2025 A Look Back: Perfectly clear priorities award
Throughout a year when Western North Carolina was begging for more hurricane recovery funding and a less bureaucratic inefficiency, the North Carolina General Assembly demonstrated incredible flexibility and focus — just not on governing.
Republican lawmakers couldn’t find the time to pass a state budget by July 1 due to infighting between the Republican-dominated House and the Republican-dominated Senate, leaving Democrats stupefied, agencies guessing, projects delayed and pay raises for workers in limbo.
But when it came to redrawing congressional lines, urgency magically appeared!
In a purple state that is essentially 50/50 politically, legislators hustled to gerrymander another seat as a political firewall designed less for representation than for protecting President Donald Trump from prison ahead of what some are speculating will be a devastating midterm election for the Grand Old Party.
North Carolina recently had a 7-7 U.S. House delegation under a court-ordered map after judges struck down earlier Republican-drawn lines as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering, but a 2023 decision by a Republican-majority state Supreme Court to rehear that case (spoiler alert: they came to a different conclusion) allowed GOP lawmakers to enact new maps that helped flip three seats, shifting the delegation from 7-7 to 10-4 and positioning Republicans to gain an 11th seat before the 2026 midterms.
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Sure, Democrats gerrymandered North Carolina for a century, keeping their boot on the neck of the Republican party though the majority of the 1900s, but now that the shoe’s on the other foot, Republicans — aided by their state Supreme Court — have made the practice of politicians choosing their voters that much more indelible and will probably cry about all this when they’re no longer in the majority.
No budget, no timetable? No problem. The most important thing — the map — came in right on schedule.
