As we noted Sunday, today the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments for one of the most consequential cases regarding elections in many years. Moore v. Harper is a case brought by the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature, which was ruled against by North Carolina's state supreme court regarding the legislature's extreme gerrymandering of Congressional districts to give Republicans a big majority in the "50-50' state. CNN has live updates of the oral arguments here. Right-wing justices, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch have remarked favorably in the past on the so-called "independent state legislature theory" that underpins the North Carolina legislature's argument.
At immediate issue is the tortured partisan reasoning that state legislatures have the sole Constitutional responsibility for redrawing Congressional districts, and that their state courts have no role in reviewing that process, checks and balances be damned. Since Republican-controlled state legislatures currently outnumber Democratic-controlled ones, if successful, it will be pushed by the Republicans especially in swing states in order to maintain their power through manipulation.
It's a demonstration of one party's attempt to reverse its coming electoral decline by creating artificial, Byzantine Congressional district boundaries in order to give Republicans the electoral advantage. The broader implications could involve empowering state legislatures to engage in all manner of electoral mischief, including more aggressive voter suppression and election nullification. This case will be another test of how far the right-wing dominated Supreme Court is willing to go in that effort.
