Next Gerrymandering Battle in North Carolina: Congress

Weeks after a North Carolina court panel ruled that a state legislative map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the State Constitution, a new lawsuit filed in the same court on Friday took aim at another gerrymander — this time, the map of the state’s 13 congressional districts.

The suit, sponsored by a nonprofit group allied with the Democratic Party, claimed that the House map “may be the most extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander in American history” and asked that new districts be drawn in time for primary elections in March. North Carolina voting is split close to evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but Republicans control 10 of the state’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives.

Such suits normally require months and even years of litigation. But the plaintiffs are seeking to build on the three-judge panel’s unanimous ruling on Sept. 3 that partisan gerrymanders of state legislative districts violated the State Constitution’s guarantee of free elections.

That ruling — and the repeated admission by Republicans that the House map had been drawn to lock in the party’s dominance — opens a clear path to a rapid verdict in the suit, R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer with the Washington-based law firm Arnold & Porter who represents the plaintiffs, said in an email.

“This case is as straightforward as they come,” Mr. Jones wrote, “and the gerrymandered congressional map should be struck down immediately and replaced with a new, fair map for the 2020 elections.”

The suit was filed by Democrats from each of the state’s 13 congressional districts. The sponsor of the lawsuit, the National Redistricting Foundation, is an arm of a Democratic group led by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that is seeking to challenge Republican control of the next round of redistricting in 2021.

“For nearly a decade, the people of North Carolina have been forced to vote on manipulated electoral maps that were drawn by Republicans in the Legislature to create a partisan outcome,” Mr. Holder said in a statement. “It’s time for this era of gerrymandering in North Carolina to come to an end.”

State Senator Philip E. Berger, the Republican Senate president, charged in another statement that the lawsuit was part of a national strategy by Mr. Holder to create “a Democratic legislative majority created by Democratic judges.”

The lawsuit is one of only a few challenges to partisan gerrymandering in state courts, but many legal experts anticipate that several similar suits will be filed in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in June that it had no authority to review maps drawn for political advantage. As in North Carolina, the vast majority of state constitutions have provisions that might support challenges to partisan maps.

The lawsuit filed Friday challenges a House map drawn by Republicans in 2016 after some districts were found to be racially gerrymandered. Democrats claim that House districts have been crafted to assure Republican dominance since party leaders first drew them in 2011. The suit argues that the map violates State Constitution clauses guaranteeing free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and equal protection under the law.

If the suit succeeds, it could open the way for Democratic gains in North Carolina. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map last year, Democrats captured nine of 18 House seats, a gain of four from 2016.

North Carolina’s Republican leaders have long said that they drew the state’s congressional map for maximum political gain. One of the principal drafters of the most recent version of the House boundaries boasted in 2016 that he had given Republicans a 10-to-3 edge in seats “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” But Republicans say Democrats gerrymandered the state in their direction for decades when they controlled the Legislature.

Since the House map was first drafted in 2011, it has become an exercise in political recidivism — challenged often in court, struck down three times, but always emerging with a pronounced bias favoring Republicans.

Beginning in 2013, critics charged in state and later federal courts that two of the 13 House districts were racial gerrymanders. The state court disagreed, but the United States Supreme Court upheld the complaints and ordered the districts redrawn in 2016.

Republican leaders not only complied, but also said that the new maps would avoid any accusations of racial bias by being drawn strictly for political gain. That led critics to sue again, charging this time that the entire House map was a partisan gerrymander. A three-judge federal panel struck the map down on those grounds two times before the Supreme Court reversed the panel in June.

Separately on Friday, the former chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Robin Hayes, agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of lying to the F.B.I. about a scheme to influence the state insurance commissioner. Mr. Hayes and three other men were indicted in April on conspiracy and bribery charges stemming from what prosecutors say was an effort to win favorable treatment for an insurance company controlled by one of the men.