Over the past six years, North Carolina has pushed some of the most restrictive legislation in the country, civil liberties groups say — and they caution that the state’s push could represent the proverbial “canary in the coalmine.”
In two separate cases within the past few weeks, the North Carolina legislature suffered significant defeats in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the first, the high court declined to revive the state’s restrictive voter ID law, a law that gained national attention last year when a federal appeals court ruled its provisions deliberately “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls.
On May 22, the Supreme Court threw out two of the state’s congressional districts, ruling that lawmakers unconstitutionally used race as a predominant factor when drawing the maps.