Legislators seek to dismiss challenges of new NC congressional map
North Carolina legislative leaders are asking a three-judge panel to dismiss two lawsuits challenging North Carolina’s new congressional map. A court filing Tuesday says the plaintiffs make partisan gerrymandering claims that are barred by federal court precedent.
“Supreme Court precedent is clear ‘that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,’” wrote lawyers representing legislative leaders. The court filing quoted the US Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in the North Carolina case Rucho v. Common Cause.
“That holding applies to all partisan gerrymandering claims, regardless of how they are packaged,” legislators’ lawyers added. “Resisting that point, the two sets of challengers here (respectively, the ‘Williams Plaintiffs’ and ‘NAACP Plaintiffs’ and, collectively, ‘Plaintiffs’) challenge North Carolina’s 2025 congressional redistricting plan on the ground that the General Assembly ‘considered whether voters voted for or against President Trump and Republican congressional candidates in 2024.’ While these claims bear different labels and rest on various indiscriminately cited constitutional provisions, they are in fact partisan gerrymandering claims that should be dismissed.”
The motion to dismiss arrived a day after top lawmakers and the two sets of plaintiffs challenging the congressional map filed competing proposals for resolving their legal dispute.
Both sets of plaintiffs also seek an injunction to block the new map’s use in 2026 elections. They are also asking the three-judge panel to expedite the case to reach a decision about an injunction by Dec. 1.
Republican state legislative leaders suggested an alternative plan that could resolve both lawsuits completely by the same date.
Both groups of plaintiffs filed motions Friday seeking injunctions.
“In a virtually unprecedented move, the [North Carolina General Assembly] engaged in mid-decade redistricting entirely on its own initiative,” wrote lawyers representing the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, Common Cause, and individual plaintiffs. “No new Census compelled it. No intervening court order prompted it. No legitimate state interest justified it. The NCGA targeted Congressional District 1 in the redistricting process for one reason alone: to punish the voters in North Carolina’s historic Black Belt, including Plaintiffs, who had challenged the previous districting plan in this Court and who exercised their political power to oppose the map-drawers’ preferred candidates and policies in 2024.”
The new map linked to Senate Bill 249 “targets the heart of the Black Belt — Congressional District 1 (‘CD1’), already challenged in its prior configuration as intentionally discriminatory,” the NAACP-led plaintiffs argued. “SB249 exacerbates the already-demonstrated vote dilution in CD1 by massively reducing the district’s Black voting-age population and eviscerating North Carolina’s longstanding Black Belt district.”
“Plaintiffs seek a preliminary injunction on two grounds supported by Defendants’ own statements preceding and during the legislative process: retaliation in violation of the First Amendment and frustrating Plaintiffs’ right to petition the government for redress of grievances,” the court filing continued. “SB249 is a paradigmatic act of retaliation, punishing Plaintiffs for their protected political expression, association, and petitioning activity, specifically their organizing, voting, and litigating in 2024.”
The previous congressional map, drawn in 2023 and used in last year’s elections, already had been the subject of two lawsuits.
“[B]y replacing the challenged 2023 map before this Court could rule in Plaintiffs’ pending case, the NCGA has attempted to subvert judicial review altogether, inviting an endless loop of un-remediable injury in violation of the First Amendment right to petition,” the NAACP’s lawyers wrote.
A second group identified as the Williams plaintiffs work with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm. They filed a separate request for an injunction.
“Over the course of just over 48 hours, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the state’s fifth congressional plan in four years — an unnecessary, mid-decade redistricting plan that intentionally dismantles CD-1, a historic Black opportunity district that has elected a Black representative to Congress for more than 30 years,” the Williams plaintiffs argued. “This targeted strike was accomplished by redistributing voters based on their race: not only does the 2025 Plan move several counties with significant Black populations out of the district while moving in primarily white counties from CD-3, Black voters were twice as likely as Democratic voters to be moved out of CD-1.”
“Both the means and the ends are clear: once again, North Carolina has ‘intentionally target[ed] a particular race[] … because its members vote for a particular party, in a predictable manner,’ which ‘constitutes discriminatory purpose,’” according to the court filing.
“The General Assembly’s voluntary, unnecessary, mid-decade revision of a legislatively-enacted congressional plan must also be enjoined as a per se violation of the U.S. Constitution, on at least two grounds,” the Williams plaintiffs continued. “First, the use of five-year-old Census data results in present-day population deviations that are not otherwise justified by a legitimate state objective, in violation of Article I, Section 2 and the Fourteenth Amendment’s one-person one-vote guarantee. The legal fiction that census data remains the same for the remainder of the decade is intended to avoid the need for constant redistricting, not to enable it.”
“Second, the General Assembly’s unnecessary and unjustified consideration of race and partisanship violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” the court filing added. “Any leeway states have to consider race and pursue partisan advantage in the course of mandatory post-census redistricting falls away entirely when they engage in voluntary mid-cycle redistricting of a legislatively-enacted plan.”
“A preliminary injunction is necessary to ensure relief in advance of the 2026 midterm elections,” Williams plaintiffs argued. “If elections proceed under the 2025 Plan, Black voters in northeast North Carolina will be irreparably harmed, deprived of their fundamental constitutional rights to vote free from discrimination.”
Both sets of plaintiffs submitted a proposed schedule that would call on legislative leaders to respond to the injunction request by Nov. 14. A court hearing would take place as early as Nov. 19.
The schedule “would allow a decision on or before December 1, 2025 — minimizing disruption to the primary schedule announced by the State Board of Elections and consistent with the Court’s October 30, 2025 Order expressing its intent to resolve all claims expeditiously,” according to the court filing.
