Supreme Court gives North Carolina a delay in gerrymandering case
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court came to the aid of North Carolina’s Republican leaders Thursday, putting on hold a lower court’s ruling that declared the state’s election map an unconstitutional “partisan gerrymander” and required the GOP-controlled Legislature to redraw congressional districts in time for this year’s election.
The justices granted an emergency appeal that blocks enforcement of the Jan. 9 decision by a three-judge panel rebuking Republican leaders.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
The court’s decision will put the case on hold until the justices rule on at least one of two partisan gerrymandering cases currently before them.
The justices are already in the midst of an internal battle over the constitutionality of partisan line-drawing, involving a case from Wisconsin, which was brought by Democrats, and a case from Maryland brought by Republicans. The outcome could affect the political battle for control of the House in the November elections. Partisan gerrymandering has helped the GOP control the House for most of this decade.
The North Carolina case led to an unusually strong condemnation of partisan linedrawing. The three-judge panel that ruled against the state’s map would have required the Legislature to draw new districts in two weeks.
Those judges ruled the state’s election map was unconstitutional because it was deliberately drawn to give the GOP a lopsided 10-3 grip on the state’s delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The best evidence of this partisan bias came from the mouths of the state’s Republican leaders, the judges said.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” state Rep. David Lewis, the GOP leader of the state Assembly, said two years ago when the district lines were being redrawn. “We want to make clear that to extent we are going to use political data in drawing this map, it is to gain partisan advantage,” he said, adding that is “not against the law.”
He would have gone further, Lewis said, but “I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”