RALEIGH – Leaders of the North Carolina Democratic Party are fuming at Johnston Superior Court Judge Knox Jenkins. Last week he threw out a revised set of North Carolina Senate districts and tweaked the legislature’s House map. In both cases, the result will likely be to create more competitive districts, weakening the Democrats’ traditional advantages from gerrymandering.
Now, the very same Dems who have used contorted political maps to exaggerate their margins in the legislature are accusing Judge Jenkins of partisan motives. It’s a bum rap. Moreover, legislative leaders have only themselves (and, to some degree, incompetent legal representation) to blame for their current predicament.
First, state Democrats and Attorney Gen. Roy Cooper have filed an appeal that, in part, uses the lack of detailed findings in Jenkins’ order to “prove” that he had no constitutional justification for throwing out the legislative maps and drawing his own. This is worse than mistaken – it is a fabrication and an attempt to smear a duly elected official of the state’s judiciary. Experienced attorneys I talked with today told me that Superior Court judges, unlike their appellate counterparts, rarely write lengthy opinions or explain their reasoning in great detail.
Moreover, the state had an opportunity to request a more extensive explanation from the judge early on but failed to do so. And, don’t forget, there is a clock ticking. Jenkins has emphasized that he is acting only to create “interim” maps in time for the 2002 elections, leaving it to the next General Assembly to fashion maps in a deliberative fashion that best comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Stephenson v. Bartlett.
Speaking of, it isn’t hard to figure out the likely grounds for the judge’s decision to throw out the Senate map. It relied on unnecessarily large “clusters” of counties within which to draw new districts. The clear meaning of the high court’s decision earlier in the case was that the fewer the number of counties grouped in this way, the better. The Democrats’ sprawling clusters were designed to retain the ability to gerrymander to protect their incumbents, as evidenced by a district drawn for Sen. Allen Wellons of Johnston County that meandered across Eastern North Carolina. In the GOP plan that Jenkins used as the basis of his plan, the cluster is compact and far smaller, and drawn without regard to partisan or incumbency-protection issues.
Democrats should remember that had they stuck to an agreement struck with Republicans in 2001 to cooperate in drawing legislative districts, it is likely that they would have been far better off than they are now. As it is, the 2002 election cycle could turn out to be the most competitive in a century, with dozens of seats in play and a lot of new faces attracted to the process.
Furthermore, the Democrats’ legal eagles from the N.C. Department of Justice antagonized Jenkins needlessly by dragging out what should have been a brief hearing into a two-day trial, calling witnesses whose oozed contempt for the case and the Supreme Court’s prior ruling, and contradicting the defendants’ own previous argument that it didn’t have enough time to redraw legislative districts – a position they had forcefully stuck to only a few weeks before. If, on the margin, Jenkins tended to accepted the plaintiffs’ arguments over the defendants, you can probably chalk it up to the nature of the adversarial system and the relative performance of the advocates involved.
It’s time for the Democratic Party to stop the smears and name-calling, stop the laughable attempt to portray themselves as the injured party of a gerrymander, and prepare to ask the voters of North Carolina for a mandate to maintain power in Raleigh. If the Democrats deserve it, the new maps will still allow for such a result. The only difference now is that, if the voters feel differently, they now have a realistic chance of making a change.