A GOP-dominated NC Supreme Court reflects a national push to politicize state courts | Opinion
The North Carolina Supreme Court building in downtown Raleigh hasn’t changed, but the idea of judicial independence expressed by the building’s impressive granite facade is disintegrating.
That breakdown became clear in the closing months of the state Supreme Court session. The court, with a 4-3 Democratic majority, fast-tracked rulings on school funding, redistricting and voter ID ahead of the Republican majority that will take control of the court in January.
The rush of rulings was effectively a vote of no confidence that a Republican-dominated court would rule against actions taken by the Republican-led General Assembly. The three Republican justices showed that expectation to be well founded. The votes in all three cases were along party lines.
The incoming court will have a 5-2 Republican majority after Republicans gained two seats in the November election. GOP legislative leaders see their party’s victories as a rebuke of Democratic justices who ruled against Republican positions.
It’s no accident that North Carolina ended up with a high court that is likely to enable rather than check legislative excesses. It’s the result of a national Republican push to eliminate state courts as barriers to extreme gerrymandering and other legislation that violates state constitutions.
Douglas Keith, who studies state courts as counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told me that North Carolina was among the first states to see its supreme court become highly politicized. The process began in North Carolina when the Republican lawmakers restored partisan labels to state Supreme Court elections starting in 2018. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United increased the money from national groups pouring into state Supreme Court races.
The outside spending turned those races from relatively low-key, nonpartisan affairs to expensive battles featuring nasty negative ads. In North Carolina, for instance, ads wrongly linked Democratic justices to being soft on child molesters.
The involvement by political parties and deep-pocketed national groups creates pressure to select nominees who will be what Keith called “a sure thing” when they reach the bench.
“What we might be seeing now is that those bounds that were constraining judicial interpretation may be disintegrating and judges are more and more willing to interpret the laws in ways that are not reasonable or plausible because their interpretation achieves their own personal goals,” he said
Raw partisanship works like acid on the image of the courts and dissolves the judicial branch’s ability to be a check on legislation that violates rights.
“If you have state courts that are operating as just arms of state legislatures, then you lose that check and you risk losing the public’s confidence in court decisions,” Keith said. Once that confidence is lost, he added, those who control a legislature “can change the rules of our democracy to entrench themselves and there’s going to be no one to stop them.”
In North Carolina, that mission has been accomplished by tying the Supreme Court’s makeup to voting trends that favor Republicans in statewide elections. Since partisan labels were added following the 2016 election, Republicans have won five of six Supreme Court races. The lone Democratic victory – Anita Earls’ win in 2018 – resulted from a fluke that put two Republicans against her in the general election.
After the new court is sworn in in January, Republican justices will hold the majority until at least 2028. And if they give a green light to gerrymandered redistricting maps, Republican lawmakers may be in the majority even longer.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
