Washington Post: North Carolina Republicans’ long track record of unconstitutional laws
The North Carolina legislature continues to try to subvert the will of the people with extreme partisan gerrymandering, unfair voting laws, and attempts to rig our courts. So far courts have found all these attempts to be unconstitutional. Now, the GOP led General Assembly is trying to trick voters into putting these unfair laws into our constitution to once again subvert the courts and the people.
This week a panel of federal judges ruled that North Carolina Republicans unconstitutionally gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts to disadvantage Democrats, the latest move in a legal saga going back to 2011.
Gerrymandering is the process by which legislators draw voting districts that give their own party a political advantage. The North Carolina map, for instance, allowed Republicans to take 10 out of the state’s 13 House seats in 2016 despite winning 53 percent of the statewide popular vote.
The latest North Carolina legal decision lays out precisely why this is a problem: When maps are gerrymandered, the government no longer reflects the will of the voters. “We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles,” wrote Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in his decision.
