The North Carolina legislature is hurriedly redrawing the lines of two congressional districts that had been gerrymandered along racial lines and ruled unconstitutional by a Federal District Court. Unless the Supreme Court steps in, the Republican-controlled legislature must draw new maps by Friday, in time for the March 15 state primary, under an order from the district court.

North Carolina has asked for a stay of the lower court ruling, but it’s an open question whether the justices will grant it, considering the 4-to-4 standoff produced by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In the meantime, the legislature must quickly redraw the First and 12th districts, which a three-judge panel of the lower court said had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered after the 2010 census to pack African-American voters together so their political power would be diluted. The two district maps containing the blatant “racial quota” were used in the last two congressional elections.

The nation’s growing political curse of partisan and racial gerrymandering is at the heart of the North Carolina case. The lower court found the “serpentine” 12th to be so “contorted and contrived” by the legislature that it may be the least geographically compact of all the nation’s many gerrymandered districts. It resembles an archipelago snaking northeast from Charlotte along Interstate 85 through African-American communities.