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Former Attorney General Eric Holder said Republican campaigns to restrict ballot access are connected to looming partisan gerrymandering efforts.
Hours after new redistricting data was released by the Census Bureau, lawsuits were filed Monday night to toss out expired election maps in three states.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and prominent Democratic voting rights lawyer Marc Elias filed the suits in federal and state courts on behalf of voters in Louisiana, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. They argue that population changes over the last decade have rendered the current maps unconstitutional.
Because these states have divided governments, it's likely that partisan disputes will prevent them from agreeing on new election maps in time for the 2022 midterms. The litigation was filed in anticipation of an impasse and with the hopes of expediting court-drawn maps.
Both Louisiana, with six congressional seats, and Pennsylvania, with 18 congressional seats, have Democratic governors and Republican-majority legislatures. Minnesota (eight congressional seats) has a Democratic governor and state House but a Republican state Senate.
Pennsylvania was the only state of the three to lose a House seat after the Census Bureau reported the new state population counts Monday afternoon.
Due to population shifts over the past decade, the lawsuits argue, the states' congressional maps have been rendered malapportioned and are therefore unconstitutional. The suits seek to prevent the states from using the current maps in any future elections. They also ask the courts to mandate the implementation of new maps that adhere to the "one person, one vote" constitutional requirement, in the event that the legislature and governor fail to agree on maps.
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During a press call on Tuesday, Holder linked the GOP-led efforts across the country to roll back voting access to the partisan gerrymandering that will inevitably take place this year.
"What we're facing right now is a Republican Party that has shown that they're willing to bend or break the rules of democracy, simply to hold on to power," he said. "I have no doubt that the same Republican legislators who have pushed these bills will now try to use the redistricting process to illegitimately lock in power."
The goal of the litigation filed this week, Holder said, is to protect the integrity of the redistricting process and ensure fair maps and representation across the country.
Elias, who will be litigating the cases, said these redistricting lawsuits won't be the last filed this year. In addition to these three states, there are six more with divided governments and no independent redistricting commissions, so disagreements over election maps are likely to occur.
"We are prepared and ready to use every legal tool available to make sure that new maps do not unfairly treat voters," Elias said. "These lawsuits ensure that there is a backstop if and when the normal process breaks down or if there is a deadlock between the legislature and the governor which is more than likely going to be the case."
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are sure to be targeted by the new campaign. They are prominent Senate Democratic defenders of the filibuster, which could permit the GOP to kill the bill.
An expensive and aggressive lobbying step was taken Monday on the uphill climb for HR 1, the congressional Democrats' catchall package for assuring that voting gets easier and governance becomes more fair and ethical.
A pair of progressive organizations announced they will spend $30 million on television and digital advertising, direct lobbying, and creating grassroots pressure on the Senate. Part of the effort is to coordinate with other democracy reform groups to build momentum for what could become one of the most consequential victories over voter suppression since the 1960s.
The legislation's paramount obstacle is unified Republican opposition magnified by the filibuster, which is supposed to help democracy by giving the political minority influence but has also made partisan deadlock the norm. Advocates of HR 1 assert that, if there's ever a moment to confront the filibuster's perverse consequences, it's to pass a measure designed to resuscitate democracy itself.
So far, that argument has not proved persuasive to the two Democratic senators who have publicly committed to retaining the de facto 60-vote requirement for passing most bills, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Some of the money in the new campaign — run by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and End Citizens United's Let America Vote Action Fund — will surely be allocated in an effort to woo them. The organizations say they will run ads in at least a dozen states and finance organizers to target both Democratic and Republican centrist senators in six of them.
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But Manchin and Sinema by themselves have the power to preserve the status quo by siding with the 50 Republicans, who deride the Democrats' democracy bill as an electoral power grab in the guise of reform — and are keen to preserve their biggest tool to combat (or else compel bargaining with) President Biden and his fellow Democrats now in control of the Capitol.
It is not yet clear the Senate's consideration of HR 1 will be the venue for deciding the filibuster's future. Democratic leaders are contemplating several modifications that would make the weapon more difficult to deploy but not eliminate it altogether. While gauging support for those, over the next few weeks they intend to focus on legislation with at least a hope of bipartisan support — on infrastructure and China, for example — in part to test the willingness of the GOP to collaborate.
In addition, Democrats say they want to put the democracy reform package through something of a normal legislative process. That means hearings and a committee debate before a climactic vote on the Senate floor. But the Senate companion bill, dubbed S 1 by the Democrats for similar symbolic impact, has not yet been formally introduced, and the first hearing is not expected before next week
The bill, which the House passed two weeks ago on almost pure party lines, has gained significantly more public attention than when it was first deliberated two years ago. That's mainly because the Democrats have started marketing it principally as a voting rights package that would countermand the extraordinary efforts in almost two-dozen Republican-run states to make casting a ballot much more difficult than in 2020.
To be sure, the measure is packed with provisions designed to make voting equally easy no matter where people live — even if that means reversing a wave of new restrictive state laws unmatched since the Jim Crow era.
