North Carolina’s new Republican Supreme Court majority took the latest step in its power grab on Friday, reversing recent precedent that curbed partisan gerrymandering when the court was led by Democrats. The 5-2 decision, with the court’s two Democrats dissenting, said the state court can’t hear such gerrymandering claims, effectively condoning the anti-democratic election map-drawing practice because there’s supposedly no “judicially manageable” way to rule on it.
Friday’s GOP-backed ruling paves the way for greater GOP electoral control in the state.
As it happens, Friday’s GOP-backed ruling paves the way for greater GOP electoral control in the state. It also calls into question the status of a potentially dangerous elections case that’s pending at the U.S. Supreme Court with nationwide implications.
To be sure, Friday’s result in North Carolina was expected, but that doesn’t make it less extreme. I’ve written about how November’s state elections shifted control of the court from 4-3 Democrat to 5-2 Republican. After that GOP takeover, the court took the incredibly rare step of voting to reconsider prior rulings, including the gerrymandering case decided Friday. And it wasn’t the only anti-democratic ruling that day from the state court, which also handed down pro-GOP decisions on voter ID and felon voting, also over Democratic dissent.
Dissenting from the gerrymandering ruling, Justice Anita Earls made plain the partisan state of play on her court. “Today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority,” she wrote. Contrasting the previous curbs on partisan gerrymandering and Friday’s ruling allowing it, Earls explained:
To be clear, this is not a situation in which a Democrat-controlled Court preferred Democrat-leaning districts and a Republican-controlled Court now prefers Republican-leaning districts. Here, a Democratic-controlled…
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