GOVS. MARTIN, HUNT, EASLEY & PERDUE: Gerrymandering 'poisons' politics; 'corrupts' our government

Together, Republican Jim Martin with Democrats Jim Hunt, Mike Easley and Bev Perdue have a century of service in public office – district attorney, county commissioner, legislator, member of Congress, lieutenant governor and North Carolina governor.

They know what it takes to get things done in the public arena. Their knowledge comes not just from their successes but also hard lessons learned from failure and defeat.

“The highs came when members of different political parties worked together to move our State forward, and when all three branches respected the separation of powers at the core of our constitutional system,” they recently observed.

“The lows came when progress took a back seat to partisanship, and when the legislature sought to expand its own power at the expense of the executive and judicial branches. … Partisan rancor and legislative attacks on the other branches are no longer temporary. They have become the new normal. The reason is partisan gerrymandering.”

These governors’ styles are as diverse as their political affiliations and backgrounds. But, they have come together in an amicus brief, filed in state court last week, supporting the plaintiffs seeking to have the General Assembly’s hyper-partisan gerrymandering of the state Senate and House of Representative districts declared unconstitutional.

“The partisan gerrymanders of today ultimately jeopardize our entire system of government,” they say in their brief. The experience they bring to their comments offers a case study in how government can work best and how hyper-partisan gerrymandering silences the will of the voters and thwarts representative government. Below are highlights from the brief the four governors filed. The entire brief is available here.

“Increasingly sophisticated gerrymanders produce increasingly partisan legislators — legislators who are beholden to the sectarian interests of the party leaders who draw their district lines and the very small number of voters who are most likely to vote in primary elections. … These legislators have no real choice but to pursue hyper-partisan agendas without regard for the separation of powers.”

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“Partisan gerrymandering impedes the voters from exerting their will and rooting out partisanship in the voting booth. “… It sacrifices bedrock democratic principles of popular sovereignty, fair representation, and political accountability for raw partisan gain.

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“Our constitutional design facilitates good government. The separation of powers is the ‘cornerstone’ of our constitutional system. … By keeping the legislative, executive, and judicial powers ‘forever separate and distinct,’ our constitutional design aims to prevent any one branch from overrunning the others and imposing its agenda on the people without restraint.”

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“Partisan gerrymandering disrupts the constitutional design. … Good government depends on collaboration and a shared respect for the separation of powers; the extreme partisan gerrymandering that we face today thwarts collaboration and threatens the separation of powers.”

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“Partisan gerrymandering contributes to polarization and impedes effective governance. … Rather than appealing to voters of both parties, or even to the moderate voters of their own parties, legislative candidates in safe districts ‘are driven to appeal to the most ideological members of their own parties, because those partisans turn out disproportionately in party primaries.’”

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“Under a partisan gerrymander, ‘a representative may feel more beholden to the cartographers who drew her district than to the constituents who live there.’ And the cartographers who draw gerrymandered districts do so at the direction of party leaders.”

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“Any legislator who might otherwise be inclined to buck party leadership faces the prospect that the leadership will redistrict her out of office in retribution. To secure their political futures, therefore, legislators must toe the party line, surrendering their independent judgment to vote for the partisan agenda mandated by party leaders.”

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“Partisan agendas now obstruct bipartisan compromise, and ideological grandstanding has replaced pragmatic problem-solving.”

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“An ill-gotten legislative supermajority with the power to propose constitutional amendments can seek to write the separation of powers out of the North Carolina Constitution altogether. This is not alarmism. It is exactly what we have seen in our own State in recent years. … For example, it reduced the size of the Court of Appeals, required partisan judicial elections, eliminated judicial primaries, and redrew judicial districts … to partisan ends.”

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“The worst of partisan gerrymandering is yet to come. … Partisan gerrymandering is not new. … What is new, however, is the magnitude of the threat that partisan gerrymandering poses to our system of government. That is because advancing technology has made partisan gerrymandering far more sophisticated and precise today than it was in the past.”

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“No matter which party controls the legislature, the mapmakers charged with redrawing our state legislative districts in 2021 will have better tools at their disposal than ever before to draw those districts to favor the party in power at the time. And that will again be true in 2031, in 2041, and beyond. The consequence of this ever-growing sophistication of partisan gerrymandering will be an ever-growing threat to our system of government.”

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“The purpose of democratic politics is to give people a voice, as individuals and as a community. That purpose is cast aside when gerrymandering rigs the outcomes of elections and divides communities into different districts to pit them against each other for partisan ends.”

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“Competitive elections make our politics more civil and create an environment in which promising and pragmatic policies can emerge. Partisan gerrymandering eliminates competitive elections, poisons our politics, and corrupts our system of government.”