One method of preserving privilege is often overlooked--gerrymandering, or the practice of drawing Congressional district boundaries to preserve office holding. In fact the judiciary has traditionally backed away from examining how district boundaries are defined, under the legal rubric of lack of "judiciability". That means the judges are unable to decide what is not a legal, but a political matter. But when the practice is so abused, as this chart shows, it should be examined by the courts because it denies the fundamental principle of one person, one vote:
North Carolina is perhaps the worst example of a minority party drawing lines to preserve its hold on offices. Even though North Carolina has a voting populace almost equally split in half, the GOP maintains a grip of 67% of the Congressional offices up for election in the last cycle. A federal judge who struck down the state's voter ID law called North Carolina's targeting of non-white voters "almost surgical in its precision". A special federal panel of judges struck down North Carolina's district boundaries as racially based gerrymandering in 2016. However, the Supreme Court has never found a state's districts were so manipulated as to be unconstitutional. In fact it recently passed up the opportunity to do so in two cases, one from Maryland and another from Wisconsin. The partisan intent behind redefining district boundaries was clearly expressed by a North Carolina state legislator who said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” addressing fellow legislators when they passed his state's plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
The House of Representatives has taken up the gauntlet by passing HR 1 that puts drawing district boundaries in the hands of an independent commission. A good idea that the Senate "majority" leader has already promised to kill. The The next opportunity to gerrymander will be in 2021 after the US census in 2020.