Federal Judge Dismisses North Carolina Republicans' Latest Effort to Preserve Their Gerrymander
Source: Salon
A federal judge swatted down North Carolina Republicans’ latest attempt to preserve their gerrymander of the General Assembly, rejecting a bizarre GOP ploy to prevent the progressive state Supreme Court from striking down the current maps.
North Carolina’s state Legislature is grotesquely gerrymandered to entrench Republican power. GOP lawmakers hired political operatives to draw mangled districts that dilute Democratic votes—because, they declared, “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats.” This gerrymandered firewall held firm in 2018, when Democrats won a majority of statewide votes for both the House and Senate but received a minority of seats. In response, Common Cause and the North Carolina Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in state court, arguing that the gerrymander infringes upon the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free elections, equal protection, and freedom of expression.
The decision to pursue the claim in state court, rather than federal court, was strategic: In 2018, North Carolina elected civil rights attorney Anita Earls to the state’s high court, cementing a 5–2 progressive majority. There is thus an excellent chance that the justices will follow the lead of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and invalidate the gerrymander under the state constitution. So legislative Republicans tried to remove the case to federal court—a totally frivolous move, since the claims arise solely under the North Carolina Constitution and the federal judiciary has no authority to resolve them.
To work around this roadblock, GOP lawmakers devised a rather startling theory: They alleged that the plaintiffs were attempting to force North Carolina to violate the Voting Rights Act, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and the 15th Amendment’s bar on race-based voter suppression. How, exactly, could an effort to remedy partisan gerrymandering wind up disenfranchising minorities? Republicans argued that if the current map were invalidated, either the North Carolina Supreme Court or the General Assembly would have to draw new districts. And, they insisted, neither could do so without trampling on the voting rights of racial minorities. The argument implies that both legislators and the justices are too racist to be trusted to redraw the maps in a way that wouldn’t violate the Constitution.
Read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/north-carolina-republicans-gerrymander-anita-earls.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
care about the people there even if I didn't!
They are very progressive and this is good news for them! (Western NC rocks).
I used to live in Asheville, North Carolina in the '70s and it was sooo Cool back then, too!
to maintain their ugly gerrymandering... And when all else fails, watch for when they threaten to impeach the very state Supreme Court Justices who ruled against them, which is what happened here (although it wasn't carried out... at least as yet). 
What helped here and would hopefully help there, is having a Democratic governor.
In NC's case, they appear to be talking about their state legislative districts and that is something that seriously needs to be resolved here in PA. When they redrew the state legislative and congressional maps after the 2010 census here, the GOP's initial state map was thrown out in court and a new map was drawn in 2012, which was still gerrymandered but not as extreme. And with them controlling all aspects of state government, that is where it ended. But once we got a Democratic governor in 2014, we were finally able to move in parallel sets of lawsuits, to at least tackle the egregious congressional districts, which yielded the paydirt of 4 new Democratic seats (in addition to the seat won by Conor Lamb), bringing our state's congressional delegation closer to what it should have been based on party registration.
In this last 2018 election with the enhanced turnout, Democrats in PA were able to pick up 11 state House seats and 5 state Senate seats, despite the gerrymandered districts, which effectively ended the GOP super-majorities in the PA General Assembly. This will hopefully provide Democrats more bargaining power towards getting fair districts across the board, after 2020.
