NC lawmakers ordered to pay $100,000 after gerrymandering court loss
Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $100,000 related to one of the gerrymandering cases the legislature lost last year, a panel of judges ruled Wednesday.
The N.C. Democratic Party and the anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause NC sued Republican lawmakers over the maps used to elect members of the state legislature. Now, their lawyers at the Washington, D.C., law firm Arnold & Porter will receive $67,000 from the state legislature to cover costs from the trial.
The money is mostly for paying for the fees expert witnesses charged, or for depositions of numerous other witnesses.
North Carolina will also have to pay more than $33,000 to cover the costs of a Stanford University professor and gerrymandering expert, Nathan Persily.
Persily helped the judges review the new maps passed under court order, after the lawsuit ended, to make sure they didn’t contain further constitutional violations. His costs include not just the time he spent working on the maps, but also costs for him to travel to and stay in Raleigh for a time last fall.
The money is in addition to what Republican lawmakers spent on their own lawyers for this and another recent gerrymandering case over the state’s congressional lines.
Both recent gerrymandering cases focused on the concept of partisan gerrymandering. The judges gave credence to arguments that GOP lawmakers had drawn the maps to purposefully suppress the political power of Democratic voters while inflating the influence of Republican voters.
Both the congressional maps and the state maps were re-drawn this past fall. The new maps replaced maps that were themselves drawn — under different court orders — due to earlier racial gerrymandering cases that challenged maps Republicans drew in 2011.
Aside from court-ordered redistricting, states only redraw their lines every 10 years, after new Census data is available. Whichever political party wins control of the state legislature in the 2020 elections will be in charge of the next round of redistricting in 2021, when North Carolina is expected to gain another seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Orders to pay the other side’s legal fees in redistricting cases aren’t unheard of. In 2017, for instance, after a judge ruled the legislature had unconstitutionally redrawn districts for the Wake County Board of Elections and Wake County Commissioners, the school board and state legislature were ordered to pay more than $400,000 to their opponents.
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This story was originally published January 22, 2020 at 4:22 PM with the headline "NC lawmakers ordered to pay $100,000 after gerrymandering court loss."
