The Supreme Court's landmark ruling that federal judges are powerless to police political gerrymandering is not going to be the final word on the matter from an American courthouse.
Opening arguments were heard Monday in a state court lawsuit challenging the work of North Carolina's aggressive Republican mapmakers, the same folks whose work on congressional districts survived a high court challenge in Washington just three weeks ago.
But this time, the plaintiffs (led by Common Cause) are challenging the boundaries of state legislative districts — alleging they abridge North Carolina's constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and equal protection and so should be tossed out, even if they can no longer be challenged as violating the U.S. Constitution.
"Republicans in the General Assembly have manipulated the district lines to guarantee that their party will control both the state House and the state Senate, regardless of how people vote," attorney Stanton Jones declared as what's expected to be a two-week civil trial got underway before a panel of three state judges in Superior Court in Raleigh. "This attack on representative democracy and voting rights is fundamentally unfair."
The attorney for the Republican legislative leaders, Phillip Strach, countered that plaintiffs were seeking to be rescued by "judicial fiat" from the normal consequences of electoral, legislative and even demographic processes, including that Democrats tend to cluster in cities and so don't compete in many suburbs or rural areas.
"This lawsuit is not about protecting democracy," Strach said. "It is a full-frontal assault on democracy."
Challenges like this one are sure to become more common in light of the Supreme Court's ruling three weeks ago, in which the five conservative justice agreed that federal courts have no role in addressing even the most dramatically partisan gerrymanders — those drawn by the party in power in order to stack the deck disproportionally against the other party, even when voter behavior makes plain the desire for an allocation of seats that's closer to even.
Republicans, who have benefitted much more from partisan gerrymandering in this decade, are on alert for the potential their efforts will eventually get undone by these state court challenges.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has taken the lead in combatting this strategy as chairman of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which will coordinate the party's redistricting strategy after the 2020 census. After the Supreme Court decision he warned members of his party against resting easy. "Now, more than ever, we need all Republicans to join us or we will find ourselves gerrymandered into perpetual minorities by liberal state supreme courts," he wrote on Twitter.
Challenges similar to the new one in North Carolina have been filed in Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Connecticut, Mississippi, Alabama and Maryland. But none has yet gone to trial.
One such challenge, however, has already produced an enormously consequential victory for opponents of partisan mapmaking, and for Democrats. Last year, in one of the biggest purple states in the nation, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared that the state's constitution was violated by a map drawn by GOP legislators to assure that 12 of the state's 18 congressional districts would be filled by Republicans. Under the new map ordered by the court, the state elected nine House members from each party in the 2018 midterm.
But in North Carolina, even though Republican legislative candidates received less than half the overall vote, district-by-district results yielded a 10-seat advantage for the GOP in the state House and a seven-seat edge in the state Senate.
The trial over the those maps will feature many of the same arguments that permeated the litigation that challenged the state's congressional map, with has reliably led to wins for Republicans in 10 of the 13 districts. One important thing will be different, however: The plaintiffs will be able to present evidence from the files of the late Tom Hofeller, a GOP gerrymandering wizard who helped the North Carolina mapmakers in maximizing their partisan advantage.
The plaintiffs are particularly optimistic about their chances because, no matter what the trial verdict, the case looks destined for final disposition at the Supreme Court of North Carolina, where judges elected as Democrats hold six of the seven seats. Although the new case is just about state legislative seats, a ruling that they violate the state constitution could be applied to the congressional districts in time for the redistricting after the 2020 census, when North Carolina is likely to be awarded a 14th house seat because of its population growth.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.