Boundary wars
As disappointing as it was, there wasn't much of a surprise when Republicans used newly acquired power in the General Assembly to draw voting districts in a way calculated to give them all-out partisan advantage.
Disappointing because of expected GOP gains? Well, not everyone would see those gains as a reason to set off fireworks. But that's not the point. In contorting the shapes of legislative and congressional districts, Republican mapmakers took a bad situation created by the Democrats who used to rule on Jones Street and made it worse.
The redistricting that followed the 2010 census was the Republicans' first chance in more than a century to draw new district lines with a free hand. The governor, in this case Democrat Beverly Perdue, isn't allowed to use her veto stamp on redistricting bills, and the GOP-controlled House and Senate gambled that a partisan-to-the-max approach would survive the court challenge it was bound to provoke.
Their strategy boiled down to this: Since African-Americans tend to vote Democratic, cluster as many of them as possible into a certain few districts. With those districts thrown to the Democratic wolves, Republican candidates would be sitting pretty, or at least prettier, everywhere else.
But to carry out this plan, districts had to be drawn with lines so squiggly that the computers used for the task must have been smoking and hissing like they were about to blow.
Sliced and diced
Counties were chopped into districts that made sense only to legislative bosses who wanted to isolate Democrats, particularly black Democrats, in their own enclaves. Even precincts got the chopped-liver treatment. Communities and neighborhoods were split in a way sure to mystify voters and candidates as well. What this does is corrode the bond between citizens and their elected leaders.
Now the new districts are about to undergo their anticipated test as a lawsuit pressed by Democrats and several nonprofit government reform groups faces its first review. Republicans have moved to have the suit thrown out, and they cite past maps skewed to benefit Democrats as a precedent for their approach.
What an excuse - "They did it first." Which they did. However, not to the same degree - not with the same relentless thrust for the partisan jugular that makes these GOP-drawn maps a model of self-serving cynicism.
Packed and jacked
That cynicism is underscored by Republicans' professed concern for the rights of minority voters. They say that packing African-Americans into certain districts is necessary to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and related court decisions. But when the maps' overall effect is to dilute black voting strength by purging African-Americans from districts where Republicans find them inconvenient, surely the law's spirit is mocked.
The state Department of Justice, under Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, finds itself in the awkward position of having to defend the Republican scheme. It resorts to arguing that the state constitution doesn't prohibit the splitting of precincts. But voting district boundaries also are supposed to abide by principles of compactness and contiguity. A comparison with the current maps shows how the proposed ones flout those principles like never before.
The parceling out of black voters is not the only technique used by Republicans angling for every edge at the polls. They've also "double-bunked" several Democratic incumbents into the same district and shifted other Democrats into districts where they don't live.
Some of this sort of thing is within the bounds of accepted partisan hardball. As to whether the packing of minorities has gone beyond those bounds, the courts will have to decide. This should be one of those instances where they'll know it when they see it.
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