No recusals as NC's redistricting case heads to state Supreme Court
North Carolina's full Supreme Court will decide the state's ongoing redistricting case after three justices asked to recuse in the case declined to do so Monday.
The decision was expected, telegraphed by recusal decisions in a separate case before the high court targeting the state's voter ID law.
With all seven justices participating, Democrats hold a 4-3 advantage on the court, and the redistricting case will help decide who wields political power in the state for years to come. Voting rights groups sued state Republican leaders, saying the election maps they approved late last year are unconstitutional. Republicans have said they complied with map-drawing guidelines when they created the congressional and state legislative districts.
Republican lawmakers pressed two registered Democrats to sit out the case: justices Anita Earls and Sam Ervin. Groups looking to overturn the maps asked Republican Justice Phil Berger Jr., whose father, Phil Berger Sr., is a key GOP lawmaker and a named defendant in the case, to step aside.
Earls co-founded one of the attorney groups suing over the districts, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Before her election to the state Supreme Court in 2018 Earls repeatedly sued GOP lawmakers over voting rights.
Her 2018 campaign got a six-figure donation from the state Democratic Party, which in turn got $250,000 from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group headed by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The National Redistricting Foundation, which is affiliated with the NDRC, has helped fund the current redistricting case.
Earls said in her recusal decision that "every justice comes to the court having had a prior career in some substantive area of the law."
"There is simply no factual or legal basis for the assertion that I cannot be fair and impartial in this matter now because of my prior career as a civil rights attorney or because of statements I made before joining the court," Earls said.
Republicans asked Ervin to recuse himself because he's up for re-election, and they argued that the high court's previous decision to delay the state's primaries and candidate filing benefited Ervin's run by blocking potential challengers from filing and throwing the timetable into question. Ervin said in his decision that there is "no reasonable basis for questioning my ability to fairly and impartially decide this case."
"Any attempt to determine the effect of the 8 December 2021 order (delaying the primaries) upon the outcome of this year's judicial elections is nothing more than an exercise in speculation," Ervin wrote.
Justice Berger's decision referenced his previous decision not to recuse himself in the voter ID case. He said at the time that the people of North Carolina voted him to the bench knowing, "or at least having information available to them concerning my father's service in the legislature."
