Holder ‘doesn’t want electoral “fairness.” He wants partisan judges to impose partisan gerrymanders that protect Democrats…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Democrats revealed the true motives underpinning their court-forced gerrymandering campaign as North Carolina‘s fairly drawn maps using a left-wing “expert” and a bipartisan process elicited outrage from partisan leftists who demanded they go farther.
The Tarheel State has been on the front lines in Democrats’ push to use courts to force red states to make their maps more favorable to themselves.
It has drawn special attention from former Attorney General Eric Holder, who is leading the charge while overseeing the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
Holder, himself, has admitted that the aim of the well-funded activist network is to “favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process,” which would, in essence, allow them to create their own gerrymandered districts.
But Holder and others involved—including former President Barack Obama—have publicly have denied this when addressing low-information audiences, such as that of “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial dismantled the effort and exposed its brazenly political objectives, pointing out that the NDRC had done nothing to address overt partisanship in heavily blue states like California and Illinois.
“Mr. Holder didn’t back the Illinois redistricting commission initiative or contest maps in Maryland, New York, New Jersey or Massachusetts that heavily favor Democrats,” it said.
“In other words, he doesn’t want electoral ‘fairness,'” said the editorial. “He wants partisan judges to impose partisan gerrymanders that protect Democrats, but not Republicans.”
Sue Till Blue
Likewise, in North Carolina, Democrats were the longtime beneficiaries of gerrymandering practices, with Republicans only securing a legislative majority in 2010 for the first time since 1870 after voters flocked to the polls to show their disapproval of the Obama agenda.
But rather than acknowledge that their loss of political clout was the result of their own actions, leftists in 2016 devised a strategy during the Democratic National Convention, determined to circumvent the electoral process by going through the courts.
The state redrew the maps in 2017 after the U.S. Supreme Court determined that they were racially biased, but Republicans still retained control of the legislature after the 2018 elections—leading the Left to complain yet again that they were unfair.
Even after the U.S. Supreme Court determined that partisan gerrymandering issues were a state matter, not a federal one, the activists have resolved to press forward in their attack.
By flipping the state legislatures prior to the next round of redistricting, they can entrench their permanent majorities at the federal level, as well, with little legal recourse remaining.
With a recent defeat at the superior-court level, facing a radicalized liberal state Supreme Court, the Republican-led General Assembly in North Carolina this month agreed to redraw its maps for the second time in three years.
Left-Wing Freak-Out
Despite the admittedly fair, inclusive and bipartisan process that the legislators relied upon, partisan Democrats remained unsatisfied, sounding alarm on Twitter because the maps did not offer them an explicit advantage.
Some far-left figures in the national media went so far as to attack Democratic state legislators for applauding the bipartisan effort.
David Nir, political director for the overtly partisan Daily Kos, ranted in a tweetstorm that state Democrats had put self over party to protect their own districts from being redrawn.
He attempted to dox the Democratic legislators who went along with the GOP effort and called state Senate minority leader Dan Blue an idiot.
On top of that, the NC GOP can also point to comments like those from *DEM* Senate leader Dan Blue, who idiotically declared, “This is the most transparent redistricting process in history.”
B.S. This process was completely tainted, as people like @EveryVoiceNC have documented
— David Nir (@DavidNir) September 17, 2019
Meanwhile, Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern waged an attack on the so-called map expert whose simulated models provided the basis for the new maps.
Jowei Chen had been used by the plaintiffs, activist left-wing gerrymander group Common Cause, to testify in court to the unfairness of the old (previously redrawn and approved) maps. But even Chen’s maps proved to be too gerrymandered for the leftist malcontents.
The big lie is that Chen’s maps were “used by the court as a model of nonpartisanship.” They were not. They were used to illustrate just how extreme the gerrymander was. They were never intended to form the basis of new maps. https://t.co/G2pt52PGa5
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 16, 2019
Nir said Democrats should have ignored the legislature altogether and simply forced a left-wing “expert” consulting with the courts to draw the maps.
Absurd, from the NC Senate Dems leader. There was no reason to participate in this flawed process when a far better one—asking the court’s independent expert to draw nonpartisan maps—is right at hand https://t.co/MW5D8WhdlT
— David Nir (@DavidNir) September 17, 2019
Phil Berger, the state Senate leader, issued a press release on behalf of NC Republicans that responded to and debunked some of the outlandish claims in the left-wing media.
“The only people who had a role in creating these maps are Democratic legislators and the expert mapmaker the Democratic Party hired,” said the press release.
“It’d be odd for the Democratic Party to create a map that’s ‘a pro-Republican gerrymander,’ but here’s a liberal activist “reporter” claiming they did,” Berger said in response to Nir’s tweets.
The bipartisan support notwithstanding, one North Carolina Republican leader voted against the maps.
U.S. Rep.-elect Dan Bishop, who last week won a special election in the 9th Congressional District, cast his last vote as a state senator before traveling to Washington, DC, to be sworn into Congress on Tuesday evening.
“If the current map was an illegal partisan gerrymander, so was every map in North Carolina history,” Bishop said.