A North Carolina Supreme Court Switcheroo

North Carolina’s Supreme Court reversed itself Friday on partisan gerrymandering, ruling 5-2 that it poses “nonjusticiable, political questions.” Last year a 4-3 court said the opposite. In between was the November election, in which GOP candidates won two Supreme Court seats, giving conservatives a majority again.

Critics will call the reversal a judicial power play, but it’s really a corrective to the old majority’s overreach. Four liberal justices held that the North Carolina Constitution bans partisan map-making, because it guarantees “free elections,” the rights of speech and assembly, and so forth. At one point the court floated specific metrics that could be used to police gerrymandering, saying that a map could be presumptively constitutional if it has “a mean-median difference of 1% or less.”