Finally, Something to Celebrate
Over the weekend, the news came out that the Reverend William Barber, official preacherman of this shebeen and one of the great moral leaders of our politics, announced that he was leaving his post as the head of the NAACP in the newly insane state of North Carolina in order to take up the leadership of a modern version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave Barber a nifty going-away present.
The Court refused to grant certiorari on an appeal by North Carolina to review a lower court's decision to shitcan the voting regulations passed by the Republican majorities in the state legislature. From WaPo:
In the voting rights case, a unanimous panel of the 4th Circuit on July 29 agreed with allegations from the Justice Department and civil rights groups that North Carolina's bill selectively chose voter-ID requirements, reduced the number of early-voting days and changed registration procedures in ways meant to harm African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party. "The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision" and "impose cures for problems that did not exist," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel. "Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the state's true motivation."
That phrase about acting "with almost surgical precision" rang loudly through the politics of the issue. (Roy Cooper, a Democrat who was elected governor in 2016, informed the Court that he did not want to appeal the lower court's decision.) In declining the appeal, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:
"Given the blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this Court under North Carolina law, it is important to recall our frequent admonition that '[t]he denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,' " Roberts wrote. Last summer, Roberts and the court's other conservatives - Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. - said they would have allowed the law to be used in the 2016 elections while the appeals continued. But they were unable to find a necessary fifth vote from one of the court's four liberals.
There is no question that the Moral Monday movement that erupted spontaneously in Raleigh against former Republican Governor Pat McCrory, and for which Barber was the guiding spirit, began the process that ended on Monday with the Court's decision and with the state legislature with its feet to the flame to come up with voting rules that don't make Dr. King gag in the Beyond.
The Court does have before it another appeal regarding the franchise, this one regarding a Tinker Toy redistricting map that the appeals court punted even further than it did the voting regulations. In both cases, you have perfect examples of political power inside and outside the government working in tandem. It should be an object lesson for every group that's pushing back against the authoritarian momentum of one-party government all over the country. Or, as the Reverend Barber put it only last summer:
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