed.” “You still had politicians walking up there carving up their own districts to their advantage,” he said. “It was illuminating, I guess, to see them go up there.”

Lawyers for Common Cause, which won the recent lawsuit forcing this new redistricting session, say Senate Republicans violated a court order by ordering members of the media and the public to stay out of the area where senators and staff are drawing maps. “As a result of Sen. Hise’s order removing citizens and journalists from the map-drawing area, members of the committee were sitting at computers and amending maps without the public able to know how or why legislators were making changes to proposed districts,” Common Cause deputy director Brent Laurenz said in a press release.

Republicans do not plan to appeal the decision in the case, Common Cause v. Lewis, so the 2020 election will likely be the first in nearly a decade where Democrats have a fighting chance to take control of the state legislature in North Carolina.Common Cause is just the latest in a series of court decisions and ballot initiatives that either undercut Republican gerrymanders or that seek to prevent either party from drawing similarly gerrymandered maps in the future. Court decisions in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have weakened Republican gerrymanders, while ballot initiatives in Michigan and Ohio seek to prevent either party from gerrymandering those states ever again.

“If the justices in Washington, D.C., won’t protect people’s constitutional rights — won’t ensure that all voters have a fair opportunity to participate in our democracy — then the courts of North Carolina will fix the problem themselves,” said Stanton Jones, a chief lawyer in the lawsuit filed by Common Cause, the state Democratic Party and Democratic voters.

Just this week, a unanimous three-judge panel in North Carolina struck down that state’s legislative district maps saying they were unfairly drawn to benefit Republicans -- in violation of the state constitution.The “decision offers a framework for other states to evaluate their own redistricting,” said Stanton Jones, a constitutional lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. representing Common Cause. “There are a number of other state constitutions around the country with free elections clauses similar or identical to the one in North Carolina.”A challenge to Pennsylvania’s congressional map brought by the League of Women Voters reached a similar conclusion last year, with that state’s Supreme Court finding the gerrymandered districts violated state law.The cases show that “state constitutions can be invoked to protect the people of that state,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause.