South Carolina Republicans want judge off redistricting case

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Republican legislative leaders want to toss a judge from a lawsuit over redistricting plans, arguing in papers filed Thursday that the jurist can’t fairly consider the case in part because of prior legal work on such cases. Prior to his appointment to the federal bench, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel was lead counsel on a redistricting case that followed the 2000 census, “with a singular focus in opposition to redistricting plans passed by a Republican-controlled legislature,” attorneys for House Speaker Jay Lucas and the Republicans leading two key committees wrote in a federal court filing. In that case, they wrote, Gergel “took positions similar to those advanced by the Plaintiffs in this litigation.” As an attorney in another case several years earlier, Gergel “was opposed and adverse” to redistricting plans also put forth by Republicans, Lucas’ attorneys wrote, and therefore shouldn’t now sit on a three-judge panel considering a new legal challenge to GOP lawmakers’ redistricting plans stemming from the 2020 Census. Gergel has been appointed to a judicial panel mulling a lawsuit filed by two civil rights groups alleging that South Carolina’s newly drawn legislative maps discriminate against Black people by diluting their voting power. Then, they wrote, Gergel acknowledged that, since he had previously deposed or cross-examined many of the likely witnesses, someone could reasonably “conclude that service of the former adversarial attorney in the 2002 reapportionment litigation in the present legislative reapportionment case on the three judge panel would create an appearance of partiality.” House lawmakers’ suggested congressional map doesn’t significantly redraw the boundaries of the state’s existing districts and resembles a proposal put forth by a Senate committee in November.