EDITORIAL: SCOTUS and our (interim) Congressional districts

Today at Triad City Beat, we feel somewhat, mostly, sort-of confident that the maps for the 2022 Election will stand, as the US Supreme Court voted 6-3 not to touch the decision handed down by the lesser court.

This decision applies to the Congressional map drawn by the state Supreme Court. In it, District 6 contains all of Guilford and Rockingham counties, most of Caswell and, in Forsyth, most of the city of Winston-Salem. It’s cut for a Democrat that will most likely be represented by incumbent Rep. Kathy Manning, who faces no primary challenger. We also get District 5, which has the rest of Forsyth County and an 11-county, comet-like tail that extends west to the Tennessee border. District 5, cut for a Republican, has a primary conflict between incumbent Rep. Virginia Foxx and Republican challenger Michael Ackerman, a former sheriff’s deputy who lost his partner in a shooting and now works for juvenile court in Boone.

The NC GOP wanted to cut these 14 districts into an 11-3 split. We’ve settled on a 7-6, in the GOP’s favor, with one toss-up.

In other words, it’s fair — even though registered Republicans are outnumbered both by registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters they still get the “winner’s bounce” that comes with being the majority party. Even though they became the majority party by illegally gerrymandering districts and suppressing votes.

But we’ve been around long enough to know that “fair” won’t work for the NC GOP, which suffers from a deficit in numbers so steep that no amount of cracking and packing will remedy it. They don’t have the numbers because they don’t have the ideas — this is what happens when the party platform consists of making North Carolina more like it was in the 1950s, which is to say racist and backwards.

NC Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger has already noted that these new Congressional districts are “interim” districts that held only because SCOTUS did not want to get involved so close to the actual election. Plans to assail them, he assures us, are already underway. Because without the numbers, there’s only one way to win — though there’s a hundred ways to do it.