Local politics is ground zero
by Tom Sullivan
NC state House members scramble to redraw legislative districts under court order for the second time since 2011.
As fascinating as the presidential race is — and imperative with an authoritarian kleptocrat in the White House — the rot in this country is widespread beyond the Oval Office.
“From Oregon to North Carolina, GOP lawmakers have used every dirty trick they can to seize power and undermine the power Democrats even after they win elections,” Sophia Tesfaye writes at Salon, unloading on Republican legislators as a class. She recounts crimes against democracy occurring across the country.
North Carolina made national headlines this week when, lacking a supermajority for overriding the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, Republicans in the state House resorted to trickery to call a snap vote while Democrats were out of the room for September 11 observances. Speaker of the House Tim Moore had put a budget veto override vote on the calendar every day since June 5, hoping for enough Democratic absences to narrowly pass it. He scheduled no votes for the morning of September 11 and told the press and Democratic legislators there would be none. Surprise!
This is the same legislature that tried to strip Cooper of his powers between his 2016 election and his 2017 inauguration. Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan attempted the same after Democrats won governorships there in 2018.
Martin Longman, writing at Progress Pond, calls out the North Carolina GOP as “a kind of worst-possible-case example of where the national party is headed. Nowhere else have I found the Republicans to be more conniving, vindictive, undemocratic and downright criminal.” It demonstrates raw “contempt for democracy,” wrote the Raleigh News & Observer editorial board, “carried out by a Republican majority that courts have repeatedly found to have gained seats through illegal gerrymandering.”
A three-judge state court panel in NC this month ruled in Common Cause v. Lewis the GOP-drawn legislative districts in North Carolina are illegal partisan gerrymanders under the state constitution. Legislators are working overtime this week (image above) to meet the deadline judges set for drawing acceptable, constitutional maps or risk having them drawn by a special master a second time (see below).
In addition to other legislative malfeasance by North Carolina’s Republican elite, the ruling may yet have implications for another case to be heard this fall before the state Court of Appeals. In NAACP and Clean Air North Carolina v. Moore and Berger, a Wake County Superior Court judge ruled in February that two constitutional amendments placed (and passed) on the 2018 ballot are invalid because those same district maps are unconstitutional under state law.
Facing South explained the case in July:
The North Carolina NAACP is challenging two 2018 amendments to the state constitution that imposed a voter ID mandate and lowered the state’s income tax cap. The amendments were passed by the legislature after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was the product of unconstitutional, racially gerrymandered election districts. The state Court of Appeals will hear arguments in the case this fall.
In February, Wake County Superior Court Judge Brian Collins agreed with the plaintiffs and ruled that the legislature “lost its claim to popular sovereignty” after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2017. Collins’ ruling was limited to the two challenged amendments, which were approved by a very narrow margin.
Since then, new evidence has emerged about the 2017 redistricting process from hard drives obtained from the daughter of deceased Republican redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller.
So, the legislative districts North Carolina Republicans drew in 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court in North Carolina v. Covington ruled racial gerrymanders and ordered redrawn in 2017. Those districts a state court invalidated under the state constitution this month as partisan gerrymanders. Now, the GOP could also lose the voter ID amendment their unconstitutional body voted onto the ballot and voters passed in 2018.
It wouldn’t be their first time. Republicans lost Amendment 1 (passed 2012) banning same-sex marriages when a federal judge struck down the amendment in 2014. Should they lose their appeal this fall in NAACP and Clean Air North Carolina v. Moore and Berger, Republicans face a state Supreme Court composed of 6 Democrats and 1 Republican justices.
Given GOP recidivism, maybe there’s a case to be made for a 3-strikes law that disbands entire caucuses.
Tesfaye cites similar antidemocratic behavior by Republicans in Texas, in Florida, in Oregon, and in Tennessee. I could go on, but won’t. The point I will come back to again and again is that President Joe cannot stop this criminality in state capitols. Neither can President Bernie or President Elizabeth or anyone else on the Democrats’ presidential bench even if they win in 2020. Misplaced attention to the presidential media circus every four years has allowed the GOP to take over state legislatures from coast to coast. From there, and with the help of REDMAP in 2010, Republicans have systematically undermined democracy at the state level, corrupting redistricting and passing voter suppression and other laws designed to ensure their continued control of government as a minority party. Stopping them requires concerted local efforts at taking back control of state legislatures.
Democrats’ and donors’ focus on federal races, as well as an anachronistic party culture, means the infrastructure for Democrats regaining control at the state level is in many places as structurally deficient and in need of replacement as America’s bridges. But like climate change, that situation won’t improve by ignoring it. And like the climate, time is running out for action.
If we want change, we will have to do some remediation to get it. Like now.
Tesfaye wraps up her coast-to-coast accounting of malfeasance by warning GOP “calls for civility are actually demands for servility.” They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. (TDWTGTWTR. Too long?)