A hopeful Supreme Court sign on NC redistricting extremes
For the past few weeks, Republican legislative leaders who savored their power by drawing legislative and congressional districts designed to keep them in control have said a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an Alabama redistricting case had no bearing on their actions.
On Monday, the nation’s highest court signaled that the Republicans’ confidence might well have been misplaced.
The justices ordered the North Carolina Supreme Court, which had upheld the districts, to take another look. The result of Republican redistricting has been a larger GOP majority in the state’s congressional delegation and in the General Assembly. In drawing the new district maps in 2011, Republicans packed black voters into a few districts, diluting their voting power in others.
Democracy North Carolina, a watchdog group, said Monday in response to the high court’s action: “Republican mapmakers said they had to segregate voters in this manner to create majority-black districts that would satisfy the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that African-American voters have a fair chance to elect representatives of their choice. But 15 of the 25 African-American legislators in the 2010 General Assembly were elected in districts where black voters were a minority.”
Former state Rep. Margaret Dickson is the named plaintiff in the North Carolina case, and she said in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that citizens “deserve to have this resolved so that they can benefit from fair and legal maps for the 2016 elections.”
In the Alabama ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the state’s courts to re-examine a ruling there that upheld districts that black leaders in that state said relied too much on race to determine their lines. Alabama courts have to follow the high court ruling, and now so will North Carolina’s Supreme Court.
North Carolina’s GOP legislative leaders will downplay this ruling, going back to the claim that the North Carolina district lines aren’t as questionable as those in Alabama.
But those who have challenged the lines vehemently dispute that attitude.
Said Anita Earls, head of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice: “The decision in the Alabama case makes clear that the Voting Rights Act does not require, and the Constitution does not permit, the use of mechanical racial targets in redistricting, as was done in North Carolina.”
Indeed, in writing about the Alabama case, Justice Stephen Breyer of the nation’s high court indicated that drawing voting districts should be about fairness as well as about numbers.
And in North Carolina, maintaining political power, not fairness, was clearly the aim of GOP redistricting.
Republicans are going to have a hard time claiming fairness given that they also reached into local government authority to redraw the district lines for Wake County commissioners and school board members in a way clearly calculated to give the GOP an advantage.
Redrawing legislative and congressional districts is a task that ruling parties take on after a census. It’s true, as Republicans have claimed, that Democrats drew districts to their advantage when they were in power, but they did not go to the extremes the GOP did.
Think of how much time and trouble and money the state could save if it established a bipartisan commission to draw districts every 10 years. But don’t expect that to happen while Republicans continue to enjoy being in power after 100 years out of it.
This story was originally published April 20, 2015 at 6:39 PM with the headline "A hopeful Supreme Court sign on NC redistricting extremes."