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The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2023-09-19 18:33:15.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m sorry for the lack of posts recently. I caught covid at the beginning of the month, then my dad ended up in the hospital, and he is now in hospice care. So…it’s been a difficult couple of weeks. I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing regularly. Thank you for your patience and for sticking with me!
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Gerrymandered into power
Two of the nation’s most purple states, with a voting population split nearly 50/50 between the two parties, are also the most gerrymandered to produce a Republican advantage. North Carolina voted for Donald Trump in 2020 by just 1.3% (or 74,000 votes) and has a split state government (with a Democratic governor and Republican legislature), yet the Senate is controlled by Republicans 30-20 and the General Assembly is 72 Republicans and 48 Democrats.
Wisconsin voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election by just 0.6% (or roughly 20,000 votes), but its congressional delegation is 6 Republicans and 2 Democrats, its Senate is 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, and its Assembly is 64 Republicans and 35 Democrats. Like North Carolina, Wisconsin also has a split government with a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.
- Note that Republicans now have a supermajority in both chambers in North Carolina, after Democrat Tricia Cotham switched parties just months after her election to the General Assembly. Wisconsin Republicans also have a new supermajority in the Senate with a special election win in April, giving them the power to impeach officials. Republicans in the Assembly are just two seats away from likewise having a supermajority.
Now, Republicans are using their unfair numerical advantage in both states to consolidate their power through the impeachment of Democratic justices on their respective Supreme Courts.
North Carolina
Last year, Republicans reclaimed a majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court, flipping the bench from 4-3 Democratic control to a 5-2 Republican majority. Only about half of the state’s registered voters participated in the election, choosing Republican Richard Dietz over Democratic incumbent Lucy Inman and Republican Trey Allen over Democratic incumbent Sam Ervin IV. In each race, roughly 200,000 people—or 5% of the total votes—determined the outcome.
Background
The conservative effort to capture the state Supreme Court began in 2010 when the Republican party won control over both the Senate and House for the first time in over a century. Then, in 2012, Republican Pat McCrory defeated Democratic candidate Walter Dalton to secure the governorship, becoming the first Republican to take the seat in 20 years. With their new trifecta, North Carolina Republicans passed a bill in 2013 to terminate the state’s pioneering public financing for judicial elections, which, according to a study published in American Politics Research, led justices to be more impartial and less responsive to donor interests.
- The GOP also passed other bills in 2013 to limit early voting, implement voter ID requirements, and ban same-day registration. They used their newfound power to create congressional maps that diluted Black voting power so obviously, even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to vote in favor of invalidating the districts. A different court case resulted in several state legislative districts being declared racial gerrymanders, as well. The Republican-controlled legislature then voted to cancel a special session called by Gov. Cooper to redraw the maps, saying that redistricting did not satisfy the “extraordinary circumstances” requirement of the state constitution.
In 2016, North Carolina voters elected Democrat Roy Cooper to be governor and ousted Republican-affiliated Supreme Court Justice Robert Edmunds in favor of Democratic-affiliated Judge Michael Morgan, flipping the court from 4-3 conservative-leaning to 4-3 liberal-leaning control.
Crucially, however, judicial elections up until that point were non-partisan—the candidates’ party affiliation was not listed on the ballot. That all changed in the few short months between the election and when Cooper took office. Republicans convened an emergency session of the legislature and, with Gov. McCrory ® in power for just weeks longer, passed a law requiring judicial candidates to display their party affiliation on the ballot.
“It was a very sudden and brutal use of legislative power,” said state Sen. Graig Meyer, who was a Democrat in the House in 2016 and voted against the changes.
Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, who wouldn’t take office until 2017, was watching closely. “They believed that if they could make judicial races partisan again, that they would have a much better opportunity to control the courts and inject right-wing politics into the judicial system,” Cooper told Public Integrity this spring. “And they have been successful.”
- Republicans also used the last-minute special session to restrict incoming-Gov. Cooper’s executive power and to give themselves more representatives on state and county elections boards.
Since implementing the requirement that judicial candidates display a party affiliation on the ballot, Republicans have won five of six contests.
Results from Burke County, North Carolina, illustrate the difference the party label makes. The area is the longtime home of the Ervin family, a Democratic political dynasty in the state. In the 2014 state Supreme Court race, without party labels, Sam Ervin IV received 62% of the Burke County vote.
When Ervin came up for re-election as an incumbent in 2022, his party affiliation appeared next to his name. In that election, he received just 34% of the vote in Burke County.
Ervin lost statewide in November, as did the Democrat running for another seat, flipping the court from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican one.
Using their new majority, the Republican justices decided to rehear several voting rights cases decided just months earlier by the previously Democratic-led court. All five white Republican justices overturned their predecessors’ rulings—permitting extreme partisan gerrymanders, reinstating a restrictive photo ID law, and upholding the state’s felony disenfranchisement law. The two Democratic justices, both Black, dissented from each opinion, as well as the decision to rehear the cases in the first place:
Nothing has changed since we rendered our opinion in this case on 16 December 2022: The legal issues are the same; the evidence is the same; and the controlling law is the same. The only thing that has changed is the political composition of the Court. Now, approximately one month since this shift, the Court has taken an extraordinary action: It is allowing rehearing without justification…
The consequences of this Court’s orders are grave. The judiciary’s “authority . . . depends in large measure on the public’s willingness to respect and follow its decisions.” Williams-Yulee v. Florida. Bar, 575 U.S. 433, 446 (2015). The public’s trust in this Court, in turn, depends on the fragile confidence that our jurisprudence will not change with the tide of each election. Yet it took this Court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public t…
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