Lawmakers seek new court hearings on voter ID, redistricting

North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore noted in a news release that GOP lawyers are asking justices to revisit decisions made under a previous Democratic majority. As of this month, Republican justices hold a 5-2 majority on the high court.

Moore called the previous court “activist” and said the newly Republican court should "correct the errors" by rehearing the cases and overturning the prior decisions.

In a new legal filing, lawyers for the Republican lawmakers argued the court’s decision in a redistricting case known as Harper v. Hall wrongfully infringed on state lawmakers’ ability to determine boundaries of legislative and congressional districts.

The Supreme Court, under its previous makeup, ruled in December that state Senate boundaries already once redrawn by Republican legislators were tainted by partisan bias and must be redrawn. And it upheld a congressional map drawn by trial judges but opposed by Republicans.

A separate filing by the Republicans argues the proper legal standard was not applied in a decision upheld by the state Supreme Court regarding voter ID. That case is Holmes v. Moore.

The state Supreme Court ruled in December that a 2018 law requiring photo identification to vote in North Carolina remains invalid, upholding the lower court decision that found that the law violated voters’ constitutional rights and was designed to help the GOP.

"Holmes was wrongly decided based on a predetermined outcome," Sam Hayes, Moore's general counsel, said in a statement. "We now have a chance to right this wrong and deliver on voter ID, which the voters of this state overwhelmingly support."

Jeff Loperfido, interim chief counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, represented the winners in redistricting and voter ID cases. Both rulings came out last month.

"It's hard not to see this as sort of a power play by legislative leadership to try and get different results from a different court," Loperfido said.

Loperfido said rehearing the cases would violate the principal of settled law, and lawmakers haven’t presented any new arguments.

"Legislators are now asking basically to restart the whole process over, to disregard what the trial court has done, and the years of litigation and the weeks of trial, have the court throw out that decision and then restart at the trial court," Loperfido said. "And, there's really just nothing in the record that justifies such an extreme ask."

Bob Phillips, director of progressive group Common Cause North Carolina, said he's hopeful the new Republican majority on the court won’t agree to the request.

"I do regret that the people of North Carolina have to go through this again," Phillips said. "It creates more confusion, more cynicism, and also costs millions of dollars to the taxpayers. And it's just unnecessary in my mind."

Loperfido said the U.S. Supreme Court may have laid the groundwork for this request when they overturned 50 years of precedent by overturning the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade last year. He said the point of the doctrine of settled law is so that people know what the law is, and that it shouldn't change with the political winds.