NC justices hand GOP big win with election rulings

AP FILE PHOTO

Reggie Weaver, at podium, speaks outside the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Feb. 15, 2022, about a recent partisan gerrymandering ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court. In massive victories for Republicans, the North Carolina Supreme Court on April 28 threw out a previous ruling against gerrymandered voting maps and upheld a photo voter identification law that colleagues had struck down as racially biased.

RALEIGH — In massive victories for Republicans, the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday threw out a previous ruling against gerrymandered voting maps and upheld a photo voter identification law that colleagues had struck down as racially biased.

The rulings likely give the GOP-controlled legislature the ability to rework the state’s congressional map for next year’s election to help Republicans gain seats in the narrowly divided U.S. House. Under the previous map, Democrats won seven of the state’s 14 congressional seats last November.

The new edition of the court, which became a Republican majority this year following the election of two GOP justices, ruled after taking the unusual step of revisiting opinions made in December by the court’s previous iteration, when Democrats held a 4-3 seat advantage. The court held rehearings in March.

State Senate President Phil Berger, whose son Phil Berger Jr. is one of five Republicans on the court, hailed the ruling.

“For years plaintiffs and activist courts have manipulated our Constitution to achieve policy outcomes that could not be won at the ballot box,” the elder Berger said. “Today’s rulings affirm that our Constitution cannot be exploited to fit the political whims of left-wing Democrats.”

Friday’s 5-2 rulings also mean that state lawmakers should have greater latitude in drawing General Assembly seat boundaries for the next decade, and that a photo ID mandate approved by the GOP-controlled legislature in late 2018 could be enforced in time for the 2024 elections.

In another court decision Friday along party lines, the justices overturned a trial court decision on when the voting rights of convicted felons can be restored. That means potentially tens of thousands of people convicted of felonies will have to keep waiting to completed their probation or parole or pay their fines to qualify to vote again.

“This shameful, delegitimizing decision to allow the unjust, blatant manipulation of North Carolina’s voting districts was not a function of legal principle, it was a function of political personnel and partisan opportunism,” said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Redistricting Foundation. “Neither the map nor the law have changed since last year’s landmark rulings – only the makeup of the majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court has changed.

“History will not be kind to this court’s majority, which will now forever be stained for irreparably harming the legitimacy and reputation of North Carolina’s highest tribunal. The eyes of the nation will now turn to the North Carolina legislature to see what further harm Republicans will do to undermine democracy in the state.”

The state Supreme Court struck down last December the state Senate map as an unconstitutional gerrymander and upheld a lower court’s application of congressional districts. Ten months earlier, the court struck down all three maps drawn by the Republican-controlled General Assembly as partisan gerrymanders.

“Today’s decision from the North Carolina Supreme Court opens the floodgates for unchecked partisan gerrymandering in our state for decades to come," said Jo Nicholas, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “Combined with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho, today’s ruling weakens vital checks and balances, leaving no options for North Carolinians to challenge unconstitutionally partisan district maps in courts of law. This shameful decision means that politicians in North Carolina now have the ultimate power to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.”

This article includes reporting by Herbert L. White of The Charlotte Post.

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