With Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Harper, the reckless, anti-democratic arrogance of North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders finally hit a wall.
The court essentially told the North Carolina lawmakers that they either don’t understand democracy or don’t support it.
The case centered on the lawmakers’ claim that under a fringe legal argument — the independent state legislature theory — the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures exclusive control over the conduct of elections and courts and other parts of government have no authority to rule on laws that set federal election districts.
Moore v. Harper — the Moore is N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, Rebecca Harper is a voting rights advocate — posed a potentially devastating threat to democracy.
If the U.S. Supreme Court found for North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers, legislatures throughout the nation would be free to restrict voting and gerrymander voting districts to a point where the majority party would be virtually assured of staying in power regardless of the popular will. Such a ruling could have spread to all states the extreme gerrymandering and partisan election laws that have sapped democracy in North Carolina.
The U.S. Supreme Court, one of the most conservative and Republican-friendly courts in generations, declared in its 6-3 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts that the North Carolina lawmakers’ claim was flatly wrong. Roberts wrote: “The Constitution does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.”
That Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented should frighten anyone who cares about fair elections and a system of checks and balances.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is also a rebuke to the Republican-dominated North Carolina Supreme Court. In April, the court, which flipped to a 5-2 Republican majority in November’s election, reversed a decision last year by the state court, then with a 4-3 Democratic majority, that rejected congressional election districts as being excessively gerrymandered.
In reversing that ruling, North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, said that the Republican-controlled General Assembly should be left on its own when it shapes congressional and state election districts.
The opinion said: “The people did not intend their courts to serve as the public square for policy debates and political decisions. Instead, the people act and decide policy matters through their representatives in the General Assembly. We are designed to be a government of the people, not of the judges. At its heart, this case is about recognizing the proper limits of judicial power.”
The ruling overturned the court’s previous finding that courts have an obligation under the state constitution to ensure free elections and gerrymandering that heavily tilts election results violates the state constitution.
Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling may open the door to a challenge to the current state Supreme Court’s interpretation of its role, or lack of it, in reviewing state election laws.
The reversal on redistricting appeared to render moot the Republican state lawmakers’ complaint in Moore v. Harper that state courts cannot intrude on a legislature’s authority to regulate federal elections within a state. That the U.S. Supreme Court ruled anyway shows that a majority of the justices think that such a claim of exclusive power must be emphatically rejected.
Were it possible, Moore and state Senate leader Phil Berger should be ashamed that their desire for unchecked power brought the nation to a brink in which two more votes could have severely undermined representative democracy. They won’t be ashamed, of course, because they regard any court decision that limits their power to be partisan and wrong.
But now six justices, including three of their own party, told them democracy is not about exercising raw power. It is about having checks and balances on the power of any one branch of government.
Fortunately, the nation has been spared a dose of North Carolina’s autocracy. Unfortunately, it still endures here.
