Motion heard in district map suit
A second lawsuit challenging the state’s drawing of congressional districts critics contend dilutes the influence of Black voters had a hearing Monday before the same three-judge panel that dismissed an earlier lawsuit after concluding it had failed to demonstrate that racial discrimination factored into the newly drawn map.
On Monday, the panel — Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., U.S. Circuit Judge David Stras and U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr. — heard oral arguments regarding a motion to dismiss the case of Christian Ministerial Alliance et. al. v. Secretary of State John Thurston that was filed May 23. The lawsuit alleges that the state’s current congressional map violated the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution by purposely moving more than 41,000 predominately Black voters in
Pulaski County that were in the state’s 2nd Congressional District into the state’s 1st and 4th Congressional districts.
The Christian Ministerial Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of religious leaders from Pulaski County and neighboring areas that was founded in 1968. Also named as plaintiffs are five Black registered voters — Patricia Brewer, Carolyn Briggs, Lynette Brown, Mable Bynum and Velma Smith — all of whom resided in the 2nd Congressional District prior to passage of the new map. Following passage, the complaint said, Brewer and Bynum remained in the 2nd District while Briggs and Brown were placed in the 1st Congressional District and Smith was moved into the 4th Congressional District.
All five co-plaintiffs maintain in the complaint that candidates are now less likely to appeal to them for their votes
given the dilution of Black voting influence in the 2nd District and the super majorities of white voters and distant population centers in the 1st and 4th districts.
According to the complaint, although roughly 16,510 people needed to be moved out of the 2nd District to balance populations in the 1st and 4th districts, the legislature elected — in an 11th hour move — to shift 41,392 2nd District residents from heavily Black southeastern Pulaski County into the 1st and 4th districts. The resulting population imbalance in the 2nd District was then addressed by moving 23,000 residents in predominantly white Cleburne County from the 1st District into the 2nd District.
The lawsuit was filed the day before the three-judge panel dismissed the earlier lawsuit — Simpson et. al. v. Hutchinson et. al. — on the grounds that the plaintiffs had failed to prove discriminatory intent regarding race in the drawing of the new maps. That decision is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Arkansas Deputy Solicitor General Dylan Jacobs, arguing for the defendants, opened his argument Monday saying the plaintiffs in the lawsuit had filed a complaint that was essentially identical to the Simpson complaint the panel had dismissed previously and was indicative of the politically-charged nature of the redistricting process.
“This is the most recent lawsuit challenging Arkansas’ most recent reapportionment,” Jacobs began. “Redistricting is a politically fraught activity, to put it mildly, rarely is everyone, or perhaps anyone, satisfied with the outcome.”
Jacobs said the plaintiffs were unhappy with the political outcome of the redistricting process and characterized the heart of their claim, “as it was in Simpson, that the Republican legislature redrew congressional district lines to make it easier for a Republican to get elected to Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District.” He said because a political gerrymandering claim falls beyond the purview of the federal courts to address, “they have recast those allegations as a racial gerrymander.”
“The court recently dismissed those same claims based on the same factual allegations,” he said. “This case is functionally no different than Simpson and the result should be no different.”
Jacobs maintained that new allegations contained in the lawsuit were subsets of allegations contained in the Simpson case that the panel had dismissed.
To that, Marshall asked about what was characterized in the Christian Ministerial Alliance lawsuit as an “overkill allegation.”
“You had a 16,000-person problem to fix,” Marshall said, “but you ultimately moved around 41,000 folks.”
“There’s nothing on the face of the map that gives rise to a plausible inference that the motive behind doing that was based on race rather than other permissible motives such as partisan considerations or the generalized need to equalize populations,” Jacobs said.
Stras then pointed out that in what the plaintiffs had characterized as the “overkill” aspect of the new map, the state had drawn lines that disrupted boundaries of school district lines, county lines, “and all kinds of other lines as well.”
“It would be one thing if the overkill was to preserve some of those things,” Stras said, “but I think they allege that you ended up with some illogical lines in other respects. What do you make of that allegation?”
Jacobs said any time a county line is split between districts, other lines such as school districts, city ward lines, “things like that,” inevitably get split as well, “because those lines are smaller than the county lines.”
None of that, he said, raised a plausible inference that racial, rather than political considerations, were the predominant motivation behind the drawing of the new map. Jacobs maintained that the fact that the most heavily affected area of the county was an area with the county’s greatest concentration of Black voters was, “just how it worked out.”
Arguing for the plaintiffs, Michael Skocpolcq, a Washington D.c.-based attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the changing demographics of the 2nd District — which grew in Black population while white population declined between 2010 and 2020 — had made the 2nd District a more competitive district. He said the threeway split of the county into three districts, “sliced right through the heart of the Black community,” and he said the lack of a “smoking gun” linking the changes to race did not remove race as the motivation behind the changes.
“It was very clear the Legislature knew the demographics of the affected area,” he said. “The fact that a governor of the legislative proponents’ own party refused to sign these maps while citing concerns about racial discrimination goes to the fact that this was really obvious and well known exactly what they were doing.”
Then-gov. Asa Hutchinson, following legislative approval of the new congressional map, allowed it to go into effect without his signature, saying at the time that, “the removal of minority areas in Pulaski County into two different congressional districts does raise concerns.”
Skocpol said the plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that the 2nd Congressional District adopted under by the Legislature constitutes a racial gerrymander in violation of the 14th Amendment and to declare that the 2021 congressional map was passed with a discriminatory intent to dilute Black voters’ political power in violation of the 14th and 15th amendments.
He said the sheer number of voters affected by the redistricting coupled with the demographics of people the Legislature shifted around in an effort to secure the 2nd District for Republicans offered strong evidence to the racial discrimination claim.
“We’re talking about tens of thousands of voters — two to three times as many as were needed to simply balance the population — moved into and out of the district,” he said. “Looking at all the direct and circumstantial evidence bearing on it, can you say that race predominated in the Legislature’s decision making about where to place these lines through the heart of the Black community?”
On the vote dilution claim, he said, the intent to harm Black voters was, “at least a motivating factor.”
The congressional map, Skocpol said, represents a setback of 10 years of progress for Black voting power in the 2nd District over the course of a decade.
“In effect,” he said, “what the Legislature did was roll back the clock a decade on Black voting progress.”
Skocpol said the plaintiffs are also asking the court to block the state from conducting any elections under the 2021 redistricting plan until the state adopts a plan that passes muster with the U.S. Constitution for elections beginning in 2024.
At the conclusion of the 90-minute hearing, Marshall said the panel will issue a ruling on the motion to dismiss, “in due course.”