Gerrymandering is intended to suppress minority voting rights

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article258076633.html

HELLO?  All white Republican caucus in the North Carolina General Assembly? 

Gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing Congressional districts after a decade census to favor one political party over the other.

Echo editorial opinion published in the Charlotte Observer:
NC Supreme Court outlaws partisan gerrymandering and uplifts democracy, by the Editorial Board updated February 05, 2022 

Read more at: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article258076633.html#storylink=cpy

North Carolina journalism: ”Court declares legislative districts unconstitutional.” For the umpteenth time, redistricting schemes have been invalidated.

Once again, we can’t know exactly when our elections will be held. Once again, we can’t know exactly who the candidates will be. Once again, millions of dollars are wasted. Once again, Tar Heels are taken for suckers. Once again, bullying lawmakers claim to be victimized by marauding folks in black robes. Sometimes Republican legislators break the rules to penalize Black voters.

Sometimes, they break the rules to penalize Democrats. 

Sometimes they go after both. 

Always feather their own nests. Rarely do they defend by saying what they did was fair.

Instead, they argue that they have the right to cheat and no one has the right to stop them. The relentless, unyielding pattern is as consistent and as democracy-defying as it is disgusting. And there is no reason to think it will end until the transgressors are bounced. If then. The N.C. Supreme Court ruled last Friday night, in Harper v. Hall, that our new congressional and state legislative maps, beyond any reasonable doubt, violate the state constitution. 

In fact, the majority again declared “the fundamental right to vote includes the right to enjoy substantially equal voting power and substantially equal legislative representation.” Say glory! The only entity now positioned to protect North Carolina’s democratic form of government did so.

Even more pointedly, the justices explicitly held that “achieving partisan advantage incommensurate with a political party’s level of statewide voter support is not a legitimate government interest.”

In other words, the central governing methodology of the N.C. Republican Party is literally prohibited. No wonder Chief Justice Paul Newby got the vapors. Gerrymandering grandmaster Sen. Ralph Hise howled that the “perverse” ruling was based on politics, not law. Really. Ralph Hise. The Republican position on partisan gerrymandering is that they’re going to repeatedly con the system to entrench their power and it’s everybody else’s duty to sit back and cheer them on. Outlawing extreme partisan gerrymandering can also help to cure an absurd problem now afoot in states like North Carolina. The U.S. Supreme Court has said, inappropriately, that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional but political gerrymandering is effectively fine. But what is the appropriate line between racial and political gerrymandering? Especially, when reviewing the handiwork of the all-white Republican caucuses of the N.C. General Assembly, which has been repeatedly found, over the past decade, to have used state power to violate the constitutional rights of African-Americans and then lied about it? It’s not me, or only me, who has said that. It has been repeatedly, unequivocally found by the state and federal courts. How much judicial deference is to be afforded to the political stratagems deployed to foster that unseemly work? Are the political feints of such an outfit really non-justiciable? Are they racial or (merely) partisan?

Colin Luther Powell (April 5, 1937 – October 18, 2021)

When, some years ago, these same lawmakers engaged in the most politically distorted district drawing in American history to secure and expand their racialized proclivities, can it actually be that our constitutional standards require judges to look away? Spectacularly favoring form over substance? It may be the case that in some locale, at some time, racial and political gerrymandering can be yanked apart, surgically separated. Maybe. But, anyone who says that’s happening here in North Carolina is simply dissembling. It’s a relief, even if only a temporary one, that our state Supreme Court seems to understand that. God knows what will happen next?