The bill would require the minority of states that don't already do so, for example, to allow no-excuse absentee voting as well as at least 15 days of in-person voting before Election Day. And it would nationalize online registration, same-day registration for federal elections and automatic registration of eligible voters when they do business with their state agencies — practices not in effect in about a quarter of the states.
It would restrict how states cull, or purge, their voters rolls and make the Postal Service help people re-register to vote when they change their addresses. It would require states give at least a week's notice before changing a polling place location — and assure the average wait times for voting are less than half an hour.
But the new campaign is being spearheaded by groups that have until now been more keenly interested in other aspects of the sprawling package.
End Citizens United is a prominent voice for limiting big money in politics, and so has been primarily focused on language that would create a system of 6-to-1 matching funds for congressional candidates who refuse donations above $1,000 and boost disclosure requirements for politically active advocacy groups.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, meanwhile, has mainly focused on the provision turning all congressional redistricting over to politically independent commissions in each state — on the assumption that partisan demographics will put most of the cartography in GOP hands for the foreseeable future.
But the bill's reach extends even further, from ensuring felons could vote after release from prison, to beefing up election cybersecurity, to establishing ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials.
"This historic investment will harness the grassroots energy for unrigging the system in Washington to make it work for everyone, not just those on top, and will make it clear to the Senate that we must pass this bill," said the announcement by the two groups, who recently released polling they commissioned finding 83 percent support for the bill.
"This is a power grab" by the Democrats, GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Sunday on Fox News. "It's that simple. They want to install a permanent partisan majority in the United States when it comes to voting in elections."
To be sure, nationwide easements of access to the polls would increase participation, especially by minority voters who disproportionately lean Democratic.
Barack Obama and Eric Holder are the faces of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is waging a mostly partisan fight against partisan gerrymandering.
The campaign operation backed by Barack Obama and Eric Holder is expanding its sights.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was created by the former president and his attorney general to elect more Democratic legislators who could help the party in the coming nationwide remapping of congressional districts. Now it's growing its ambitions to include some judicial elections.
The first target is a pair of Supreme Court contests in Ohio. That's because winning both this fall would tip the partisan balance of the court, and those justices are likely to end up deciding the lines for the 15 House districts that the seventh largest state is likely to have in the coming decade, one fewer than today.
The organization has been a prominent critic of partisan gerrymandering, but its efforts to combat the practice have occurred almost exclusively in states run by Republicans.
That has opened Obama and Holder to criticism that their effort — which they portray as a crusade against one of the biggest obstacles to a more representative and better functioning democracy — is motivated entirely by something different: a desire to get more fellow Democrats in position for the 2020s to maximize their power through mapmaking, the same way the GOP did so effectively in the 2010s.
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Ohio is among the dozen states the NDRC is targeting and, like eight others, the state government is now under the control of the GOP. Democrats seizing control of the General Assembly this fall is highly unlikely. But under changes approved by the voters in 2018, the minority party will have more influence over redistricting, especially if their caucuses get a bit bigger, which could result in a deadlock a year from now that kicks the process to the state's high court.
That's why the NDRC may invest in both races for the bench this fall, spokesman Patrick Rodenbush told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
"Because it was so gerrymandered after 2011, we want to try as much as possible to make that map more fair for the next 10 years," he said.
The partisan gerrymander of Ohio a decade ago has worked just as well as the GOP could have hoped. The party has held 12 of the states 16 seats all decade, even in the 2018 midterm, when Republican candidates took just 52 percent of the congressional vote statewide.
Since its 2017 founding, the NDRC and its affiliates have raised $52 million, much of it from liberal millionaires and labor groups who were generous donors to Obama's campaigns.
The other states on its target list are:
A foundation affiliated with Eric Holder is trying to get North Carolina's congressional map redrawn.
North Carolina's congressional map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander under the state constitution just like the state legislative maps struck down earlier this month, a lawsuit filed Friday argues.
The National Redistricting Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of a political committee run by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, asked the state courts to order a redrawing of the 13 House districts in time for next year's election because the current map is "the most extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander in American history."
The lawsuit relies almost entirely on the precedent set just this month by a panel of three judges in Charlotte, who declared the maps for the General Assembly drawn by the GOP violated the state constitution's clauses protecting the rights of Democrats to free elections, equal protection and freedom of speech and assembly.
The decision was a landmark for redistricting reformers, because it gave them new hope that state courts would become their allies in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling in June that federal courts can have no say in partisan gerrymandering disputes.
The new North Carolina suit notes how the Republicans in charge of the congressional cartography boasted that holding all 10 of the GOP's seats in the delegation was their main objective. Republican state Rep. David Lewis famously said that was his goal only "because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats."
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His map, drawn in 2016 after a prior map was struck down as a racial gerrymander, has succeeded as planned — even though Democrats won 47 percent of the statewide congressional vote in 2016 and a majority of the vote in last fall's midterm.
Republicans vowed to contest the suit, suggesting it would not be settled before the Dec. 20 deadline for candidate declarations for Congress in the current districts. They also excoriated Holder as a hypocrite, noting that to date his group's lawsuits have been all in states where Republicans controlled the mapmaking.
"He riles up his supporters by pretending this is all about good government, but he really just wants to game the system to elect more Democrats," said state Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger.
