Court throws out N.C. congressional map

Court throws out N.C. congressional map before election

A three-judge panel ruled that North Carolina's House districts are so gerrymandered that they violate the Constitution.

By SCOTT BLAND

A federal court struck down North Carolina’s congressional map Monday, calling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and throwing the state’s House elections into uncertainty just 10 weeks before Election Day.

It is unusual for courts to throw out a political map so close to an election — but district court judges wrote that the case “presents unusual circumstances.” The Supreme Court vacated a similar decision earlier this year, ordering the district court to retry the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Gill v. Whitford ruling.

A three-judge panel ultimately returned the same decision, finding that Republican state legislators had violated the First Amendment and the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when they drew congressional lines that favored their party. Ten of the state’s 13 House districts are held by Republicans, despite the state's political competitiveness.

Circuit Court Judge James Wynn wrote the opinion, and District Court Judge William Britt concurred. Wynn was appointed by former President Barack Obama and Britt was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter. District Court Judge William Osteen Jr., an appointee of former President George W. Bush, partially dissented from the decision.

What happens next is unclear.

The court will appoint a “special master” to draw a remedial map — but it may also give the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw a “constitutionally compliant” plan, pending further submissions later this week. If so, the court gave the legislature a September 17 deadline to enact that plan — just three weeks from now.

On top of that, North Carolina has already held its 2018 congressional primaries. The court raised the option of candidates running in general election districts that were different than the ones in which their primaries were held. But the judges also floated the possibility that the state could instead hold primaries on Nov. 6, Election Day, and then hold special general election contests at a later date to be determined.

"You don't know the districts you're running and you don't know when you're having an election, so that's my definition of chaos," said Carter Wrenn, a Republican consultant in the state. He added: "It turns the world on it's head."

Candidates in North Carolina have been gearing up for competitive elections in several districts. The DCCC has identified Democrats Dan McCready and Kathy Manning as top battleground candidates, and both of them have raised more money than their Republican opponents. McCready is set to face Republican Mark Harris in the 9th District outside Charlotte, while Manning is running against GOP Rep. Ted Budd in the 13th District. Meanwhile, Rep. George Holding’s (R-N.C.) campaign recently told supporters that he trailed Democrat Linda Coleman in a poll of North Carolina’s 2nd District.

President Donald Trump won between 56 and 58 percent of the vote in all three districts in 2016.

Another uncertain factor is the Supreme Court. The court already prevented a redraw of North Carolina’s congressional map earlier this year, and it could act to set aside the latest decision. But that would require agreement by five of the eight justices currently on the Court, which is shorthanded since Anthony Kennedy retired earlier this summer.

"I'm telling clients that this is a court issue, and that we have to continue to move forward in the current districts with November on our mind," said Andy Yates, a Republican consultant who works with Harris. "Until something more final happens, we have to operate under the assumption that it's preliminary and to stop would be foolish."

The North Carolina case is part of a wide-ranging effort to challenge legislative maps around the country on the grounds that they are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The Supreme Court has long held that racial gerrymandering is illegal, but advocates are still testing the idea of a constitutional limit on gerrymandering done expressly for one party’s political gain. The court declined to rule definitively on the matter or lay down tests in a pair of decisions earlier this year — one challenging Republican-drawn state legislative districts in Wisconsin and another that challenged Democratic-drawn congressional districts in Maryland.

Still, fights over partisan gerrymandering have already changed the course of the 2018 election. This winter, Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court threw out another GOP-drawn congressional map, ruling that legislators violated the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections.

Republicans currently control 12 of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats, but Democrats could have a majority in the delegation after midterm elections under a new court-drawn map, which broke up GOP-leaning districts in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs and the Lehigh Valley.