NC’s new district maps dismantle democracy. Blame the state Supreme Court | Opinion
You may not have realized that Wednesday was Election Day, but in many districts in North Carolina it effectively was.
Republican state lawmakers approved new congressional and legislative district maps that are heavily gerrymandered. A year before the 2024 election, the new lines have largely determined that the Republican Party will win in most districts.
A Duke University analysis predicts that the maps will flip the state’s congressional delegation from a 7-7 partisan split to 10-4 or even 11-3 in Republicans’ favor.
That result distorts the will of voters in an evenly divided state. In the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump edged Joe Biden by 1.3% – Trump’s narrowest margin among the 24 states he carried.
The Duke report concluded that the congressional maps are “highly non-responsive to changes in the opinion of the electorate.”
The maps also wash out democracy at the state legislative level. For instance, the group’s report said, “Under the newly proposed Senate maps, the Republicans may reasonably expect to obtain a supermajority, even when the statewide Democratic vote share is over 50%.”
Imagine that. Democrats collect more than half the votes and Republicans get a veto-proof majority. Whatever that is, it’s not democracy.
Democrats complain that Republican lawmakers drew these maps in secret and unfairly. They did. And they’ve done it more extremely than Democrats did when they were in power. After all, Republicans won control of the legislature in a 2010 election based on districts drawn by Democrats. The state’s congressional delegation that year had only a 7-6 Democratic advantage.
But the Republican lawmakers are not the real villains here. They’re doing what politicians do to stay in power. The blame belongs to the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court.
The court, which shifted from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican one in the 2022 election, reversed a ruling by the previous Democrat-controlled court that outlawed extreme partisan gerrymandering. The court majority’s message to their fellow Republicans in the state legislature: “Do what you want with redistricting. That’s your job, not ours.”
Republican lawmakers then stretched gerrymandering as far as the math would allow.
In his opinion justifying the reversal, Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, took a disingenuous approach. He said the court should stay in its lane and out of politics and the ruling against partisan gerrymandering veered off that track. He wrote, ”Such engagement in policy issues forces courts to take sides in political battles and undermines public trust and confidence in the judiciary.”
Of course, the Republican majority’s abrupt reversal benefiting Republican lawmakers did just that and undermined public trust and confidence in the court’s independence from politics.
Republicans argue that neither the federal or state constitutions explicitly require that election districts be drawn to reflect the will of the people. But both constitutions were written to defend and preserve democracy and extreme partisan gerrymandering is a direct threat to it. Only partisan justices would think that countering that threat is beyond their constitutional duty.
In her dissent to Newby’s majority opinion, Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, was bitterly critical, but tried to end on a hopeful note. She wrote: “I look forward to the day when commitment to the constitutional principles of free elections and equal protection of the laws are upheld and the abuses committed by the majority are recognized for what they are, permanently relegating them to the annals of this Court’s darkest moments. I have no doubt that day will come.”
In the meantime, North Carolina will have to endure the results of this week’s pseudo Election Day, when Republican lawmakers selected their voters. Partisan gerrymandering is back with a vengeance thanks to partisan justices.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
