A federal circuit court dealt a huge blow to gerrymandering in North Carolina when it struck down its state legislative maps as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Republicans had illegally packed minority voters into a few districts, like the 21st state Senate district shown above. They disingenuously claimed the Voting Rights Act forced them to increase such districts from plurality black to majority black. However, the real purpose was to prevent black voters from electing their candidate preference in neighboring seats, allowing white Republicans to win seats like the 19th District.
This ruling follows a spate of recent racial gerrymandering court rulings, including one striking down North Carolina’s congressional districts earlier this year. North Carolina is one of the most gerrymandered states in the entire country and Republican legislators explicitly defended their partisan gerrymandering in anti-democratic terms. The legislative maps this court just invalidated are so biased that Republicans won veto-proof majorities in 2012 despite effectively losing the statewide popular vote to Democrats.
Sadly, this ruling was not a complete victory against gerrymandering. The court only invalidated 28 of 170 legislative districts and will give the legislature a chance to pass remedial maps. They also left the racially gerrymandered districts in place for the 2016 elections, meaning new maps won’t go into effect until 2018 at the earliest and Republicans will have gotten away with illegal maps for three of five cycles this decade. Since Democrats have almost no hope of winning majorities in 2016 under the current maps and the governor can’t legally veto redistricting, Republicans will almost certainly be able to pass new gerrymanders next year.
Still, this ruling deals a serious blow to Republicans. Minority voters will have their clout grow significantly in several districts and Democrats could gain several seats in both chambers by 2018 or 2020. Even if that won’t let Democrats win majorities in 2016, it should help them sustain vetoes from a possible Democratic governor in the future or maybe even win a majority if the 2020 election favors Democrats.
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Republican legislators will almost certainly appeal this ruling and since it was from a three-judge federal circuit court panel it will likely go directly to the United States Supreme Court. However, without the late Justice Antonin Scalia, there almost certainly won’t be a majority of justices willing to overturn the lower court ruling. Given Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote with the four liberals in a similar 2015 racial gerrymandering case in Alabama, the Supreme Court would most likely uphold this ruling instead.
Thursday’s ruling is just the latest in a long line of court decisions rebuking North Carolina’s legislature over its racial and partisan gerrymandering schemes. So far, the legislature’s districts for Congress, both legislative chambers, the Wake County (Raleigh) government, and the Greensboro city council have all been blocked or invalidated. A federal appeals court just recently gutted North Carolina’s sweeping voter suppression law, whose provisions like voter ID it said “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
These rulings show we simply cannot trust redistricting to partisan legislators and it’s high time we reform our system to create independent redistricting commissions in states like North Carolina. However, Republican legislators are unlikely to willingly cede that power and North Carolina voters have no way of forcing them to as voters have done in other states. That’s why it’s paramount for Democrats to win the 2016 state Supreme Court election if they want to further curtail future partisan Republican gerrymandering of North Carolina’s state legislative districts.