Why Can't North Carolina's Governor Veto A Redistricting Bill?
GOP state lawmakers are coming back to Raleigh next week to try and make North Carolina's congressional delegation even MORE Republican. The governor can veto lots of bills. Why not this one?
If You Don’t Want This Context And Just Want The Plot Twist, Just Skip Down To The Section That Says “Here’s The Plot Twist”
Yesterday, North Carolina’s most powerful state senator, Phil Berger, announced that he and state house speaker Destin Hall would be calling the state legislature back into session next week to draw new congressional maps. If you’re thinking back to fourth grade, you may remember that redistricting is only supposed to happen once a decade after the U.S. Census releases new population numbers. However! North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature really doesn’t want to lose power in a state that’s really close to 50-50, politically. In statewide elections, that split is clear, since we have Democrats who won races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and superintendent of schools, while Republicans were elected auditor, labor commissioner, agriculture secretary, insurance commissioner, and treasurer. So, using that logic, a fourth-grader might easily assume that there should be a lot of close races for General Assembly, which is supposed to be the branch of government that’s closest and most responsive to the people.
Nope! Since 2010, the GOP has had a stranglehold on the legislative branch, thanks to redistricting. That also affects both Congressional and local races. A map that gave North Carolina a 7-7 split in Congress earlier this decade was allowed to be redrawn after the GOP also won control of the state supreme court, and the new maps (drawn in 2023! Two years ago!) gave the GOP a 10-4 edge. And now they’re going to draw them again, potentially to give Republicans an 11-3 or even 12-2 advantage. In statements, GOP leaders in the General Assembly generally blame California Governor Gavin Newsom for this, mostly ignoring the fact that Newsom is responding to Texas’s mid-decade redistricting, which came about because Donald Trump asked for it. “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” said Berger in a statement. “Picking up where Texas left off, we will hold votes in our October session to redraw North Carolina’s congressional map to ensure Gavin Newsom doesn’t decide the congressional majority.”
Wait, I thought that’s what elections were for! Will of the people, things of that nature! (I’ll go ahead and duck while you throw things at me, a naive person.)
I’ve written about gerrymandering a few times before. Back in 2017, I wrote a Politico story in which I ran a 5K race in Asheville to understand district boundaries that bobbed and weaved to include six specific houses on the west side of that city. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ralph Hise, the state senate’s redistricting chair, who drew himself a new district in 2023 that included Appalachian State University, then redrew county commission maps that mostly neutered the vote of students at his alma mater over the objections of 71% of that county’s voters. Generally speaking, though, the GOP has drawn and redrawn its maps to comply with court orders that rule for or against them every few years. Now, though, they have a friendly state and U.S. Supreme Court and GOP can more nakedly make the maps into political weapons, even with the inevitable lawsuits that are trying to stop them.
Here’s The Plot Twist
But! The governor has veto power! The governor is a Democrat. The GOP no longer has a veto-proof majority in the General Assembly! Josh Stein, you’d think, could just say no to this.
Except … he can’t. According to the state constitution, the governor cannot veto redistricting bills. So, um, why?
Consider this: North Carolina has traditionally had a very weak governor. In fact, governors did not have veto power at all until 1996, making North Carolina the last state to grant its governor that ability (Lawmakers tried to do it in 1933, but it didn’t work because of technical reasons). The idea came back around in the late 1980s, but senate bills to give the governor the veto died in the Democractically-controlled House four times between 1989 and 1994. Then, in 1995, the GOP that had been asking for gubernatorial veto power for YEARS took control of the House, and a young state senator saw a new opening. That senator? A Democrat from Nash County named Roy Cooper.
The debate wasn’t so much about if the governor should have veto power. It was about how much. Republicans wanted the ability for a governor to be able to line-item veto parts of the budget. That was a bit much for Democrats, who had been mostly in control of the General Assembly for decades. In the end, they chose a weaker form of veto for the governor: One that exempted General Assembly appointments, local bills, and redistricting. That’s the bill that overwhelmingly passed and put a constitutional amendment before voters in November 1996, which passed with 75% of the vote.
