Dem
51
GOP
49
Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering violated the state Constitution. On Friday, it ruled that gerrymandering does not violate the state Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court at least had the decency to wait 50 years before saying that its ruling in Roe v. Wade was wrong. How come the North Carolina Court changed its mind in only 1 year?
It's pretty simple. The old ruling was 4-3. As a result of the November elections, there is now a 5-2 Republican majority on the Court. So naturally it voted 5-2 along party lines to allow gerrymandering. The courts are now a political arm of the government in many cases, just like the other two branches, and all that matters is how many votes you have. Sorry to disillusion you if you thought otherwise.
Former AG Eric Holder denounced the ruling as a nakedly political exercise. He said: "This shameful, delegitimizing decision to allow the unjust, blatant manipulation of North Carolina's voting districts was not a function of legal principle, it was a function of political personnel and partisan opportunism. Neither the map nor the law have changed since last year's landmark rulings—only the makeup of the majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court has changed."
The North Carolina legislature will now immediately crank up Dave's redistricting website and get to work. They can probably net at least four seats doing so. That might be enough to maintain control of the House in Jan. 2025, even if Democrats win most of the highly competitive districts in New York and California in 2024.
And just in case you thought Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) could prevent a new and radically gerrymandered map, sorry. North Carolina law does not allow the governor to veto political maps. The legislature has full control of the process.
While the Court was at it, it also reversed a lower court ruling that decreed that felons could vote. Now they can't anymore. No Republicans will shed a tear over that.
If the North Carolina legislature draws a heavily gerrymandered map, that could have ramifications further north. The New York legislature drew a highly partisan map after the 2020 census, but the state Court of Appeals struck it down. Since then, there has been a change in the composition of the state Court of Appeals (the highest court in New York), and the new court is probably more favorable to accepting a gerrymander than the old one was. It is hard to imagine New York legislators sitting around and watching their North Carolina colleagues grab four House seats and not trying to do the same thing, now that it might work.
But there is more. After the former North Carolina Supreme Court outlawed gerrymandering, Republican leaders in the state legislature sued. The case, Moore v. Harper, had oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The legislators advanced a theory claiming that state legislatures have the sole right to draw political maps and that governors may not veto them in any state and no state courts can overrule the maps. This is known as the "Independent State Legislature" theory. The suit could be withdrawn now or the Supreme Court could dismiss the case now. Or maybe not. The U.S. Supreme Court obviously has not had the time yet to decide what comes next. (V)