The November election changed the composition of the court from 4-3 Democrat to 5-2 Republicans. Then the GOP members went to work, and not in a good way.
Last February, the Democrat-controlled court ruled that North Carolina’s legislative and congressional maps were illegal because of partisan gerrymandering by the GOP-controlled General Assembly. A court-ordered map took its place.
The new court threw out that decision. Now, Republicans can reinstate their gerrymandered map or any other version they desire in time for the 2024 election. There’ll be no protection against blatant cheating in drawing the lines.
So, you ask, was the accusation of gerrymandering legitimate? Let’s look at the numbers. According to the New York Times, the state’s electorate is almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote.
The court-ordered map resulted in the state’s 14 congressional seats being evenly divided between the two parties. That makes sense considering the overall political makeup of the state.
However, the gerrymandered map probably would have given Republicans at least 10 of the 14 seats, the Times said. That’s a big deal in a closely divided U.S. House, and that’s what the map will look like the next time, if not worse.
I don’t care what the law says – a smart lawyer or biased judge can twist it any way he wants – but it’s obvious that in the real world a map gerrymandered to that extent should not be allowed to exist. But it is.
Should a state legislature be allowed to draw up partisan gerrymandered maps with no recourse by the public to challenge them in that state’s highest court? That’s the Republican-controlled court’s position in North Carolina.
The Times said that “Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.”
The map issue is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal scholars said the state ruling is likely to derail that case.
The North Carolina court didn’t stop there when it comes to undermining voting rights in that state. It also reversed a previously ruling that a GOP voter ID law violated the equal protection clause in the state constitution.
And it overturned a decision that struck down a law denying voting rights to people who have completed prison sentences on felony charges but were not yet released from parole, probation, or other court restrictions. That move revoked the voting rights of more than 55,000 people who had completed prison sentences.
Do you see a trend here?
We all see the corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court, where at least three justices have questions about financial conflicts hanging over their heads. Don’t overlook what’s happening at the state level.
The Times said, “The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges – Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and others – have seen races for their high court turned onto multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.”
There’s big money flowing into elections for state judgeships, some of it coming from out-of-state. Why would a millionaire donor half a country away care who wins another state’s judge race? The North Carolina map case is one clear answer to that question.
As Joshua A. Douglas, a scholar on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, told the Times: “If you think the earlier state supreme court was wrong, we have mechanisms to change that, like a constitutional amendment. But changing judges shouldn’t cause a sea change in the rule of law, because if that’s the case, precedent has no value any longer, and judges really are politicians.”
I’m not saying any judge is getting paid off. I’m saying it’s not good for democracy when the goal is to elect a candidate who’ll, for the most part, be loyal to one party’s orthodoxy instead of applying the law in an impartial manner. And it’s dangerous to have any judge beholding to big donors who’ve sunk large amounts of money into getting him elected.
That’s how money corrupts our judicial system, by making it a monetary arms race. Who has the biggest war chest shouldn’t be such a big advantage in an election for what’s supposed to be a nonpartisan, nonpolitical job.
The Republican effort to shape the judicial system in its favor is very real. So is the possibility that success in that endeavor would ensure a type of minority rule with decisions going against the majority opinion in a country becoming more diverse every day. This isn’t how a democracy is supposed to work.
Where are we heading with all this? We hear some people talk about an upcoming civil war. I don’t think that will happen. I don’t even know what that would look like. Who’d be fighting who?
Still, what happens if we wake up some day and enough of us realize that our courts, the place where justice is supposed to be blind, have become nothing more than a partisan apparatus put in place in large part by millionaires and billionaires who have paid astronomical sums of money to ensure the system favors them.
What happens then? I don’t know, but I will say this:
Revolutions are started by the poor and oppressed, not the rich and well-positioned.
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Musings of a Nobody 