Six factors that add up to a diminished NC democracy in 2024 | Opinion

These six things are true.

1. In April 2023, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s new 5-2 Republican majority overturned a prior decision and held that extreme partisan gerrymandering, no matter how destructive of rights of equal political participation, is permissible under the state constitution. We are entitled, absurdly, to “free” but not “fair” elections.

2. Thereafter, the North Carolina General Assembly took up the invitation to resume enacting among the most aggressively partisan redistricting schemes — for the Congress and the General Assembly — ever seen in the United States. As a result, the North Carolina congressional delegation switched from an even 7-7 split to a 10-4 Republican advantage, helping deliver a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. And even though Democratic candidates prevailed in statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and school superintendent and state Supreme Court justice, Republicans, with the benefit of partisan gerrymandered districts, won two-thirds of the seats, or almost 2/3 of the seats, in both chambers of the General Assembly. Extreme partisan gerrymandering delivers.

3. The Republican General Assembly has used, and continues to use, its disproportionate power to dramatically dismantle North Carolina’s constitutionally prescribed separation of powers and debilitate the one branch of government (the executive) it doesn’t control. These efforts by Republican lawmakers are designed to draw even more power unto themselves, to dismantle the traditional structures of North Carolina government and to overturn the results of elections whose outcome they dislike.

4. Since the Republican justices came to power two years ago, the North Carolina Supreme Court has been transformed into the most partisan appellate tribunal in the United States. The court has cast aside judicial norms of stare decisis, precedent and appellate review in the Republican cause and adopted radical presumptions in favor of the constitutionality of acts of the General Assembly — which the Republican justices describe as “the great and chief department of government” representing the “sacrosanct fulfillment of the people’s will.” Good Lord.

5. Broadly speaking, state separation of powers issues are left in the hands of state supreme courts, unreviewable by the federal judiciary. So when the state Supreme Court says the General Assembly can do whatever it wants — including cheating on redistricting and overriding the results of elections through sore loser laws — regardless of the clear limits of the North Carolina constitution, the people of the state have no legal or effective political recourse. Such are the wages of a Supreme Court refusing to carry out its prescribed duty of independent judicial review.

6. The present perilous marriage of a disproportionately empowered Republican General Assembly that is willing to throw off constitutional guardrails to expand its own power with a state Supreme Court that operates as a caucus of the Republican party creates a pattern of fundamental transgression that is capable, patently, of defeating constitutional democracy in North Carolina. It provides a kind of vicious circle, a feedback loop, an endangering cascade, that moves beyond partisan gamesmanship and toward the destruction of our most important, defining heritage.

This is the unfolding, or now unfolded, plan of the Republican leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly. It does the rest of us no service to pretend it otherwise.