And now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. And today Bloomberg lahst Greg's store discusses a Supreme Court ruling and North Carolina Republicans relied to heavily on race when they drew two oddly shaped congressional voting districts in the state. He speaks in Napor silly Or, professor at Stanford University Law School, want you just start by giving us a brief explanation
of what the court held. There were two different two districts and in two different rationales for for what the court did well. The Court once again is reviewing the North Carolina every districting plan. And I said once again because over the last twenty years it has looked at these districts five or six times. And what they said was that the first district, but the but the first district and the twelfth district were unconstitutional because they excessively
used race. And the first district was unconstitutional because you could not blame the district on the Voting Rights Act, which is what the state attempted to do. They said, you had to draw an over fifty percent African American district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court said, no, you did not, uh, and so because
you've used race so extensively, that district unconstitutional. With respect of the twelve district, North Carolina defended it as part of its partisan jerrymander, saying it was drawing a very safe democratic district. The Court here, in a five to three vote, said that the district was an unconstitutional racial jerrymander because you're essentially using race as a proxy for partisanship.
And so, just because you are drawing districts that might harm Democrats by packing them together doesn't get you out of the fact that race and party are so highly correlated in North Carolina in that district that it still runs a file of the constance. And what in all that, Nate, would you pick out as the most important or most surprising part of this ruling? As you suggested, one of the more interesting UH facts of this case is the
final vote on District twelve. That just Justice Laurence Thomas, is generally pretty conservative on constitutional questions, joined with the
four more liberal justices to strike down District twelve. And it shows you a kind of strange bedfellows in cases like this, we're Justice Thomas, who advocates a color blindness approach to redistricting and other kinds of government action, whereas the Democrats are the more liberal justices on the on the Court were um offended by the district because it's sort of discriminated against African Americans by packing them uh
in too high concentrations. And so that was I think the most significant sort of fact about this case was that you had the strange confluence of liberals and conservatives. That name for Silly a professor at Stanford University Law School speaking with Bloomberg Law host Greg Store and you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays at one pm Wall Street time here on Bloomberg Radio. And you can find more legal news at Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg
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