Another lawsuit challenges NC redistricting, this time using new legal theory of 'retaliation'
Opponents of North Carolina’s new congressional districts filed a new legal challenge Monday — one that leans on a new interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in hopes of blocking the map from being used in future elections.
The new districts already face a racial gerrymandering challenge, filed a day after the map passed into law last week.
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The newest challenge focuses on a new legal theory: An allegation that state lawmakers, in drawing the new map, violated the First Amendment rights of eastern North Carolina voters. The new complaint, made as part of an ongoin lawsuit over racial gerrymandering in the state, alleges that lawmakers in this newest version of the map retaliated against eastern North Carolina voters for supporting a Black Democrat in the 2024 elections.
And unless courts strike down the new map, the lawsuit argues, then this could become just the first step in what could be decades of retaliatory redistricting to follow, no matter which party is in charge, with maps redrawn potentially before every single election from here on out.
“It foreshadows a relentless game of whack-a-mole against voters, in which even a hint of dissent will cause the hammer to come down through targeted line-drawing against communities whose voters dare differ from the views of those in power,” the lawsuit says.
Voters in the state’s 1st Congressional District, in northeastern North Carolina, voted narrowly for Republican President Donald Trump in 2024. But those same voters also chose Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis to represent them in Congress. Davis is an Air Force veteran and moderate Democrat who sides with Republicans on immigration, which was one of the most salient issues of the 2024 elections. He defeated Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army officer and defense consultant.
Republicans are now punishing voters in that corner of the state for not supporting their party’s candidate against Davis, the new lawsuit claims. It cites anti-voter retaliation as a reason the map should be blocked from being used in 2026 or beyond, calling it a violation of the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The lawsuit was brought by individual voters from eastern North Carolina as well the state chapters of the NAACP and anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause, with legal help from the ACLU and Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has successfully sued the state legislature for gerrymandering in the past.
Spokespeople for House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is the second legal challenge filed against the new map, as part of an older lawsuit against the districts Republicans drew in 2023 for use in lat year's election. And more challenges could be coming; longtime racial justice advocate Bishop William Barber II, who is from Goldsboro, one of the towns targeted by the new map, has said his group Repairers of the Breach plans to announce additional legal action this weekend.
The new congressional districts eliminated what was North Carolina’s only competitive district, turning it into one that’s expected to elect a Republican candidate in 2026 and beyond.
The old version of the district had had more Black voters than any of the state’s other congressional seats, but the new district is substantially less racially diverse. Black voters in North Carolina are overwhelmingly affiliated with the Democratic Party, and many opponents of the maps have alleged racial gerrymandering.
“This wasn’t redistricting. It was payback,” state NAACP President Deborah Dicks Maxwell, said in a written statement Tuesday about her group's new challenge. “Lawmakers used their power to silence Black voters who dared to speak through the ballot box. That’s retaliation, plain and simple.”
Also Tuesday, Davis — the Democratic congressman targeted by the new map — filed a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting. His bill would be retroactive, meaning that if it became law, he'd be allowed to run for reelection under the map he won on in 2024, when the seat was competitive.
That bill is almost certainly doomed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Not only would it foil GOP-led efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of power in North Carolina, Texas and other states, but it would also allow Democratic efforts in California to draw districts that would push Republicans out of power. Davis’ bill would create several loopholes to allow mid-decade redistricting, including if it was ordered by a ballot referendum, which is what California Democrats are currently pushing for.
Politics and race in NC
Republican leaders have said they did purposefully target Democratic voters, which they think should be allowed by courts, but that they didn’t look at racial data when drawing the new district lines.
Democrats and other critics have said that regardless of whether racial data was used, it doesn’t change the fact that the new map targets one of the state’s few Black lawmakers by removing thousands of Black voters from his district.
Courts have largely ruled that North Carolina lawmakers may discriminate in redistricting for partisan reasons, but not for racial reasons. Complicating matters is the extent to which politics and race are closely linked in North Carolina — and particularly in rural areas like most of those in the two eastern districts affected by the most recent round of redistricting.
The new map’s GOP sponsor has said he doesn’t think there’s enough of a link between race and politics for the opponents to successfully argue that drawing a map using political data is also unconstitutional for racial reasons.
Similar logic prevailed last month in an unrelated lawsuit over racial gerrymandering, also focused on eastern North Carolina, which had challenged two districts for the state senate as unconstitutional.
In that case Federal District Court Judge James Dever ruled in the GOP’s favor in that earlier redistricting lawsuit. He wrote that there wasn’t enough evidence of racially polarized voting for him to strike down the state Senate districts. Dever had spent years as one of the main lawyers in North Carolina gerrymandering lawsuits for Republicans, before President George W. Bush nominated him to be a federal judge.
GOP lawmakers are highly likely to point to Dever's recent ruling in that other case, as they seek to defend the new congressional map against similar accusations of racial gerrymandering.
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