LEGISLATIVE REDISTRICTING

Winston-Salem Journal Editorial
July 21, 2003

Last week's N.C. Supreme Court ruling on legislative redistricting should make one thing perfectly clear to the General Assembly: It's time to hand redistricting to an independent commission.

Even legislators who oppose the change as a diminution of the legislature's constitutional authority should understand the meaning of the court's latest rulings. The legislature no longer has the authority to redraw district lines. The Supreme Court has usurped that authority, taking it for the judicial branch.

In a series of rulings last year and this, the court has created its own set of redistricting criteria. Some are based on the state constitution, others are in direct contradiction to the constitution and others come from Congress and outside courts, both federal and state.

The result has been something akin to a coup d'etat by the Republican court, taking the constitutional authority to redistrict away from the General Assembly, which happens to be controlled, for the most part, by Democrats.

The whole redistricting affair, from the first maps produced by Democrats in 2001 to the judge-shopping performed by Republican legislators, to the Supreme Court's contradictory rulings, to the trial court judge's admission that his own maps were unconstitutional, has been a civic disaster. Legislators have acted in their own self-interest while judges have injected their decisions with obvious partisanship.

Redistricting, therefore, is doing great harm to the public confidence in its system of government.

Legislators should consider the opportunity provided by a constitutional amendment creating an independent commission. In writing the amendment, they could clarify the criteria that are to be used in drawing districts. They could assign relative importance to factors such as compactness, contiguity and community. They might also define those terms.

They could also eliminate the confusion created when the state Supreme Court rejected the legislature's 2001 plans because they divided counties, which the state constitution doesn't allow. The same court then demanded that counties be divided to create single-member districts.

Much thought will have to go into deciding who would serve on the independent commission and the information that would be made available to them. The commission would work best if it were denied all data on partisan voter registration and the residences of individual legislators. The new system should operate to draw districts that best serve the interests of the voters of North Carolina, not partisan or individual interests.

Legislators have an opportunity to snatch back some of the control over redistricting that they once had, but which has been taken away by an activist and partisan court.