Get ready for more gerrymandering suits in NC, former Obama AG Holder says in UNC speech
Unless Republican lawmakers surprise him by embracing legal reforms, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says, he will likely be back in North Carolina courts soon, backing yet another anti-gerrymandering lawsuit.
“North Carolina really is, in some ways, ground zero for partisan and racial gerrymandering,” Holder said Friday in a speech to the UNC School of Law. “And the only way, I think, to crack that which is happening in North Carolina is through the courts, and use those decisions to get a more fair Congressional delegation from North Carolina.”
Holder, the first Black attorney general in U.S. history, led the U.S. Department of Justice under former president Barack Obama. He now chairs a group called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which helped bankroll two gerrymandering lawsuits here in 2019 — the first against our state legislative districts, and the second against our U.S. House districts.
After the first lawsuit proved that GOP lawmakers had drawn their own districts in a way that unconstitutionally disenfranchised Democratic voters, legislative leaders agreed to redraw both the state-level and congressional maps before the 2020 elections.
In 2020, the results of those 2019 anti-gerrymandering lawsuits were a mixed bag for Democrats. They failed to take back a majority in either chamber of the state legislature, despite the more favorable maps, but they did flip two Republican-held U.S. House seats, centered around Raleigh and Greensboro.
Holder’s speech Friday was part of UNC Law’s annual Weil Lecture on American Citizenship. In addition to redistricting, Holder spoke about voter ID and other voting rights issues that he said stem from a long history of racism in American politics.
But now that Democrats hold Congress and the White House, Holder said, he hopes they pass a sweeping voting rights bill named after the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis — even if it means killing the filibuster, if Senate Republicans try to hold it up.
“I do not believe the Senate should use the filibuster, which was once used to stop civil rights legislation, to now stop these critical bills from becoming law,” he said.
Fair maps, or Democratic maps?
Holder said that while he’s a Democrat, his intention isn’t to gerrymander in favor of Democrats but rather to get fair maps.
In North Carolina, for instance, it’s rare for U.S. House races to be decided by less than 10%, even though the statewide races for president or governor can come down to just 1% or 2% of the vote. Holder said races for Congress or state legislatures should also be competitive, but gerrymandering often has the opposite intent.
“No matter what political party you support, what policies you advocate, your voice will be stronger if politicians are required to be more responsive to your needs,” he said.
Pat Ryan, a spokesman for North Carolina’s Republican Senate leader Phil Berger, called Holder a “charlatan” who doesn’t really believe what he says.
“Eric Holder is the worst kind of phony partisan operator,” Ryan wrote in an email. “He pretends to care about ideals like ‘fair maps,’ but it’s just a veneer to hide his true partisan goal of electing more Democrats.”
In the 2018 elections, the PAC associated with Holder’s anti-gerrymandering group gave the N.C. Democratic Party half a million dollars. It also gave $5,200 to civil rights attorney Anita Earls, who ended up winning her race that year for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court and thus might be in a position to rule on a gerrymandering lawsuit in the future.
“Does that sound fair to you?” Ryan wrote.
2021 redistricting in NC
New Census results are slated to come out this year, which states must use to draw their political maps for the next decade. Holder said he’s keeping a close eye on several states with a history of unconstitutional gerrymandering, like North Carolina.
“We’ll come back and I think we’ll keep winning, as many times as it takes,” Holder said.
However, Republican leaders here have previously said they plan to draw the new maps this year using many of the same rules and procedures that were put in place by the 2019 court order from the Holder-backed lawsuit.
That was by far the most transparent redistricting process in North Carolina history, as conducted by either party, the News & Observer reported in 2019.
“Voters should know that the legislature is committed to a process that’s open and transparent,” Berger told The N&O after the 2020 elections, when Republicans held onto their majority going into this new redistricting cycle.
State law bans the governor from being able to veto redistricting maps — a law, ironically, that Democrats passed in the 1990s when now-Gov. Roy Cooper was a powerful state senator. So that means the new maps will be entirely up to Republican lawmakers to draw on their own, without needing any bipartisan consensus.
Berger said he doesn’t expect Democrats will necessarily like the maps, but that he and his fellow Republican lawmakers will still “be committed to making decisions that are based on criteria that is not inherently political or advantageous to one party or the other.”
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This story was originally published February 19, 2021 at 12:36 PM with the headline "Get ready for more gerrymandering suits in NC, former Obama AG Holder says in UNC speech."
