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The Washington Post reports Supreme Court rules race improperly dominated N.C. redistricting efforts
The Supreme Court ruled [May 22] that North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature relied on racial gerrymandering when drawing the state's congressional districts, a decision that could make it easier to challenge other state redistricting plans.
The decision continued a trend at the court, where justices have found that racial considerations improperly tainted redistricting decisions by GOP-led legislatures in Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. Some cases involved congressional districts, others legislative districts.
[...] [The justices] were unanimous in rejecting one of the districts and split 5 to 3 on the other.
AlterNet reports
Republican legislators used surgical precision to pack black voters into just two districts, the tentacular 1st and the snake-like 12th. The lower court found that these districts targeted voters on the basis of race in violation of the constitution, a move that effectively prevented black voters from electing their preferred candidates in neighboring seats. map
[...] This now-invalidated congressional map was one of, if not the very most, aggressive partisan gerrymanders in modern history. North Carolina is a relatively evenly divided swing state--Donald Trump won it by just 3 points last year--yet these lines offered Republicans 10 safe districts while creating three lopsidedly Democratic seats. Amazingly, all 10 Republican districts hit a perfect sweet spot with GOP support between 55 and 60 percent, a level that is high enough to be secure yet spreads around Republican voters just carefully enough to ensure the maximum number of GOP seats possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:44PM
So if you ignore race the SCOTUS has ruled in the past that you are a racist. In my state we are under court order to create a certain quantity of 'majority minority' Congressional Districts for example. But now if you do it too much, i.e. if you don't disenfranchise enough white people by mapping them into those 'majority minority' districts where their vote is a piss in the wind of the machine that is assured to produce yet another jewel of idiocy like Mad Maxine, you are also racist. But all of that is merely squid ink for we all know the actual logic employed, if a map gets more Democrats elected it is acceptable, otherwise not.
And this problem will continue to exist as long as we allow the Judiciary to be this overtly political and free of any attempt to check the excesses by the other two branches. Look at SCOTUS, you can predict the vote with very high confidence by the party label. We have two warring concepts of Justice, American and Progressive and Progressive jurisprudence has no rules, only Power and the Will to use it. Impeachment would be the preferred method but helicopter rides may be the only viable way to save even the semblance of the Rule of Law at this point. Yea I'm at the destroy the village to save it point.