Supreme Court to consider important North Carolina racial gerrymandering case in coming term

The Supreme Court announced this week that it would hear a case this coming term concerning racial gerrymandering in North Carolina’s congressional districts. Alongside a similar challenge to Virginia’s state House of Delegates districts already set for the fall term, the court is poised to resolve some of the unclarified issues regarding the acceptable and impermissible use of race ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle.

In 2011, Republican legislators in the Tarheel State redrew the 1st and 12th Congressional Districts and increased them from plurality black to majority black, claiming the changes were necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act. In 2016 a federal district court struck down these districts, deeming them an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Legislators subsequently claimed that they had gerrymandered based on party, not race. However, the court found that arbitrarily increasing the share of black voters was not necessary to preserve their ability to elect a black representative, but instead had diluted black voters’ clout in surrounding districts....
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/1543234