The plan for 70 new state House districts adopted last month by a court is “seriously flawed” and should be tossed out, lawyers for Democrats and minority voters told the state Supreme Court on Tuesday.
They said retired state District Judge James Hall was too focused on equalizing population among the districts, and in the process he OK’d a map that had a partisan bias, unnecessarily divided some communities, and ignored the concerns of Hispanic minorities in the southeast and southwest.
The Supreme Court didn’t immediately make a decision but said it would soon.
The courtroom was packed and the arguments were lively in the latest round in the politically charged fight over redrawing district lines for House seats.
It’s a job lawmakers are supposed to do every 10 years, after the census, to account for population shifts. The Democratic-dominated Legislature passed a plan in September, but Republican Gov. Susana Martinez vetoed it, sending it to court.
Hall had 17 maps in front of him during the December trial and adopted one offered by the governor and other GOP state officials.
It gives the west side of the Albuquerque area three new seats to accommodate its population boom. Those seats come from consolidating districts of two Republicans in the southeast, two Democrats in the north, and a Democrat and a Republican in central Albuquerque – the areas where population growth lagged the most.
The new map conceivably could result in the election of 34 Republicans; there are 33 in the House now.
Lawyers for Democrats and minorities said Hall’s map unconstitutionally splits, or fails to unite, Hispanic communities in Deming and Silver City, dilutes the voting strength of the Hispanic community in Curry County, and is not politically neutral.
And the judge should have given more weight to the plan the Legislature passed, they argued.
But Martinez’s lawyer, Paul Kennedy, said Hall “did the best he could, and did a good job,” urging the court not to tamper with it.
“The elephant in the room … was always the northern seat,” Kennedy told the court.
According to trial testimony, House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Nambé, didn’t want any northern districts consolidated, and the map passed by the Legislature didn’t include a northern pairing.
Kennedy said Hall saw that a northern consolidation was “logical and fair,” but when the judge invited the various parties in the lawsuit to submit maps that included one, the Democratic groups paired the north’s only GOP lawmaker, Jim Hall of Los Alamos, rather than pairing two Democrats.
Some justices indicated in their questioning that they might have an appetite for overturning Hall’s decision – weighing in for the first time on what a judge should consider in such a situation – and perhaps sending the matter back to him.
— This article appeared on page A4 of the Albuquerque Journal
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