Newly Right-Wing North Carolina Supreme Court Reverses Its 2022 Gerrymandering Decision

The United States Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause declared non-justiciable a dispute over partisan drawing of  election district lines, thus returning the issue to North Carolina. 

The closely divided [53/47] state in 2016 sent but three Democrats to fill its thirteen seats in Congress.  The 2022 elections sent a majority of Republicans to the state's high court.  The new majority reversed the older ruling more accurately approximating the partisan divide among North Carolina voters.

In an astonishingly particsan move the new high court majority declared:

Our [North Carolina] constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text. Those limitations do not address partisan gerrymandering. It is not within the authority of this Court to amend the constitution to create such limitations on a responsibility that is textually assigned to another branch.

So much for the principle of one person one vote declared in the 1962 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186. Justices Earls and Morgan, dissenting, said:

...the majority has used rehearing in this case to “upend the constitutional guarantee that voters in the State will enjoy ‘substantially equal voting power,’ regardless of their political affiliations.” Id. “Such a change . . . fundamentally alter[s] the political rights of every voter in North Carolina.” Id. (quoting Harper I, 380 N.C. at 376).

- GWC 

 North Carolina Supreme Court Reverses Its 2022 Gerrymandering Decision

By Kate Riga

The North Carolina Supreme Court became much more conservative after the 2022 midterms. On Friday, the newly minted justices flexed that power to overturn the court’s own months-old decision knocking down maps that were egregiously gerrymandered by the Republican state legislature. 

In Harper v. Hall the right-wing majority cloaked the decision in highfalutin language, but the decision is nakedly political. Now the Republican legislature knows that it can continue to manufacture its way into a permanent majority — regardless of the will of its voters — and that the state’s highest court won’t stop it.