You have to wonder at the fate of American Democracy when one of those purported national “swing states,” North Carolina, has a GOP-dominated legislature that lives in morbid fear of any non-white-traditionalist voter. The rather unequivocal goal of the incumbent Republican legislature – uncomfortably faced with a newly-elected Democrat in the Governor’s office – is to make sure that minorities have no political power and any Democrat who gets elected to any position of power winds up powerless.
Among the most gerrymandered states in the union, North Carolina is the poster-state for a slow transition from red to blue. While the traditional rural constituency is crimson red, the state has become host to the banking industry (Charlotte) and has one of the most advanced positions in biotech (the RTP – Research Triangle Park [Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill] – feeding off great universities like Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State). Hence the drift towards blue.
Mainstream, high-knowledge-based industries are moving to North Carolina to take advantage of that superior educational system, a highly-skilled talent pool, with a strong pro-business environment for those kinds of businesses. Unlike the industries like the state’s notorious Duke Energy – one of the most polluting power companies in the United States taking complete advantage of the almost non-existent local environmental enforcement (exacerbated with the new Trump-led EPA) – these new business sectors are clean with lots of solid-paying jobs.
However, with these high-profile, high-revenue-generating industries comes a well-educated employee base that leans liberal. A catch-22 for the incumbent GOP that likes the money but hates the ethnic diversity and left-leaning politics that comes with it. Their solution: take the money but make sure these left-leaning voters don’t count.
The most recent political ugliness began last November when a Democrat, Roy Cooper, narrowly won the governorship. With a couple of months between the election and when Mr. Cooper would take his office, the GOP legislature conspired with the lame-duck Republican governor, Pat McCrory, to strip the governor’s office of many executive powers, limit the governor’s right to make key appointments, severely limiting most of the state’s chief executive’s discretionary powers and configuring the various voting schema in the state to insure continued GOP control of all state politics. Effectively, the old regime left the new governor with little more than a title, a powerless figurehead.
The North Carolina courts stepped in fast, holding that this rash of lame-duck legislation violated the state constitution. Governor Cooper’s judicial challenge to this attempt to contain his authority succeeded. For a while. The Republican infrastructure identified the “problem”: the courts. So their focus has now turned to dilute judicial power, contract the state’s judiciary – especially at the appellate level – to reduce the possibility that the new governor might appoint new liberal justices to the court, and make it increasingly difficult for any Democratic judge running in a local election. That the legislature is so dominated by Republicans, easily able to override gubernatorial vetoes with their supermajority, is a strong incentive for them to continue their open crusade to render Roy Cooper irrelevant and liberals powerless, regardless of changing demographics.
“Now lawmakers have seized on a solution: change the makeup of the courts… Judges in state courts as of this year must identify their party affiliation on ballots, making North Carolina the first state in nearly a century to adopt partisan court elections. The General Assembly in Raleigh reduced the size of the state Court of Appeals, depriving Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, of naming replacements for retiring Republicans.
“And this month [October], lawmakers drew new boundaries for judicial districts statewide, which critics say are meant to increase the number of Republican judges on district and superior courts and would force many African-Americans on the bench into runoffs against other incumbents.
‘Instead of changing the way they write their laws, they want to change the judges,’ Mr. Cooper said as he sat in a 19th-century, high-ceiling library at the Executive Mansion, which he has occupied uneasily since succeeding Pat McCrory, a Republican. The legislature has overridden nearly a dozen of his vetoes. The latest was on Monday [10/16], when lawmakers sustained a bill to eliminate judicial primary elections, which Mr. Cooper called part of an effort to ‘rig the system.’
“Republicans say their goal is to correct yearslong imbalances from shifts in population, ignored while Democrats held power, and to give voters more information about little-known judges in down-ballot races. ‘This is about making good policy,’ Representative Justin Burr, who unveiled the proposed new judicial maps in a series of Twitter messages one Sunday in June, has said.” New York Times, October 18th. No it isn’t; it’s about fighting a rather clear and dramatic demographic change, not just in North Carolina, but across the entire nation. It’s about letting an incumbent minority, dwindling fast, disenfranchise anyone who threatens to reduce their power.
This is really a story about America as a whole, heavily configured to make one rural traditional vote equal almost double the voting power of an urban vote, even though this nation is well over 80% urban. The judiciary is supposed to be a neutral check and balance in a three pronged governmental structure (executive, legislative and judicial) to insure fairness, impartiality and representative democracy under the constitution (state or federal, as appropriate). It isn’t anymore.
This nation is more polarized today that at any time since the Civil War. As left and right jockey for position, the impartiality of the judiciary has become the sacrificial lamb. Political “litmus tests” have become the norm for legislative review of presidential or gubernatorial appointments. Apparently, we want judges with intense political bias to fill those seats of purported impartiality.
“North Carolina’s evolution comes in the context of longstanding but increasing politicization of federal courts. Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, blocked President Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court for 10 months until Mr. Obama’s term expired. In the end, President Trump appointed Neil M. Gorsuch to the court instead. On Monday [10/16], appearing at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell said he favors ending the tradition of giving senators a veto — known as a ‘blue slip’ — over judges for appellate courts in their home states… The politicization has trickled down to state courts.” NY Times.
Appointed under a populist surge with a pledge of judicial neutrality, Associate Justice Gorsuch, has instead taken to arrogant lectures filled with political doctrine against his fellow jurists. It is less-than-secret that his hubristic “I’m smarter than you” approach has led to a rather severe feud with Obama-appointee, liberal Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Even our supreme court is now a thoroughly political venue, threatened with the possible inability to do its job.
Donald Trump looks at that court, dominated by his appointees, with the potential of reversing every major judicial decision made by that court that contradicts his populist vision... just like his litany of executive orders and treaty repudiations that have characterized his reign. He wants a severely biased judiciary, just like the GOP forces in North Carolina. Hardly the role of a neutral check and balance system that our founding fathers envisioned when they designed our government.
I’m Peter Dekom, and as polarization rips this nation apart, as our judicial system becomes nothing more than the expression of clear political bias, what chance does the United States have to continue as a working democracy?
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