WASHINGTON — North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature, under a court order to throw out its gerrymandered congressional map, on Friday enacted a new one that effectively gives the party eight of the state’s 13 congressional seats instead of the 10 it had before.

Democrats immediately asked the same three-judge panel of the state Superior Court to reject that map, too, saying it would cement a Republican majority in the congressional delegation in all but the most lopsided elections — the same conduct that was found to violate the State Constitution in the current map.

The impasse means there will be at least one more chapter in one of the nation’s most intense and substantial explorations of the politics of drawing district lines in a deeply polarized time. And it comes under an intense deadline. The court said in its October ruling that a new map had to be prepared in time for primary elections in 2020, and reserved the right to delay preparations for those elections if more time was needed.

Lawyers for the Democratic plaintiffs asked the judges to move rapidly to scrap the new district map, suggesting that the court hear arguments on the issue on Dec. 2 — the first day of the filing period for candidates in North Carolina’s primary elections for House seats.

“The congressional map passed by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature simply replaces one partisan gerrymander with a new one,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., who was attorney general under former President Barack Obama and now leads an effort to prevent Republicans from controlling the redrawing of congressional maps after the 2020 census.

Republican leaders charged that the Democrats’ true goal was not a fair map but one that favored them. They seized on a statement by one Democratic congressman that a fair map would give either party only a one-seat edge as evidence that Democrats wanted the map-drawing process to have a predetermined outcome.

“Democrats who sued to prohibit partisan redistricting have demanded their preferred partisan outcomes in exchange for voting to support new congressional maps,” the Republican chairman of the Senate redistricting committee, Ralph Hise, said in a statement. “Such brazen hypocrisy is astounding.”

It took a Republican-led legislative committee barely a week to redraw the House districts after the three-judge panel ruled on Oct. 28 that the existing map violated the State Constitution by denying Democratic voters a fair voice in elections.

Republicans had proclaimed when they drew the map in 2016 that they were trying to create as many safe Republican districts as possible. Their handiwork gave the party control of 10 of 13 House seats in a state that usually splits almost equally between Republicans and Democrats in statewide elections.

The new map, which won final approval in the State Senate on Friday in a party-line vote, 65 to 24, is widely considered by experts as likely to reduce the 10-seat Republican majority to eight seats. In recent days, Republicans have rejected accusations of partisanship, noting that even a study by a group including one of the Democrats’ expert witnesses concluded that an eight-to-five balance of House seats was the most likely outcome in computer simulations.

But Democrats and some outside analysts have said that both the map-drawing process and the map itself were flawed in ways that helped Republicans maintain their advantage. Republican legislators said their drafting was based on a nonpartisan map drawn by retired judges at a redistricting conference, and noted that the actual drawing of boundaries was streamed live on the internet for anyone to see.

Democrats said, however, that the ostensibly nonpartisan map was never intended to be used as a baseline for actual districts. And they complained that the line-drawing that was done in public seemed to regularly occur after long interludes in which Republicans convened in private, with colored copies of draft maps in hand.

“There were maps available to this committee on the various factors that this committee claimed to be pursuing,” such as compactness of districts and respect for geographic features, Senator Natasha Marcus, a suburban Charlotte Democrat, said in an interview. “There were better ways to do it.”

In the end, the Republican majority rejected Democratic legislators’ proposals to alter the map, which was approved in committee in party-line votes.

The new map does address some longstanding complaints by advocacy groups and Democrats about the previous map’s obvious partisan bent. Perhaps most notably, it no longer splits some Democratic-leaning cities like Asheville and Greensboro between congressional districts. Before Republicans drew their first House maps in 2011, Asheville and western North Carolina were represented by a conservative Democrat; after new maps split the city, the district elected one of the most right-leaning firebrands in Congress, Representative Mark Meadows.

But in their filing on Friday to the Superior Court, lawyers for the Democrats suggested that such changes were far outweighed by other political factors. For example, they analyzed the partisan makeup of each new House district, comparing them to computer simulations of a thousand different nonpartisan House maps. All but three of the new districts, the filing stated, were packed with such outsized majorities of Democratic or Republican voters compared to the nonpartisan maps that they would be uncompetitive in all but the most lopsided elections.

“The remedial plan could not have been the product of anything other than partisan intent,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the new map. They said the map “packs Democratic voters into five districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic, in order to ensure that the remaining eight districts are neither competitive nor Democratic-leaning.”

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