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Legal battles over partisan and racial gerrymandering “are as North Carolina as barbecue, tobacco fields and hot, humid summer days,” says the executive director of the state Common Cause chapter. North Carolina Common Cause Executive Director Bob Phillips said there has not been an election since 1971 in which the state’s redistricting plans have not been challenged. “In the decade after the 2010 redistricting cycle , every single legislative and congressional election was run on maps that the courts eventually ruled unconstitutional,” he said in a briefing for reporters. “I’m not sure there are many states, if any, that can make that claim.” “It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what will be imposed on North Carolina citizens if our state courts are no longer a place where a bad congressional map can be challenged,” Phillips said.

Kathay Feng from Common Cause, one of the groups leading the respondents, said, “It’s so much bigger than just the conversation about redistricting or gerrymandering.” 

“It is rare to encounter a constitutional theory so antithetical to the Constitution’s text and structure, so inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning, so disdainful of this Court’s precedent, and so potentially damaging for American democracy,” lawyers for Common Cause and the other non-state parties said in their brief.

"To give absolute power to one branch of government, unbound by state constitutions, would lead us down a dangerous road to tyranny," asserted Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, which is opposing the position of the North Carolina GOP lawmakers in the case. 

Kathay Feng, who leads anti-gerrymandering efforts for the national group Common Cause, calls it “the case of the century” — and not out of admiration. “It is a case that asserts a bizarre and fabricated reading of the United States Constitution ... to create a situation where elections are already rigged from the start,” she said.

Good-government groups such as Common Cause have been going after gerrymanders in both Democratic and Republican states for some time. The Supreme Court, in a 2019 case, held that federal courts can’t hear claims of partisan gerrymandering. The Court said that there’s just no standard to apply, and so federal courts are closed—there are other ways of dealing with these problems. Some states have created redistricting commissions; others have state courts that have policed partisan gerrymandering. That’s what happened in Moore v. Harper. After Common Cause lost in the U.S. Supreme Court, the group argued before the state Supreme Court in North Carolina that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution, and they won on that claim. The state Supreme Court ordered North Carolina to redraw its districts, to make them a little fairer in a state that is pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.