The North Carolina judges, in contrast, aimed their sights squarely at the foxes — documenting how the Republican maps had been drawn intentionally to favor Republicans at the expense of Democrats, and noting that the lawmakers had offered no good alternative explanation for the extreme bias.

The ruling applies only to state legislative districts, but its reasoning applies equally to North Carolina’s congressional districts, which are equally skewed. In the 2018 midterms, Republican candidates won a bare majority of the vote, but wound up winning 10 of the 13 seats in the House. One Republican lawmaker involved in the redistricting process explained that he and his colleagues had settled on that map only because “I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

Braggadocio like that was absent on Tuesday. Only hours after the state court’s decision, North Carolina Republicans folded, admitting that they had finally run into a barrier they couldn’t draw their way around. In a statement that should be a finalist for the 2019 Chutzpah Award, the State Senate leader, Phil Berger, accused Democrats of trying to “game” the redistricting process, blamed the years of litigation over their maps for harming the “legitimacy of this state’s institutions,” and sniffed that they would abide by the ruling and draw “a nonpartisan map.”

The truth is they would probably have loved to appeal the ruling to the State Supreme Court and keep drawing ever more skewed maps in their favor, but they knew that with a Democratic majority on that court, their chances of victory were slim.

At least they didn’t behave like their Republican counterparts in Pennsylvania, who responded to a decision by that state’s Supreme Court tossing out their biased maps by trying to impeach the justices who issued the ruling.

Partisan gerrymandering has a long and bipartisan history, and Republicans today see themselves as getting revenge for years in which Democrats were in power and drew the maps in their own favor. But mapmaking technology has advanced strikingly in the past two decades, giving politicians an unprecedented degree of control in carving up the citizenry for their own benefit.

That’s why Justice Elena Kagan pointed to partisan gerrymanders as an existential threat to democratic self-rule. In her dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision in June, she explained that gerrymandered maps “make bipartisanship and pragmatic compromise politically difficult or impossible; and drive voters away from an ever more dysfunctional political process.” Justice Kagan asked, “Is this how American democracy is supposed to work?”

Tuesday’s decision in North Carolina was right to answer that question in the negative, and to claim a space for state courts elsewhere to intervene when partisan gerrymandering has effectively silenced huge portions of the electorate. But state courts shouldn’t have been saddled with this job in the first place. As Justice Kagan wrote in June: “What do those courts know that this court does not? If they can develop and apply neutral and manageable standards to identify unconstitutional gerrymanders, why couldn’t we?”

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