“Since the days of Governor Tryon over 200 years ago, the North Carolina Legislature has been wary of too much power in the Executive Branch. Governor Tryon was hated as he ruled in opulent splendor from his palace,” Cooper wrote in an editorial for the Rocky Mount Telegram In March 1995. “Those days have long ago passed. The nature of government has changed and a veto for the Executive Branch is an important check and balance on legislation passed by the General Assembly.”
Rabbit Hole reader, political science professor, and armchair armadillo spotter Chris Cooper and I talked about this last November on the North Carolina Rabbit Hole podcast, but here’s the relevant part:
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“Just imagine an alternate world where Governor Roy Cooper could have vetoed these maps. [People] probably would spend a lot less money on litigation. We’d have different kinds of maps, and different forms of representation,” said Chris Cooper (no relation to Roy, who’s now running for U.S. Senate.)
So why, of all things, was redistricting exempted? The different versions of Senate Bill 3 don’t offer any insight. The redistricting carveout is in the original writing. Cooper doesn’t seem to have talked about it in interviews, and newspaper articles from 1995 and 1996 barely mention it.
The only clues here come from context. From 1985 until 1993, North Carolina’s governor was James G. Martin, a Republican. And in 1989, when Democratic state senators first introduced a veto bill, they had already exempted redistricting from it. At the time, North Carolina was also subject to a fully-intact Voting Rights Act, which put racial guardrails on districts (and ultimately was used as the reason why North Carolina’s snake-like 12th district was created to stretch from Gastonia to Durham. The heavily-litigated and often-redrawn district pushed by the George H.W. Bush administration and others created a safe seat for a Black congressman, Mel Watt, but also made nearby districts more Republican). Federal courts and the Justice Department also had broad power to review and strike down districts, which happened quite a bit in the early 1980s. Between 1981 and 1984, Democratic lawmakers redrew districts four times to comply with the Voting Rights Act, prompting a Republican lawmaker to suggest the creation of an independent redistricting commission instead.
In 1989 and 1990, Republicans were in the minority in the General Assembly, but formed a coalition with Democrats to have a voice in redistricting in 1991. But! That voice was dependent on Democrats. And at the time, Republicans were pushing redistricting hard. A 1989 Raleigh News & Observer op-ed noted, quaintly, that computers would soon be a powerful new tool to help politicians draw new maps. It also noted that by giving Martin full veto power, “the Republican governor would automatically move to the center of the redistricting action.”
The 1989 veto bill, notably, would not have given the power to the governor until 1993, after Martin left office. Democrats were willing to give Martin that power more immediately if the senate minority leader, Republican Larry Cobb of Charlotte, would drop an amendment to allow governors to veto redistricting maps. Cobb refused. He didn’t want to be blackmailed, he said. “Congressional districts are not something which should be decided exclusively by the representatives in the House and Senate in this body,” he noted in an interview in March 1993.
Democratic leaders said Cobb’s amendment would have derailed the whole bill. Democratic senator Dennis Winner of Buncombe County also noted that it wasn’t necessary, since the Voting Rights Act and the courts had placed plenty of guardrails on redistricting anyhow. The bill passed the senate 41-6, but died in the house.
After that, the fight over giving governors power to veto political maps pretty much fizzled out. In 1992, the General Assembly put new political maps into place. In 1993, Jim Hunt, a Democrat, returned to the governor’s mansion. When Republicans introduced their own (doomed) veto bill in the house in 1995, it included a line-item veto, but exempted redistricting. Cooper could have put that veto power in place, but the redistricting battles, and worries, seem to have been left in the past.
Hence, in the 1990s, nobody could see what was coming in the future. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (which required several southern states and counties to get prior approval from the federal government before making elections law changes). Section 2, which outlaws districts that dilute the clout of minority voters, even if that’s not the stated intent, will be taken up by the Supreme Court tomorrow. The guardrails that state Democrats referenced 30 years ago are largely dropping away.
Which, for Chris Cooper, leads to an interesting hypothetical. “I wonder: Does Roy Cooper today look back at past Roy Cooper and say that ‘I could have made that veto just a little bit stronger.’ Could he have changed the state in ways that he would like to have them changed?” he said. “It illustrates that the shoe is often on the other foot eventually, and that we often times make policies for strategic reasons in the short run. We have an idea that things are never going to change. But inevitably, they always do.”
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