Federal judges to consider injunction against NC congressional map
A three-judge federal panel will consider this afternoon requests to block North Carolina’s new congressional map for the 2026 elections.
Two sets of plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against the map. Republican legislative leaders are defending the map.
Tied to Senate Bill 249, the map shifts counties between Congressional Districts 1 and 3. Legislative leaders say the changes are designed to help Republicans pick up District 1, a seat held now by Democratic Rep. Don Davis.
One group of plaintiffs led by the North Carolina NAACP and another working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm challenge the map as violating constitutional rights.
The NAACP’s latest court filing targets arguments from legislative lawyers.
“Legislative Defendants do not dispute the facts underlying NAACP Plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction motion,” according to the court filing. “Instead, they erroneously assert that these claims are foreclosed by Rucho v. Common Cause,” a 2019 US Supreme Court precedent case from North Carolina. “But Plaintiffs do not bring partisan gerrymandering claims. None of Plaintiffs’ theories of liability rest on any ‘instinct that groups with a certain level of political support should enjoy a commensurate level of political power and influence’ or concepts of ‘proportional representation,’ nor do they require the court to resolve any ‘question … of degree’ of partisan dominance across a challenged plan.”
“Instead, Plaintiffs’ First Amendment claims of unlawful retaliation and infringement on their right to petition rest on ‘clear, manageable, and politically neutral’ legal standards free of any consideration of partisan fairness or proportionality — indeed, with respect to First Amendment retaliation, the applicable framework is well-established,” the brief continued.
“Plaintiffs’ claims address an unprecedented turn of events beyond any circumstance considered in Rucho: the [North Carolina General Assembly]’s gratuitous decision to redraw its own plan for no other purpose than to retaliate against voters,” the NAACP plaintiffs argued.
The second set of plaintiffs, working with the Elias Law Group, are called the Williams plaintiffs.
“Legislative Defendants (‘Defendants’) fail to rebut Williams Plaintiffs’ showing that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted and necessary,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued in a court filing. “The evidence reveals that the General Assembly used S.B. 249 ‘to entrench itself’ by ‘targeting voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party.’ Even if ‘done for partisan ends,’ because the General Assembly used Black voters as the means to achieve their partisan goal, ‘that constitute[s] racial discrimination.’”
US Appeals Court Judge Alison Jones Rushing and District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder are holding the injunction hearing 12 days before candidates are scheduled to file for North Carolina’s 2026 elections.
The same judges are also considering state lawmakers’ motion to dismiss the legal challenges against the congressional map.
“Plaintiffs demonstrate no prospect of success,” lawyers representing Republican legislative leaders wrote in their latest court filing.
“The NAACP Plaintiffs raise First Amendment and Elections Clause theories explicitly rejected in Rucho v. Common Cause,” a 2019 US Supreme Court precedent case from North Carolina, the court fling explained. “The Williams Plaintiffs attempt to evade Rucho by noting the circumstance of mid-decade redistricting, but the Supreme Court had already dismissed that argument, … and no exceptions can escape Rucho’s holding that ‘partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.’”
“That leaves the Williams Plaintiffs’ intentional discrimination and vote-dilution claims, which likewise show no promise,” legislative lawyers wrote.
“The General Assembly made clear that its objectives were political, not racial,” lawmakers’ lawyers wrote. “The 2025 criteria stated that the body ‘will not engage in discriminatory, race-based districting’ and that ‘data identifying the race of individuals or voters shall not be used in the drafting of districts.’ It also indicated that ‘legislators’ may ‘take partisan considerations into account’ and announced its ‘principal legislative objective … to increase the Republican vote share of Congressional District 1 to outperform the same district in the 2023 Congressional plan.’”
Groups called the North Carolina Black Alliance, Repairers of the Breach, and Black Voters Matter joined five individual voters to file a motion Friday seeking to enter the case with an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief.
They oppose the new congressional map and support an injunction. The three groups “have historically been at the forefront of fighting against laws and legislation that negatively impact the rights of North Carolina’s Black voters,” according to a separate court filing. “Because of the detrimental impact that racially gerrymandered districts have on Black voters statewide, Amici have strong interests in being heard on this issue.”
“North Carolina has a political history that is riddled with racism, discrimination, and inequities that has targeted Black voters statewide,” the groups’ lawyers wrote. The groups offer “to provide the Court with information on North Carolina’s history of race-based gerrymandering and the devastating impact it has on Black voters, particularly those in Eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt region.” Their brief “will shed light on the harmful impact the newly enacted 2025 maps will have on Black communities and Black voters statewide.”
“S.B. 249 is significantly inconsistent with the federal Constitution, namely the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment, the First Amendment, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and should be scrutinized and determined by the Court to be unconstitutional,” according to the court filing.
Plaintiffs in two consolidated 2023 lawsuits had asked the three judges for an expedited review of their challenges to the new congressional map. State legislative leaders who defend the map have asked the judges to dismiss the lawsuits.
An earlier court filing from legislative leaders argues that 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 top lawmakers. 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.”
Both groups of plaintiffs filed motions 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.
Williams plaintiffs 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.”
The motions for an injunction arrived one day after Rushing, Myers, and Schroeder issued an order permitting supplemental complaints challenging the new congressional map.
The judges 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 State Board of Elections is taking no position on the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments. The board filed a brief 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.”
“Federal judges to consider injunction against NC congressional map” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.
