Speaker 1: And now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief,
Speaker 1: exploring legal issues in the news. And today Bloomberg lahst
Speaker 1: Greg's store discusses a Supreme Court ruling and North Carolina
Speaker 1: Republicans relied to heavily on race when they drew two
Speaker 1: oddly shaped congressional voting districts in the state. He speaks
Speaker 1: in Napor silly Or, professor at Stanford University Law School,
Speaker 1: want you just start by giving us a brief explanation
Speaker 1: of what the court held. There were two different two
Speaker 1: districts and in two different rationales for for what the
Speaker 1: court did well. The Court once again is reviewing the
Speaker 1: North Carolina every districting plan. And I said once again
Speaker 1: because over the last twenty years it has looked at
Speaker 1: these districts five or six times. And what they said
Speaker 1: was that the first district, but the but the first
Speaker 1: district and the twelfth district were unconstitutional because they excessively
Speaker 1: used race. And the first district was unconstitutional because you
Speaker 1: could not blame the district on the Voting Rights Act,
Speaker 1: which is what the state attempted to do. They said,
Speaker 1: you had to draw an over fifty percent African American
Speaker 1: district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme
Speaker 1: Court said, no, you did not, uh, and so because
Speaker 1: you've used race so extensively, that district unconstitutional. With respect
Speaker 1: of the twelve district, North Carolina defended it as part
Speaker 1: of its partisan jerrymander, saying it was drawing a very
Speaker 1: safe democratic district. The Court here, in a five to
Speaker 1: three vote, said that the district was an unconstitutional racial
Speaker 1: jerrymander because you're essentially using race as a proxy for partisanship.
Speaker 1: And so, just because you are drawing districts that might
Speaker 1: harm Democrats by packing them together doesn't get you out
Speaker 1: of the fact that race and party are so highly
Speaker 1: correlated in North Carolina in that district that it still
Speaker 1: runs a file of the constance. And what in all that, Nate,
Speaker 1: would you pick out as the most important or most
Speaker 1: surprising part of this ruling? As you suggested, one of
Speaker 1: the more interesting UH facts of this case is the
Speaker 1: final vote on District twelve. That just Justice Laurence Thomas,
Speaker 1: is generally pretty conservative on constitutional questions, joined with the
Speaker 1: four more liberal justices to strike down District twelve. And
Speaker 1: it shows you a kind of strange bedfellows in cases
Speaker 1: like this, we're Justice Thomas, who advocates a color blindness
Speaker 1: approach to redistricting and other kinds of government action, whereas
Speaker 1: the Democrats are the more liberal justices on the on
Speaker 1: the Court were um offended by the district because it's
Speaker 1: sort of discriminated against African Americans by packing them uh
Speaker 1: in too high concentrations. And so that was I think
Speaker 1: the most significant sort of fact about this case was
Speaker 1: that you had the strange confluence of liberals and conservatives.
Speaker 1: That name for Silly a professor at Stanford University Law
Speaker 1: School speaking with Bloomberg Law host Greg Store and you
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