‘Sue til Blue’: NC Gerrymandering Trial Gets Underway

RALEIGH – While the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that courts have no place in rectifying ‘partisan gerrymandering’ by legislative majorities when it comes to congressional districts in North Carolina and other states, another gerrymandering case related to state legislative districts started Monday.

From the News & Observer:

“[…] The lines used to elect members of the North Carolina General Assembly are unconstitutional and should be redrawn before the 2020 elections, an attorney for activists and politicians argued in court Monday.

In 2018, Democratic candidates won more than 50 percent of the votes statewide for seats in the legislature, said Stanton Jones, who represents the groups and voters challenging the lines. But Republicans still won most of the seats in both the N.C. House and N.C. Senate.

“The simple truth is this: Because of the extreme gerrymandering, Democrats cannot win a majority,” Jones said. “… These plans are impervious to the will of the voters.” […]”

The lawyers for the Left continue to argue that because of discrepancies between total votes earned and actual seats won, that something sinister has happened. It’s a ridiculous argument, and even the Supreme Court majority said as much when handling the congressional gerrymandering case Rucho v. Common Cause.

Roberts then addresses the issue of proportional representation: “But such a claim is based on a “norm that does not exist” in our electoral system–“statewide elections for representatives along party lines.”” pic.twitter.com/S7SihtVqom

— Michael Bitzer (@BowTiePolitics) June 27, 2019

Proportional representation is not the system we have here in the United States, and so a complaint about it not being reflected in electoral outcomes is easily dismissed. The argument, too, that Democrats cannot possibly win a majority because the maps are rigged doesn’t stand up to reason.

How did Republicans win their General Assembly majority nearly a decade ago if gerrymandering makes partisan power transitions are impossible? Democrats had gerrymandered districts for decades prior to 2010, when Republicans swept to power on maps drawn by the other side.

(The Left paying deference to the ‘will of the voters’ is also rich considering Gov. Roy Cooper’s and Democrats’ openly fighting to ignore a voter-approved constitutional amendment requiring photo ID to vote.)

The attorney for Republican legislative leaders in the current case, Phil Strach, lays out exactly what the Left is seeking to accomplish with this lawsuit.

“[Strach] said that since the North Carolina constitution specifically gives redistricting power to the legislature, it shouldn’t even be up to a court to step in and dictate how redistricting should or shouldn’t work.

“What the plaintiffs here really want is for this court to undemocratically change the redistricting process and remove it from the legislature,” Strach said. […]”

In fact, Democrats have been telling us this is what they want as they proudly embraced the ‘Sue til Blue’ motto, challenging everything Republicans did in court and relying on Left-leaning activist judges to come to their rescue.

And so it continues with this case, which is expected to be a long and tedious trial. Unlike the Supreme Court of the United States, which has a majority dedicated to the actual tenets of the constitution, the North Carolina Supreme Court is dominated by Democrats and avowed social justice warriors that would jump at the chance to hand the Democratic Party an undeserved (and unconstitutional) victory over those damned Republicans.

This is why Cooper has been so giddy about getting cases to the Supreme Court where he feels confident Democrats will rule according to their voter registration, and not the N.C. Constitution.

Adding to the theatrics is the admission into evidence of the ‘Hofeller Files.’ Tom Hofeller was a Republican redistricting expert, and the Left thinks his emails will make Republicans’ sinister motives clear. It is pure hype, and purposely ignores the constitutional reality that legislative map-making resides in the legislature, and, necessarily, with the legislative majority.

We can expect a lot of Left-leaning media coverage of this trial in the coming weeks. The coverage, while presented as neutral news, will drip with bias, of course, as they cross their fingers for the court to overstep its bounds by weighing in on political questions.

Read more from a source that is often guilty of just that, here.