‘I have not been involved,’ NC Supreme Court justice says of bill targeting opponent

North Carolina legislators on Tuesday took another step that critics say amounted to meddling in this year’s election for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

State lawmakers voted along almost entirely partisan lines, deciding that only one of the two Republicans running for the seat would have her party affiliation listed on the ballot. The Republican majority supported the move, while Democrats opposed it.

Republicans are worried the candidate the bill affected, Chris Anglin, is not truly a Republican but rather part of a Democratic plot to influence the election. The bill was made public Tuesday afternoon and passed both the House and Senate a few hours later.

Anglin denied the allegations and criticized the legislature’s actions.

“I chose to run as a Republican for a reason,” Anglin said in a written statement Tuesday. “To be a voice for Republicans who are appalled at these types of shenanigans that attack our rule of law and the checks and balances of our Republic.”

The other candidates in the race — who will have their party labels listed on the ballot — are Republican incumbent Barbara Jackson and Democratic challenger Anita Earls.

On Wednesday, Jackson said she did not ask for the bill targeting Anglin. She hardly ever speaks with legislators about anything, she said, to avoid conflicts of interest.

“I have not been involved in this process,” she said. “We have cases pending in front of us that are involving disputes within government. ... I wouldn’t want anybody to perceive they were getting anything but a fair hearing.”

Jackson declined to give her personal opinion of the bill. She said it would be inappropriate to comment, since the bill might end up in the court system.

But Earls, the Democratic candidate in the race, was open about her feelings on the bill — and the legislators who passed it.

“For over 30 years, I have worked in our legal system to ensure all voters have fair representation and equal justice under the law,” Earls said in a written statement. “The politicians in the legislature continue to attack the independence of our courts and try to rig the system so they can stay in power. North Carolinians deserve a fair election free from partisan games and meddling.”

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, hasn’t said whether he will try to block the bill from becoming law. Even if he does veto it, Republicans are likely to override his veto.

Regardless, the bill is only the latest in an ongoing saga over the Supreme Court seat up for grabs this November.

The story so far

Last year, the legislature voted to make the Supreme Court election partisan for the first time in more than a decade. Republican legislators pushed for that change after a conservative justice lost his 2016 re-election bid to a liberal challenger, switching the balance of the court from a 4-3 conservative tilt to a 4-3 liberal tilt.

Then, early this year, legislators voted to cancel all judicial primary elections — a controversial move that nonetheless held up in court.

Last month, the legislature changed a law to switch up the order that candidates will appear on the ballot, moving Earls from the top of the list to the bottom. Political scientists say that matters, since so many voters simply vote for the first name on the ballot. .

Outside the legislature, both political parties have accused each other’s operatives of skullduggery as the election heats up.

Part of the reason for the increased focus on the Supreme Court race is that 2018 is an unusual year with hardly any statewide elections. Political insiders call it a “blue moon election.”

This Supreme Court seat and three N.C. Court of Appeals races are the only things that everyone in North Carolina will get the chance to vote on, other than half a dozen proposed amendments to the state constitution — which have invited their own controversies.

And although the N.C. Supreme Court elections aren’t typically the center of attention, the elections are important to politicians, businesses, activists and others.

The court mostly hears nonpolitical matters. The political cases it does decide tend to involve the balance of power within state government — issues like gerrymandering, power grabs and more.

Democrats dominated the state’s Court of Appeals and Supreme Court for more than 100 years, starting in 1896 after the end of Reconstruction. Republicans eventually took over and still have a majority on the Court of Appeals, but no longer on the Supreme Court.

If Jackson loses her election this fall to Earls, a civil rights attorney from Durham, the balance of the Supreme Court will shift further to the left.

More political than in the past?

Jackson said that although this is the first partisan election for the Supreme Court in years, she doesn’t believe this year’s election has much more partisan rancor than when the elections were technically nonpartisan.

“I’ve run two nonpartisan races in the past,” she said. “And you would think that judges’ natural constituents would be lawyers, and lawyers would be out there pounding the pavement. ... But the reality is that even in a nonpartisan race the people who get really energized are party activists.”

Retired Supreme Court justice Bob Orr agreed, adding that he would much prefer a judiciary without partisan pressures. Part of the reason he retired from the court in 2004, he said, was a particularly nasty 2002 re-election campaign and ensuing political pressures.

“The political parties in the legislature have tended to, if they disagree with the court’s decision on a particular matter, they immediately attribute it to the court’s partisanship,” Orr said. “And so it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to run as a partisan, your decisions get seen in a partisan light, and the elections get more and more partisan.”

Jackson said she tries to avoid speaking with legislative leaders, to avoid the potential for any conflicts of interest since the legislature does sometimes have cases before the court.

Orr said the increasing involvement of political operatives, money and activists in judicial campaigns is “a cancer to the idea of an independent judiciary.”

It’s true that even when races were nonpartisan, the political parties still backed certain candidates. And campaign finance records show that if lots of money goes to sway voters in this year’s Supreme Court election, it won’t be the first time.

Orr spent nearly $250,000 on his 2002 re-election — a massive sum for that time, and more than the winning candidate in the 2016 election spent — because the state Democratic Party launched such an organized campaign against him. The reason? Gerrymandering by the Democratic-led legislature after the 2000 Census, which he opposed.

“When the court overturned the Democrats’ redistricting plan, all I can say is that all hell broke loose,” he said.

That issue has continued to dominate the politics of judicial elections, he said, even though the sides have switched and it’s now the Republicans who are in charge of redistricting.

Earls, the Democratic candidate, has spent much of the past decade suing the Republican-led legislature over its gerrymandered districts — and frequently winning.

All of that helps explain the high stakes in the 2018 election.

But Jackson, who is seeking a third term on the court, said she doesn’t think it’s accurate to describe the court simply by which parties the seven judges belong to. Many if not most of their decisions are unanimous, she said — adding that while partisan politics are necessary to win elections, they should not factor into how judges rule.

“We agree on most things,” Jackson said. “One of the things I think is a really important aspect of the court is the confidence of the public in our court system.”

This story was originally published July 26, 2018 at 5:45 PM.