RALEIGH — The North Carolina Supreme Court issued yet another ruling Wednesday in the lengthy legal and political battle over legislative redistricting. In upholding the finding last year by Superior Court Judge Knox Jenkins, the 4-1 decision of the high court sends the matter back to the General Assembly for another round of map-drawing, possibly in September.
The case has had many twists and turns, and not a small number of hypocritical and self-serving statements all around. I’ve weighed on it several times, arguing (I hope consistently) that the Democratic-controlled legislature in 2001 had produced an egregious gerrymander that ignored state law and the constitution, that the Republican plaintiffs had a solid case, that Jenkins’ prior rulings made a great deal of sense, and that while I thought the job the NC Supreme Court did in reconciling state and federal law had produced a workable and fair set of neutral rules for redistricting, I would have rather seen those rules generated from the legislative branch rather than from the judiciary.
Naturally, the politicians didn’t exact wax philosophical on the latest Supreme Court ruling. Senate leader Marc Basnight made the charge that the whole thing was a partisan put-up job, as if there were no legitimate issues underlying the case or the Court’s decisions. Basnight was either serious, and thus woefully uninformed, or he was knowingly casting aspersions on the work of an elected and independent branch of state government — a branch, I should note, that isn’t put in power through the manipulation of district lines.
What’s more important than the immediate and rather silly political spin is the hints that legislative leaders gave about what comes next. In effect, the Supreme Court ordered legislators to go back to the drawing board and to employ neutral rules in fashioning House and Senate districts to last until 2010. They agreed with the trial court than the second set of maps the lawmakers drew in 2002 had been a gross gerrymander. If you read between the lines, though, you can already see that the most likely product of another legislative attempt at redistricting is another gross gerrymander.
Basnight, for example, told reporters that in redrawing the Senate his folks would start out by revisiting the districts in Wake and Mecklenburg counties. But there is nothing I can see in the latest court ruling that suggests that the maps used in the 2002 elections, the interim maps produced by Jenkins and his consultants, pose any significant conflict with the constitution and the court’s past decisions. There is, in other words, no real reason to deviate much from the current set of Senate districts in Wake and Mecklenburg, which are rather compact and straightforward, unless the goal is to dis-elect Republicans and re-elect or protect Democrats such as the former Sen. Fountain Odom in Mecklenburg and the current Sen. Eric Reeves of Wake, who won in 2002 by fewer than 500 votes.
On the House side, where even the interim maps for 2002 contained elements that conflicted with the original Supreme Court decision, House Speaker Jim Black renewed his belief that the previous, egregious gerrymander was “a pretty good job.” The Republican co-speaker, Richard Morgan, is on record as opposing the GOP lawsuit on redistricting in the first place, and appears little interested in implementing the legal principles it generated.
I think that this will end up in court again, that the political class in Raleigh will refuse to give up the power to pick their constituents via political slicing and dicing. They’ll try to slip another gerrymander through. They’ll probably fail — after the taxpayers are compelled to shell out plenty of money for the Attorney General’s office to defend the gerrymander.
I’d love to be proven wrong. I don’t think I will be.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.