An important — but likely fleeting — NC Supreme Court victory on voting rights | Opinion

North Carolina’s electoral landscape was shifted in yet another redistricting ruling Friday. It’s the latest — but certainly not last — development in a saga that has played out in many a courtroom over the past year.

The state Supreme Court ruled in February that legislative and congressional maps drawn by Republican lawmakers were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, and ordered them to be redrawn. A trial court then assessed the remedial maps and found all but the congressional map to be constitutional, consequently appointing a group of special masters to draft an interim map for use in the 2022 election only.

On Friday, the Supreme Court held that the remedial House map and interim congressional map were constitutional, but ruled that the remedial Senate map “creates stark partisan asymmetry in violation of the fundamental right to vote on equal terms.” That map was used in the 2022 election, in which Republicans won a supermajority in the state Senate.

Lawmakers will now be tasked with redrawing the Senate map in order to achieve constitutionality. Complicating the situation, however, is the fact that the ideological makeup of the court will change in a matter of weeks.

Republicans already have to redraw congressional maps next year, and they will do so under the oversight of a Supreme Court that’s likely more sympathetic to their cartographic creativity than this one. GOP leaders have also suggested they might redraw legislative maps next year, too, despite the fact that the state constitution clearly states that they can only be drawn once per decade.

“You have to make a careful reading of the constitution,” Senate leader Phil Berger recently said, according to WRAL. “My reading of the constitution tells me that we’ve not done anything that would be a violation of the constitution if we decided to draw maps this year.”

(It certainly helps, of course, when there are five justices on the state’s highest court whose “careful reading” of the constitution aligns with yours.)

In another notable ruling Friday, the court struck down a voter ID law passed by the legislature in 2018, saying it was “formulated with an impermissible intent to discriminate against African-American voters in violation of the North Carolina Constitution.”

Both rulings represent a critical victory for voting rights in a state that has long attempted to restrict access to the franchise. But they’re only good for as long as they last — and they may not last for very long.

The Supreme Court will have a 5-2 Republican majority starting in January, and it will almost certainly hold different positions on voting rights. The three Republican justices currently on the court dissented in both rulings. In the dissent to the voter ID ruling, Justice Phil Berger Jr. hinted that, under a different majority, the outcome of the case would perhaps be different.

The senior Berger said in a statement that “if Democrats on the state Supreme Court can’t respect the will of the voters, the General Assembly will,” adding that the legislature will pass a new voter ID law next year. Neither Berger nor House Speaker Tim Moore has commented yet on whether the legislature will redraw Senate maps as instructed by the court. (State law clearly delineates a timeframe in which remedial maps must be drawn following a court order.)

The court’s Democratic majority chose to fast-track these cases, presumably in hopes of deciding them before year’s end in case the balance of power flipped. Of course, as Republicans have suggested, a newly seated court may very well block or reverse these rulings in the future.

Friday’s rulings, likely to be fleeting, may seem meaningless. But in many ways, they are fraught with meaning. They read like an outgoing court majority casting a vote of no confidence in its successor, who maybe just can’t be trusted to rule fairly on issues as critical as voting rights. It is, perhaps, a predictable series of events in a judicial system increasingly tarnished by politics.

This story was originally published December 16, 2022 at 3:17 PM with the headline "An important — but likely fleeting — NC Supreme Court victory on voting rights | Opinion."