The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked a lower-court ruling that would have forced N.C. lawmakers to draw a new congressional election map next week.
The high court granted a stay of the lower court’s ruling “pending the timely filing and disposition of an appeal in this Court.” The two-sentence order mentions that two of the nine justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor — would have denied the lawmakers’ request for a stay.
The Supreme Court decision blocks a three-judge panel’s order to replace North Carolina’s 2016 congressional map. All three members of the panel agreed that the map represented a case of unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.
The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering cases from Wisconsin and Maryland that address similar issues of partisan gerrymandering. The nation’s highest court never has struck down an election map because of the role partisan political considerations played in its development.
Without a stay, lawmakers would have been forced to draw a new map by Wednesday. They would have been forced to submit that map to the three-judge panel by Jan. 29. The court also had announced plans to name an outside “special master” to draw an alternative map at the same time.
In a statement issued Thursday night, Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, and Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, who chair the redistricting committees in each chamber, said:
We are grateful that a bipartisan U.S. Supreme Court has overwhelmingly halted the lower court’s 11th-hour attempt to intervene in election outcomes, restored certainty to voters, and ensured that, in the coming days, candidates for office can file in the least gerrymandered and most compact Congressional districts in modern state history.