Attorneys arguing congressional redistricting cases from North Carolina and Maryland say they’ll offer U.S. Supreme Court justices an array of legal theories, hoping one will stick and the court will rule extreme partisan redistricting plans unconstitutional. By chance, the lawyers were speaking Friday at a Common Cause redistricting reform event on the Duke University campus...
The U.S. Supreme Court finally may choose to decide how much partisan advantage is too much when a political party draws congressional districts. The justices agreed Friday to hear arguments in lawsuits involving the congressional maps in North Carolina and Maryland. Districts in both states had been declared unconstitutional by trial court panels in different...
An Aug. 27 federal court ruling throwing out North Carolina’s congressional maps has added new complications to an unsettled election schedule. The decision adds another wrinkle to the state’s 2018 election. Over the course of 321 pages, a three-judge panel raised the prospect that state lawmakers might be forced to redraw congressional maps in the...
North Carolina’s Republican U.S. senators applauded President Trump’s nomination Monday of federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, where Kavanaugh would replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh is Trump’s chance to push the Supreme Court to the right. Kennedy was often a swing vote, but Kavanaugh is embedded in the Republican Party...
The clock on partisan gerrymandering keeps ticking. The U.S. Supreme Court, in an unsigned order issued Monday, sent lawsuits challenging the legality of North Carolina’s congressional districts back to a three-judge panel for reconsideration. The justices ordered the lower court to look at the consolidated lawsuits of Rucho v. Common Cause and League of Women...
A divided U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Ohio’s method of removing inactive voters from election registration rolls shouldn’t affect North Carolina’s maintenance of voting records too much, a spokesman for the state elections board says. The justices ruled 5-4 Monday, June 11, that Ohio complied with the National Voter Registration Act, often called the “motor...
Court intervention in congressional redistricting has some lawmakers wondering whether judges are gaveling their way into legislative territory. On Jan. 9, a panel of three federal judges blocked North Carolina from using its current map during congressional elections. The map, GOP redistricting leaders admitted, was designed to give Republicans an advantage in 10 out of...
The U.S. Supreme Court returned to work in October with plenty of high-profile issues on its docket. Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, oversees analysis of the court’s last term in the latest edition of the Cato Supreme Court Review. During a recent visit to Raleigh, Shapiro briefed a local...
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a ruling by the N.C. Supreme Court that prevented sex offenders from using social media. In Packingham v. North Carolina, a convicted sex offender was arrested for using Facebook. The man, Lester Packingham, claimed a violation of his First Amendment rights. In the court’s opinion, social media websites are an essential forum in the...
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed a lower-court ruling throwing out congressional district maps North Carolina used for the 2012 and 2014 elections. The lower court cited racial gerrymandering. Justices split, 5-3, on whether the ruling should apply to both of the state’s majority-minority congressional districts. New Justice Neil Gorsuch took no part in the...
President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated the youngest Supreme Court justice in a generation, 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch, who sits on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Gorsuch is a Colorado native who was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities. He clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, worked in the Bush administration Justice...
