Court Denies Legislative Leaders' Request for Earlier Ruling on Redistricting Case | Eastern North Carolina Now

    UPDATED, 5:50 p.m. The court issued an order denying the legislators' request. The court said the Jan. 5 hearing would open with a presentation by the special master explaining his maps. After that, each side would get one hour to argue its position.

    Top legislative leaders are asking a three-judge panel to move up its hearing date in the latest round of legal wrangling over redrawn N.C. House and Senate election maps. Legislators would like to appear before the panel as early as next week.

    In court documents filed Monday in Covington v. North Carolina, lawmakers ask judges to move a hearing now scheduled for Jan. 5 up to a date "on or before" Dec. 22. Their goal is to have the three-judge panel issue its next ruling in the case by Jan. 10. That's the date lawmakers are scheduled to return to Raleigh for a special session.

    "Issuing a final ruling on or before January 10, 2018, will protect the State's ability to seek meaningful Supreme Court review and take additional legislative action if necessary," according to the document filed by the legislators' attorney, Phillip Strach.

    At issue for the three-judge panel is a final ruling on legislative election maps approved on Aug. 31 for the 2018 elections. The judges ordered those new maps after ruling earlier maps unconstitutional because of racial gerrymandering. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling in its last term.

    Critics of the original maps raised similar complaints about the revised maps. The three-judge panel has issued no ruling on the new maps. Judges did signal their concerns about the legislature's revisions and appointed Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily as a "special master" in the case. The judges instructed Persily to develop his own maps.

    Persily submitted his plans Dec. 1. Under the current court schedule, more than one month would elapse between that filing and the three-judge panel's next consideration of the case. Current schedules call for candidates to begin filing for legislative elections on Feb. 12.

    "Legislative defendants have previously notified the Court that the legislature stands ready to exercise its constitutional right to re-draw any districts in the 2017 plans that this Court declares unlawful," according to the legislature's attorneys. "They have also notified the Court that they intend to seek Supreme Court review in the event this Court enters an order finding districts in the 2017 plans unlawful."

    "Legislative defendants are concerned that the Court's current schedule will not permit sufficient time for the legislature to seek meaningful Supreme Court review or exercise its constitutional prerogative to re-draw any districts found unlawful," the document continues. "The Court has not scheduled a hearing on the special master's report until January 5, 2018. The State has already notified the Court that new plans would need to have been in place by December 15, 2017, to allow sufficient time for review by the Court and implementation before the currently scheduled filing period.

• "Had the Court already issued its final ruling on the Objections, the legislature could have acted to re-draw any unlawful districts while the Court's special master did his work. In that event, the Court could have now been reviewing districts re-drawn by the legislature as well as the special master's report.
• "Instead, even if the Court issues a final ruling on the Objections soon after the January 5 hearing, the legislature will very little time to re-draw any districts while leaving time for this Court's review and implementation by the elections board prior to the start of the filing period.

    "Such a result would be contrary to the Supreme Court's admonition that 'a lawful, legislatively enacted plan [is] preferable to one drawn by the courts,'" according to the document.