RALEIGH – It’s taken a while to get here, but we are finally in the homestretch of North Carolina’s redistricting race.
On Wednesday, Johnston Superior Court Judge Knox Jenkins will hold a hearing in the Stephenson v. Bartlett case that was just remanded back from the N.C. Supreme Court, the majority of which has give Jenkins the authority to set a timetable for a new round of legislative redistricting. State lawmakers will likely be given the first try at redrawing House and Senate maps, albeit with strict deadlines and little room for error. If they fail, Jenkins is empowered to draw the lines himself, a scenario without precedent in North Carolina but with ample precedent elsewhere.
Because the same Democratic majority will be in charge this year that generated last year’s political pornography, it might seem like Republicans have gained little after months of contentious litigation – which, I feel compelled to point out, was ridiculed not only by the Democratic leadership but also by much of North Carolina’s political and media establishment. They never understood the constitutional principles behind the lawsuit, and still continue to misinterpret the result.
Several newspapers, for example, have reported that the Supreme Court struck down multimember districts as violating the federal constitution. The Court pointedly declined to agree with that argument, made by NAACP counsel Julius Chambers. What the majority did do is find a similar violation of the state constitution’s equal protection clause, thus reducing the possibility of a federal appeal (which may or may not have been the intention) and invoking rules to harmonize two coequal provisions of a single state constitution (rather than a state whole-county provision and a federal equal-protection one).
The GOP plaintiffs did win an important victory even though their proposed remedy didn’t get implemented. They have created a situation in which, for the first time, the legislative redistricting process will be guided by clear, neutral, and legally binding principles. These include minimizing the division of counties, keeping district populations within five percentage points of the optimum size, and, perhaps mostly important, “compactness.”
Just about every redistricting expert will tell you that a compactness requirement is the ultimate guarantee that incumbency and partisanship won’t drive the entire process. Compactness is easily measured (total length of district sides divided by area) and tends to drive maps towards recognizing discrete political communities of interest such as towns and neighborhoods.
Assuming that Jenkins is ready to enforce the compactness standard, Democratic line-drawers will have far less flexibility than they would like (of course, so will any future Republican line-drawers, should they ever be in such a situation).
Will Jim Black, Marc Basnight, and other legislative leaders make a good-faith effort to comply with all of these judicial standards? Or will they take their chances with another gerrymander? We’ll find out over the next three weeks.