Congressional map challengers defend suit against motion to dismiss

Critics challenging North Carolina’s new congressional map in federal court filed paperwork Friday defending their lawsuit against Republican state legislative leaders’ motion to dismiss the case.

The court filings arrived two days after a three-judge trial court panel heard arguments for and against an injunction that would block the map’s use for 2026 elections.

The same panel issued a 181-page order Thursday rejecting all other aspects of two federal lawsuits challenging North Carolina’s election maps. The ruling upheld all challenged state House and Senate election districts, along with congressional districts unaffected by the new map adopted last month.

Candidate filing for North Carolina’s 2026 elections is scheduled to begin Dec. 1.

“The circumstances of North Carolina’s 2025 congressional redistricting are unprecedented, but the bedrock First Amendment principles supporting NAACP Plaintiffs’ supplemental complaint are not,” wrote lawyers for plaintiffs led by the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and left-of-center activist group Common Cause.

The NAACP plaintiffs countered state lawmakers’ arguments that the challenge to the new congressional map involves complaints about partisan gerrymandering. Both state and federal courts have ruled in recent years that they will not consider those complaints.

“Plaintiffs do not bring partisan gerrymandering claims,” the NAACP plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote. “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants engaged in gratuitous, retaliatory redistricting to replace the legislature’s own 2023 Congressional Plan for no other reason than to burden voters (including Plaintiffs) for their protected speech, association, and petitioning conduct. By removing Plaintiffs from their congressional districts, Defendants created concrete harm that chills Plaintiffs’ associational and petitioning rights by disrupting their political association and advocacy and blocking final resolution of their pending challenge to Congressional District 1 (‘CD1’).”

The court filing labels the new map tied to Senate Bill 249 “unlawful retaliation” and a burden on the plaintiffs’ “First Amendment rights to petition the courts and their congressional representatives.”

“Defendants’ decision to redistrict is retaliatory, just as any government action aimed at chilling protected speech is retaliatory,” the court filing argued.

“Dismissing these claims would turn redistricting into a First Amendment-free zone … and would allow map drawers to use redistricting simply to ‘evade important constitutional restraints’ protecting free speech, association, and the right to petition,” the NAACP plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.

Top lawmakers filed a motion on Nov. 4 to dismiss challenges against the new map from the NAACP plaintiffs and a second group called the Williams plaintiffs. Lawyers from Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm represent the Williams plaintiffs.

“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.”

US Appeals Court Judge Allison Jones Rushing and US District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder set a Nov. 28 deadline for final court filings related to the motion to dismiss the two lawsuits.

The judges have not indicated when they plan to issue a decision about the legislators’ motion or the requested injunction.

The new map shifted voters between Congressional Districts 1 and 3 in eastern North Carolina. Legislative leaders justified the shift as a way to increase the likelihood of electing a Republican in District 1, now represented by Democratic Rep. Don Davis. Flipping District 1 from Democrat to Republican could boost the GOP’s majority in North Carolina’s US House delegation from 10-4 to 11-3.

The congressional map challenge involving Districts 1 and 3 is the only piece of the lawsuits from the NAACP plaintiffs and Williams plaintiffs that remains active at the trial court level. Thursday’s order struck down all other challenges to state congressional and legislative maps.

The decision arrived four months after the three-judge panel conducted a trial in Winston-Salem.

“Having considered the entire record, judged the credibility of each witness, and weighed all the evidence, the Court finds that Plaintiffs have failed to prove any of their claims against Defendants regarding the 2023 redistricting,” the judges wrote.

“Congressional map challengers defend suit against motion to dismiss” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.