Lawmakers from North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature have unveiled their new Congressional maps which, if finalized as expected, would threaten the reelection of three current Democratic House members, and help the GOP pick up seats in the 2024 elections.

The state’s Republicans are coming off a court victory allowing them to proceed with a redistricting plan for North Carolina’s 14  Congressional districts that strongly favors Republicans. While Republicans have been handed defeats in redistricting battles in Alabama and Louisiana this year and will face more challenges in New York in November, North Carolina’s legislature has the green light from the courts to proceed with their favored redistricting plans. 

On Wednesday, state legislators unveiled two different proposals for congressional districts.The less aggressive of the two maps would produce ten Republican-leaning districts and the more aggressive map would produce eleven. The North Carolina House delegation is currently split evenly between seve Democrats and seven Republicans.

“Two draft maps are out and both of them draw me out of my  district and put me in one that’s totally unwinnable,” Congressman Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, said in a statement. “If either of these maps become final it means I’m toast in Congress.”

The current maps are the result of a 2022 ruling by the state Supreme Court that found that the maps had been illegally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. 

But the state high court, whose judges are elected,  came under Republican control last spring and reversed the 2022 ruling on which the current maps are based.

North Carolina currently has slightly more registered Democrats than Republicans, but Republicans enjoy a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature, allowing them free rein to draw the Congressional map. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, called the Republican plan “gerrymandering on steroids” that was enabled by a  “partisan reversal of constitutional law.”

“Drawn in the back room and armed with their new law that keeps their plotting secret, they have used race and political party to create districts that are historically discriminatory and unfair,” Mr. Cooper said in a statement.

Given the narrow balance of power in the U.S. House, a potential pickup of three or four seats in North Carolina could help Republicans defend their majority in Congress next year.

Due to the Republicans’s veto-proof supermajority in both houses of the state legislature, Democrats are largely powerless to prevent their Republican colleagues from enacting one of the new  maps. The state Supreme Court could, theoretically, rule the maps unconstitutional, though this would be a reversal of their ruling from last year. 

Attorney Marc Elias, who has successfully sued North Carolina over congressional maps three times, said that he is planning to see if the maps might warrant a federal lawsuit, adding that “I’m watching carefully.”

“I  haven’t had a chance to review the maps, but if this violates the VRA, North Carolina will be sued,” he said in a statement.

The maps will be up for a vote in their relevant committees in the North Carolina Senate next week, after that the Republican controlled state House will be able to weigh in on the maps before they are finalized and enacted.