Under the plaintiffs’ proposal, a trial covering the allegations against the new congressional map would take place in May 2026.
The motions for an injunction arrived one day after US Appeals Court Judge Alison Jones Rushing and District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder issued an order Thursday permitting supplemental complaints challenging the new congressional map.
It shifts boundary lines of Congressional Districts 1 and 3. The Republican-led General Assembly justified the change as a way to pick up an additional GOP seat in the US House of Representatives. Critics say the new map violates constitutional restrictions against racial gerrymandering.
Rushing, Myers, and Schroeder held a six-day trial this summer on challenges to the congressional map used in 2024 elections, along with state House and Senate election maps. The judges have not issued a decision in the case.
“The court … concludes that for reasons of judicial efficiency, to avoid needless delay and repetition of evidence, and to preserve the extensive trial record in this case, Plaintiffs’ motions for leave to supplement their complaints should be granted,” according to last week’s court order.
“In order to permit the court to rule as expeditiously as possible, the parties shall meet and confer and propose an abbreviated schedule for the prompt resolution of the claims in the supplemental complaints,” the order continued.
The judges set a Monday deadline for parties to submit a proposed schedule for resolving the legal dispute.
State legislative leaders offered the court two options for moving forward. Under the first option, the three-judge panel would reopen its trial for two days starting Nov. 17 or Nov. 19. Under the second option, lawmakers would go along with the schedule for an injunction hearing on Nov. 19.
State lawmakers approved the new map as part of SB 249. They redrew two congressional districts in eastern North Carolina. Both districts are now designed to elect Republicans, giving the GOP a likely 11-3 majority in the state’s US House delegation. That would mean a net gain of one seat for Republicans.
Plaintiffs in the case NAACP v. Berger outlined their concerns about the new map in a proposed supplemental complaint.
“In October of 2025, with breathtaking speed and disregard for tradition, public participation, and accountability, the North Carolina General Assembly took the unprecedented step of gratuitously redistricting two of its own hand-crafted U.S. Congressional districts,” the complaint argued. “This rash action imposes the fifth new Congressional map in six years on North Carolinians. The 2025 redistricting was not prompted by the release of a decennial Census, a court order, a preference to replace a court-drawn map, or any other legitimate state interest or independent intervening cause. Rather, this extraordinary action was entirely discretionary and undertaken with precision to target Black voters in North Carolina’s Northeastern Black Belt region who, at overwhelming rates in 2024, joined together to vote against the preferred candidates and policies of those leading the General Assembly.”
Plaintiffs in the second case, titled Williams v. Hall or Williams v. Blackwell, raised similar objections. These plaintiffs are working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm.
“Over the course of just over 48 hours, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the state’s fifth congressional plan in four years — an unnecessary, mid-decade redistricting that targets a historic Black opportunity district that has elected a Black representative to Congress for more than 30 years,” the proposed supplemental complaint argued.
“North Carolina gained a congressional district after the 2020 Census, almost entirely due to an increase in the state’s minority population,” the complaint continued. “But the General Assembly has gone to great lengths to ensure that the increase in minority population does not translate into any increase in minority electoral opportunity. In a series of successive redistricting maps, the General Assembly has systemically rolled back minority voting strength across the state.”
Republican state legislative leaders defended the 2023 maps in a brief filed earlier this year.
“Plaintiffs’ principal remaining theory is that, after persuading both the United States and North Carolina Supreme Courts that its political redistricting choices should not be subject to judicial review, the General Assembly took no advantage of its successes and configured the 2023 senate and congressional plans based not on politics, but on race,” lawmakers’ lawyers wrote. “This argument is implausible.”
Lawmakers referenced the US Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in the North Carolina case Rucho v. Common Cause. The high court decided in Rucho that it would no longer consider partisan gerrymandering complaints.
“The Supreme Court warned that, after Rucho, plaintiffs will attempt to ‘repackage a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference’ and thereby ‘sidestep [the] holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable,’” legislative lawyers wrote. “To prevent this, the Court held that racial-intent claims will typically require direct evidence of racial motive and that claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot succeed unless the challenger is able ‘to disentangle race from politics.’”
“Here, Plaintiffs will neither present direct evidence of racial motive nor prove that race, rather than politics, explains the district lines,” lawmakers’ lawyers argued. “That should be no surprise. The General Assembly ‘made the laudable effort to disregard race altogether in the redistricting process.’ Plaintiffs cannot prove a motive that did not exist.”
The panel “can do much of its work by asking a simple question: Is it more likely that the General Assembly chose to use racial data after finally persuading courts of its right to use political data or, instead, that the Plaintiffs are trying to sidestep Rucho and Harper by dressing partisan-gerrymandering claims in racial garb? The answer to that question is clear.”
Harper v. Hall was the 2023 NC Supreme Court decision that ended partisan gerrymandering claims in North Carolina’s state courts.
The State Board of Elections is taking no position on the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments. The board filed a brief in the case to remind federal judges about North Carolina’s upcoming election calendar.
Candidate filing for statewide primary elections begins Dec. 1 and lasts through Dec. 19. Absentee ballots are scheduled for distribution on Jan. 13, 2026, ahead of the March 3, 2026, primary.
“If changes to the current district maps are made as a result of this litigation, the impact on the elections calendar will depend on the scope and timing of such an order,” the elections board’s lawyers wrote. “To accommodate changes to the current maps without delaying any administrative dates or deadlines for ballot preparation and distribution for the March 2026 primary, the State Board would need to receive the new map by December 1, 2025, which is approximately six weeks (38-42 days) before absentee voting is set to begin for the March 2026 primary.”
“Legislators seek to dismiss challenges of new NC congressional map” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.
