North Carolina Supreme Court’s new majority reverses redistricting ruling in a win for Republicans

A new majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday gave Republican lawmakers free rein to draw state legislative and congressional maps as they see fit, reversing a decision issued in December when liberals controlled the court.

Also Friday, Republicans on the court set the stage to reinstate a voter identification law that had been blocked in December by Democratic justices.

The pair of 5-2 rulings showed how court elections can dramatically shift the direction of a state and potentially control of the U.S. House. The Republican-controlled state legislature will be able to draw new maps that favor them for the 2024 election while reconfiguring the congressional district boundaries that could boost the GOP’s chances of capturing more House seats.

In an opinion released Friday, North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, wrote for the majority that there is “no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims” and “courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters.”

“This case is not about partisan politics but rather about realigning the proper roles of the judicial and legislative branches. Today we begin to correct course, returning the judiciary to its designated lane,” Newby wrote. Four justices joined him in the opinion.

In dissent, Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, wrote that the majority “tells North Carolinians that the state constitution and the courts cannot protect their basic human right to self-governance and self-determination.” Justice Michael Morgan joined in the dissent.

In December, the previous court, in its ruling, had rejected the redistricting maps for “excessive partisanship” and said the photo voter ID law was illegal for “being infected with racial bias.”

On Friday, the new majority said that North Carolina courts don’t have a reliable way to determine when maps are overly partisan and so cannot throw out maps for giving one political party an advantage over the other. The reasoning is in line with a 2019 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that concluded that federal courts can’t consider partisan gerrymandering cases.

In November, the state used congressional maps drawn by a panel of three judges that resulted in the election of seven Republicans and seven Democrats. The maps that Republican state lawmakers wanted to use would have given Republicans an advantage in 10 of 14 districts.

In an analysis of Friday’s redistricting decision, UCLA law professor Richard L. Hasen wrote that the decision will allow the North Carolina legislature “to engage in the most partisan gerrymander of congressional seats it can think of.”

Republicans won a 5-2 majority on the court in November and gained control of the court when they were sworn in this past January. North Carolina is one of seven states in which justices run for office with partisan affiliations.

Just before the changeover, the court in December issued 4-3 rulings rejecting a Republican redistricting plan and blocking the voter ID law. Soon after the new Republican justices claimed their seats, the court took the unusual step of agreeing to rehear the two cases. On Friday, they issued the decisions reversing the December rulings.

Democrats decried the court’s decisions.

“Today’s ruling by an extreme Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court is both unprecedented and an outrageous affront to voters who deserve fair, non-gerrymandered maps,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “This is nothing more than a partisan power grab and a slap in the face to North Carolinians. Voters in North Carolina deserve better. This fight isn’t over. We will do what we can to make sure the voices of North Carolinians are heard in Congress.”

Michael Whatley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, called the rulings “a big step toward restoring respect for the Constitution and taking politics out of the courtroom.”

“The People of North Carolina rejected the blatant activism of the progressive judges by electing a strong majority of conservative Justices,” he said in a written statement.

Friday’s ruling would seem to call into question whether the U.S. Supreme Court will decide one of the term’s most important cases, involving whether state legislators may draw congressional district lines and set federal voting rules without oversight from state courts.

At issue is the “independent state legislature theory,” which holds that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause gives exclusive authority to state legislators to structure federal elections, subject only to intervention by Congress. That is true, those who favor the theory say, even if those plans result in extreme partisan voting maps for congressional seats and violate voter protections enshrined in state constitutions.

The U.S. Supreme Court was using the North Carolina case as the basis for its review of the issue, but Friday’s decision vacates the state court decision at the heart of the case.

Last month, U.S. Supreme Court justices asked for additional briefing on how to proceed since the North Carolina Supreme Court had agreed to reconsider the case.

The advice was mixed, but U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the court the case was probably no longer in a position in which the U.S. Supreme Court still had a role to play.

The U.S. Supreme Court was considering whether a decision about whether the state constitution “imposes judicially enforceable limits on partisan gerrymandering,” Prelogar wrote. “If the North Carolina Supreme Court decides that the state constitution contains no such limits, its decision would effectively moot the federal Elections Clause issue in this case: There would be no need to decide whether the Elections Clause prevents state courts from enforcing particular types of state-law requirements in a case where the state courts have found that no such state-law requirements exist.”