Halfway through the decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has bounced the state’s congressional and legislative district maps back to the N.C. Supreme Court.

The nation’s high court didn’t overturn North Carolina’s maps, drawn in 2011 by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Instead, it told North Carolina’s top court to reconsider the case in light of an earlier ruling from the justices on Alabama’s redistricting maps. If North Carolina’s justices approve the maps and the U.S. Supreme Court reverses that decision, then the General Assembly would have to draw new maps in time for the 2016 election.

GOP legislative leaders called the U.S. Supreme Court’s action nothing more than a procedural move.

“Since 2011, every court that has issued an opinion and the Obama Justice Department has reached the same conclusion — North Carolina’s redistricting maps are constitutional,” said Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, and Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, in a joint statement. The two chaired their respective chamber’s redistricting committees when the maps were drawn four years ago.

“Today’s procedural ruling is not unexpected and we are confident that our state Supreme Court will once again arrive at the same result and the U.S. Supreme Court will affirm its decision,” Lewis and Rucho said on Monday.

North Carolina Democratic leaders took a different view. State Democratic Party Chairwoman Patsy Keever used the action to ask for donations to the party. “This will give us more competitive legislative races and will allow us to elect more Democrats to the legislature,” she said in an email.

Two leaders of the state’s Main Street Democratic caucus, which seeks to bring together moderate, business-oriented Democrats, urged reform in the redistricting process and called on the N.C. Supreme Court to expedite review of the decision. “The work needs to start immediately so the Legislature and the U.S. Supreme Court will have time to review so that voters can participate in new district elections for the 2016 election cycle,” Sen. Joel Ford, D-Mecklenburg, vice chairman of the caucus, said.

“The Supreme Court’s decision adds merit to the calls of leaders from across the state to form a nonpartisan, independent, redistricting commission,” Rep. Ken Goodman, D-Richmond, chairman of the caucus, said.

Much of the case centers on whether majority-minority districts — political districts drawn so that a majority of the voters are nonwhite — were packed with too many members of a minority race.

In the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said lawmakers drawing legislative districts after the 2010 census tried to keep the percentage of minority voters in majority-minority districts the same as they were in those drawn after the 2000 census.

Breyer said lawmakers were asking the wrong question. “They asked: ‘How can we maintain present minority percentages in majority-minority districts?’” Breyer wrote. Instead, he continued, lawmakers should have asked: “To what extent must we preserve existing minority percentages in order to maintain the minority’s present ability to elect the candidate of its choice?”

Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting in the Alabama ruling, said the current problems resulted from decades of misguided actions by the U.S. Justice Department, and even the U.S. Supreme Court itself.

“In order to maintain these ‘racially safe burroughs,’ the states or courts must perpetually ‘divide the country into electoral districts along racial lines — an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands,’” Thomas wrote. “The assumptions underlying this practice of creating and maintaining safe minority districts — that members of a racial group must think alike and that their interests are so distinct that they must be provided a separate body of representatives — remain repugnant to any nation that strives for the ideal of a color-blind Constitution.”

Thomas went on to criticize the ruling. “Worse, the majority’s solution to the appellants’ gerrymandering claims requires states to analyze race even more exhaustively, not less, by accounting for black voter registration and turnout statistics,” he wrote. “The majority’s command to analyze black voting patterns en route to adopt the ‘correct’ racial quota does nothing to ease the conflict between our color-blind Constitution and the ‘consciously segregated districting system’ the court has required in the name of equality.”

Rucho said North Carolina’s General Assembly used different standards than Alabama lawmakers did in establishing the state’s majority-minority districts. He said comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges.

Rucho said lawmakers conducted a racial polarization study to gauge voter sensitivity to race. “In the areas that we were required to put in majority-minority districts, there was racial polarization going on,” Rucho said. “If racial polarizations are a problem, you need to remedy that problem.” He said North Carolina’s solution was to adopt a standard deeming any district in which more than half the voters (“50 percent plus one”) were members of racial minorities was considered a majority-minority district.

He also said North Carolina tried to use guidelines that blended decisions from both the U.S. Supreme Court and the N.C. Supreme Court in drawing the maps, guidelines not used by Alabama. He said he expects both the state and federal high courts to validate the maps.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s used as a model for the rest of the country when they have to decide Voting Rights Act districts,” Rucho said.

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause of North Carolina, said he isn’t surprised to see the case sent back to the N.C. Supreme Court for further review.

“It’s another good reason why lawmakers should consider reform,” Phillips said. “Here we are in the middle of a decade again and still considering litigation.”

Phillips’ group and other organizations, including the John Locke Foundation, have supported a proposal that would have congressional and legislative district maps drawn either by a nonpartisan commission or the General Assembly’s nonpartisan staff.

“Reform ensures that you will have a voice that is not gerrymandered into irrelevance,” Phillips said.

Barry Smith (@Barry_Smith) is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.