On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down two congressional districts in North Carolina,

arguing that the Republican-controlled legislature had factored in race too heavily when drawing them.

The majority black districts were created, the court concluded,

to concentrate Democratic African-American voters in the minimum number of precincts and thus diminish their electoral influence in the state.

Supporters of the course decision say it's an important step in the fight to end racial gerrymandering.

Though racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering is not.

Many districts have argued that they were drawing lines on partisan, not racial gerrymandering is not. Many districts have argued that they were drawing lines

on partisan, not racial grounds. But footnotes in the decision suggest the court may no longer be

buying that because in many places, race and party affiliation cannot be untangled.

With Republicans controlling state legislatures throughout the South, experts say the Supreme

Court handed Democrats and civil rights advocates a powerful tool.

And it's a tool they desperately need because for years, majority parties in state legislatures

have worked to great effect to draw lines that advantage their party in ways that

may not serve the voters. The two key words are cracking and packing. David Daly is author of a book

on gerrymandering titled, Rat Fucked. We spoke with him last October. So cracking is the idea that you take the other party's vote and you divide it up so that it can be as ineffective as possible amongst as many districts as possible.

And packing would be to take them and pack as many voters of one party as you can into as few seats as possible while taking the rest of the seats

for yourself. Which was pretty much business as usual for two centuries, with one party

rigging the game in its favor whenever it got the chance and the other party fighting to get it

back. But according to Daly, that all changed after the Republicans were decimated in the 2008 election, and the art of gerrymandering became a science.

If you watch back on the live television of that night, it sounds like Republicans are mourning that they're going to be a minority party for a long time.

But there were a handful of really smart Republican strategists who realized this doesn't have to be the case.

2010 is a census year, which means it's a redistricting year,

...