N.C. legislators have a chance at redistricting
By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist
The North Carolina General Assembly is where good bills go to die. So it is a sign of progress when one of them gets so much as a hearing. That’s why it made news when House Speaker Tim Moore said that there will be one for House Bill 69, to establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission.
NC Congressional districts struck down
Just one month before candidates start signing up to run for the 2018 elections, a three judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s congressional districts as partisan gerrymanders that violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Fair, schmair — nonpartisan redistricting to forever languish?
Eminent figures have called for common sense, nonpartisan redistricting since even before Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry unwittingly lent his name to the unseemly practice of gerrymandering.
GOP’s corrupt elections agenda meets its demise
North Carolina’s efforts to change the elections process to help keep its GOP majorities in office have been declared illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in three separate decisions in recent months.
One can only hope that this will be the death knell for such a politically corrupt agenda, but I’m not holding my breath.
Battling the twin evils of gerrymandering and money
By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist
Most of Europe’s aristocracy didn’t think the infant United States would last a decade, and there were Americans who doubted it also. Yet here we are, 240 years after bidding an unaffectionate farewell to George III and his progeny.
Those years have fulfilled the prophecy of a foreign observer, the Baron Hyde de Neuville, who wrote after the First Congress had adjourned in 1791:
