North Carolina court clears way for Republican gerrymander that could flip four seats in Congress

North Carolina’s conservative supreme court on Friday cleared the way for its Republican lawmakers to redraw congressional districts, opening a path for the GOP to flip four seats in the battleground state.

The court ruled that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the state’s constitution, giving the green light to the GOP to rejigger boundaries of the state’s now evenly divided 14 congressional districts to give them the edge in up to 11 of them.

The power play would give Republicans the upper hand to snatch up to four of the seven seats now held by Democrats as soon as the 2024 elections, giving the GOP a buffer as they cling to a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.

The court reversed its own previous ruling striking down a Republican-backed map. Two seats on the bench flipped from liberal to conservative justices, forging a 5-2 GOP-friendly new majority on the court.

North Carolina is virtually evenly divided in statewide elections, leaning slightly to Republicans in recent presidential races.

But GOP state lawmakers have drawn district lines to pack Democratic voters into fewer urban districts, creating two-thirds supermajorities in both the state House and Senate.

That move has given them the power to do the same thing with the congressional districts, even if Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper tries to block them.

The conservative U.S. Supreme Court ruled several years ago that it would not get involved in partisan gerrymandering disputes, even in such cases where the biased maps effectively lead to one-party rule that opposition parties cannot change.

It has also severely limited the power of the Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which was intended to ensure Black voters have power in states with a history of white racism.

The basic game plan is similar to the one followed by Republicans in other red-leaning battleground states like Ohio and Florida.

In Ohio, a new conservative-leaning top court could also allow the GOP to tweak maps to open the door to an even bigger majority of the congressional delegation.

In Wisconsin, the opposite could happen. A newly elected liberal judge could help strike down the evenly divided state’s brazenly gerrymandered Republican maps and give Democrats a change to win up to four of its eight congressional seats.

New York might see something similar too.

The state’s highest court is now firmly in liberal hands after Senate Democrats rejected Gov. Hochul’s pick of conservative Hector LaSalle as chief judge.

It could revisit the previous court’s decision to overrule a Democratic-drawn map and impose a GOP-friendly one that helped Republicans grab 11 of the state’s 26 districts.