Something happened late Friday in the newly insane state of North Carolina, and we are suddenly confronted with a profound question of the nature and future of our democratic republic and its institutions. That republic and its institutions have been pushed far enough away from their originating principles and their original purposes that you can wonder genuinely if they ever can get back to them again. This was the question underlying the extraordinary argument made by a superior court judge in North Carolina on Friday.

At issue were two amendments to the state's constitution—a measure lowering a cap on the state's income tax and an amendment requiring a photo ID to vote in the state's election. Both of these measures passed handily by referendum last November, but that's not the important part of what happened on Friday. Wake County Superior Court Judge G. Bryan Collins took this opportunity to drop the big one.

In essence, Collins ruled that the amendments were illegitimate because the legislature that had passed them was so ferociously gerrymandered on racial lines that the action it took was prima facie illegitimate as well. (This was the legislature produced by the election map that a federal court said targeted minority voters "with almost surgical precision.") A judge declared that an entire legislature was illegitimate because of the way it had been produced at the polls. This is kicking over the applecart and kicking all the apples halfway to Cape Hatteras.

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Let your mind roam on the idea for a minute. (You might as well have some fun with it because I don't see any way Collins's ruling survives an appeal, largely because it probably scares people to death.) If we establish as fact that gerrymandering can be pushed to the point where the actions of the legislatures produced by the system are contrary to democratic principles, it forces citizens out of comfortable apathy and anesthetic cynicism. That is not something with which the political class is entirely comfortable, as this editorial in the Charlotte Observer illustrates.

It’s a reach of legal logic, a ruling that appears more like progressive fist-pounding than something that should come from the bench. It also prompts a follow-up question: If, as Collins contends, gerrymandering strips the General Assembly of the authority to amend the N.C. constitution, wouldn’t it also render invalid any laws these same legislators pass?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it does. If a legislature alienates itself from the people it purportedly represents, and does so repeatedly, it forfeits its right to make their laws. This alienation can come from many sources.

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It can come from simple distance; this was an argument made by certain troublesome citizens of the city of Boston in the 18th Century. It can come from the piles of money that now separates legislators from their constituents—or, at least, from those who can't write seven-figure checks. And it can come from rigging the structural integrity of the democratic process, which is what Republican legislatures in North Carolina—and elsewhere—have been doing for the past decade or so.

North Carolina's gerrymandered state legislature rendered itself unrepresentative. The federal courts repeatedly have said so, and the state legislature has been unrepentant. As I said, I think Collins is going to get whacked on appeal, but the question he raised is not going away. It is central to all our politics now, and it is an existential threat to the basic elements of our democracy.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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