Game over

The North Carolina voting districts came together quickly in February 2016, right after a three-judge panel struck down parts of an earlier map for relying too heavily on race. The panel gave the Republican-controlled state legislature two weeks to enact a replacement.

Lewis and Republican Senator Robert Rucho, the co-chairmen of the redistricting committee, told their map-drawer to make the lines as Republican-friendly as possible. The committee later included “partisan advantage” as one of eight criteria for the map, explicitly aiming to “maintain the current partisan makeup” of 10 Republicans and three Democrats.

[...]

“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” David Lewis, a Republican state representative who led the redistricting effort, said at the time.

[...]

Lewis said lawmakers made partisanship explicit to show they weren’t using race.

  Bloomberg

!! 

And why are you doing it at all?

“I was trying to make sure that I was getting on the record that we were in fact using politics for politics’ sake and not politics as a proxy for race,” Lewis said in the interview.

What an argument.

Because they can't win if they don't cheat.

And, gerrymandering wasn't enough to assure them that they would win.

A new election is being held for North Carolina’s 9th district after the state elections board concluded that absentee-ballot fraud tainted the results of the November vote.

[...]

North Carolina Republicans say the whole subject should be off limits for the judiciary. They say that none of the tests suggested by the three-judge panel—or any other lower court—provides the clarity judges need to be able to say when partisanship has gone too far.

[...]

“As far as we’ve been able to discern, this is the first time in American history that a legislature or a legislative body has explicitly ratified the pursuit of partisan advantage,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago Law School professor and one of the lawyers pressing the challenge. Judged by statistical measures, “the North Carolina plan is pretty much the worst congressional plan of the last half century,” Stephanopoulos said.

[...]

North Carolina Republicans won 10 of the 13 seats in 2016, when Democrats got 47 percent of the statewide vote. In 2018 Republicans took nine, with one seat undecided, even though Democrats got 48 percent of the overall vote.

[...]

Now the U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider the North Carolina districts in a clash opponents hope will produce the court’s first-ever ruling striking down a map as too partisan. The justices hear arguments Tuesday in the case, along with a fight over a Democratic-drawn congressional district in Maryland.

The odds are probably against the challengers. The court refused to outlaw partisan gerrymanders in a Wisconsin case a year ago, even though swing Justice Anthony Kennedy had suggested he was open to that step. Kennedy has since retired and been replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who could give the conservative wing enough votes to insulate partisan maps from constitutional challenges.

[...]

Although the Supreme Court has long restricted gerrymandering based on race, it has never struck down a voting map as being too partisan.

Essentially the same thing.

The court’s rulings will shape the next round of map-drawing, which will take place around the country after the 2020 census. Right now Republicans are the more frequent beneficiaries of gerrymanders, largely because their electoral success in 2010 let them draw many of the current maps.

[...]

Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts are likely to cast the key votes. Roberts sounded last term as if he wanted no part of the partisan gerrymandering debate.

He's the head judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, and he doesn't want to deal with a constitutional right to vote and be heard.

During arguments on the Wisconsin map, Roberts questioned whether there was any principled way to separate out gerrymanders that go too far, deriding proposed tests offered by opponents as “sociological gobbledygook.”

Roberts said the Supreme Court risks looking in each case as though it is favoring one party over another.

Too far? Any gerrymandering is too far. And by not taking up the issue, Roberts "looks as though" he's favoring the party that has gerrymandered districts all over the country.

“That is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country,” he said.

That horse left the barn ages ago.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.