Not so Blue Monday
by Tom Sullivan
Not to dampen your enthusiasm for your local congressional races (I have a few favorites), but if you live in a red state odds are the Democratic challenger in your GOP-held district is running that marathon wearing ankle weights. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sent back to a lower court a suit over GOP gerrymandering in my state of North Carolina. The Washington Post reports:
The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case.If there is a form of election rigging North Carolina Republicans haven't tried since taking over legislative control in 2011, they either haven't found the time or it hasn't been invented yet. The voter ID law targeting African American voters "with almost surgical precision" struck down by a lower court failed to win review by SCOTUS last year.
The Supreme Court recently considered the question of partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. The court has never found a map so infected by politics that it violated the constitutional rights of voters.
But the justices did not rule on the merits of the issue. The court said plaintiffs in Wisconsin did not have the proper legal standing and that the Maryland case was in too preliminary a stage.
North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature has implemented a map under which Republicans hold 10 of the 13 congressional seats. The GOP’s domination of the congressional delegation belies North Carolina’s recent history as a battleground state. It has a Democratic governor and attorney general, who have declined to defend the maps.