JUSTICE EARLS, MORGAN
BLAST HIGH COURT GOP
FOR REVERSING DECISIONS
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
The two Black Democratic justices on the NC Supreme Court know they can’t do much against the GOP machine that is the five-member Republican majority when it comes to political or racial issues that come before them. But when Associate justices Anita Earls and Michael Morgan see their conservative colleagues literally cherry-pick previously settled cases for the sole purpose of reversing them in favor of the Republican majority in the NC General Assembly, neither Earles nor Morgan can be quiet about it.
On April 28th, the Republican-led NC Supreme Court issued three stunning decisions, two of which literally reversed recent rulings by the previous Democrat majority state Supreme Court regarding voter I.D. and GOP redistricting.
The third decision ignored a lower court ruling allowing ex-felons to reclaim their voting rights. Now, those on probation, parole, or on post release supervision, can’t vote.
In each case, the present Republican court majority sided with Republican legislative leaders, effectively turning previous legal losses into new GOP legislative victories, and ultimately affecting the upcoming 2024 elections.
Justice Anita Earls, as one of two Democrats on the seven-member High Court, dissented in all three cases. Justice Morgan joined her in the minority opinion.
In each case, Earls or Morgan expressed withering outrage at what they saw as the Republican court majority judging cases based on pure partisan power, not the law, nor established legal precedent.
In the case of Holmes v. Moore, where the GOP court majority gave the green light to voter photo ID after an extraordinary rehearing, Justice Morgan forcefully dissented:
Today, four justices of this Court adopt the same approach to the law, violating the norms of appellate review and disregarding or distorting precedent as necessary to reach their desired result. Apparently, in their view, the law is whatever they say it is.
Instead of doing the legally correct thing, the majority opinion picks its preferred destination and reshapes the law to get there.
It is apparent from the artfully chosen words of my …distinguished colleagues that they have not been reticent about the notion of introducing partisan politics into this Court’s opinions when they disagreed with various case outcomes…Yet now,… the five justices which constitute the [court] majority here have emboldened themselves to infuse partisan politics brazenly into the outcome of the present case. This [court] majority’s extraordinarily rare allowance of a petition for rehearing in this case, mere weeks after this newly minted majority was positioned on this Court and mere months after this case was already decided by a previous composition of members of this Court, spoke volumes.
My consternation with the majority’s abrupt departure from this Court’s institutionalized stature—historically grounded in this forum’s own reverence for its caselaw precedent, its deference to the rule of law, and its severance from partisan politics—is colossal.
In the redistricting case of Harper v. Hall, Justice Earls dissented, noting that the previous Democrat-led court struck down the Republican NC legislature’s attempt at extreme partisan gerrymandering in redrawing voting districts, only to have this court ultimately give GOP lawmakers what they wanted after a rare rehearing. Now, nothing can stop North Carolina Republicans from redrawing voting districts to maintain a permanent majority in the legislature, or a GOP majority in Congress.
What Legislative Defendants want is a do over—a chance to go back in time and draw even more egregiously gerrymandered maps than they did before this litigation began. Because of the [court] majority’s decision today, they now have the assurance that they will get away with it. And as they correctly predicted, what Legislative Defendants want, the [court] majority will provide…
What is more, the [court] majority abolishes the fundamental right to vote on equal terms regardless of political party through a process driven by partisan influence and greed for power. Let there be no illusions about what motivates the [court] majority’s decision to rewrite this Court’s precedent. Today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority. To the Court’s new majority, the parties’ briefing after rehearing was granted did not matter. The oral argument held after rehearing was granted did not matter. The merits of Plaintiffs’ arguments do not matter. For at stake in this case is the [court] majority’s own political agenda. Today, the Court shows that its own will is more powerful than the voices of North Carolina’s voters.
And in the case of Community Success Initiative v. Moore, Justice Earls again blasts her conservative colleagues for being willing to deny “…a particular class of voters from exercising their right to vote because they are deemed less desirable” and ignoring a lower court ruling, to reach a pre-determined outcome:
The [court] majority’s decision in this case will one day be repudiated on two grounds. First, because it seeks to justify the denial of a basic human right to citizens and thereby perpetuates a vestige of slavery, and second, because the majority violates a basic tenant of appellate review by ignoring the facts as found by the trial court and substituting its own.
With regard to the first and most serious issue, the majority interprets the North Carolina Constitution to reduce the humanity of individuals convicted of felony offenses to the point of cruelty: People who are convicted of felony offenses are no longer people, they are felons. The majority believes that, as felons, they are not free even after their sentences are complete, they are merely felons for the rest of their lives. At about the same time that the state constitution was amended to disenfranchise all Blacks, both those who were slaves and those who were free, this Court held that “[t]he power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.”
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JOYNER CHIDES BLACKS
FOR NOT VOTING STRONG
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
On Friday, April 28th, the future of voting in North Carolina changed…maybe forever.
As has been reported, the Republican-led NC Supreme Court ruled that the NC General Assembly can draw voting districts any way it chooses; ruled that voter photo ID is not discriminatory and will be required of all North Carolinians going to the polls starting in 2024; and also ruled that over 50,000 former felons, and those released who do not complete their probation, parole or post release supervision requirements, are ineligible to cast a ballot in elections.
“This is a trio of tragic rulings for voters across our state brought to us by the radical Republican majority in control of our courts that are specifically designed to silence voters, especially Black and Brown voters,” said North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton. “We should be making it easier to vote – not harder.”
The seven Democratic congresspeople currently serving the state, reps. Alma Adams (NC-12), Valerie Foushee (NC-04), Don Davis (NC-01), Kathy Manning (NC-06), Deborah Ross (NC-02), Wiley Nickel (NC-13) and Jeff Jackson (NC14), also issued a statement of concern.
“As North Carolina’s Congressional Democrats, we will continue to pursue legislation at the federal level that prohibits power-hungry politicians from trampling over your civil rights, including your sacred right to vote in free and fair elections.”
For those in the civil rights community, the rulings were a kick in the teeth after so many years of court battles, and public demonstrations, like the Moral Monday Movement, which last week, celebrated its tenth anniversary.
One of the legal foot soldiers of that movement is Attorney Irving Joyner, chairman of the NC NAACP Legal Redress Committee. As far as he’s concerned, the concerted power grab by the Republican Supreme Court and the GOP-led NC General Assembly is a direct result of African Americans not voting in significant numbers in 2022.
The lesson, Joyner says, couldn’t be clearer.
“The recent N.C. Supreme Court decisions are disappointing, but are not surprising,” Joyner, also a law professor at North Carolina Central University School of Law in Durham, said. “The decisions are a part of a race-based right-wing push-back that is designed to minimize the rights and protections for African Americans that the North Carolina Constitution was designed to provide. It is clear that the biggest victims of these decisions will be African Americans, people of color and individuals from marginalized communities. Unfortunately, these developments are very similar to political developments in 1898 which resulted in the purge of voting rights and protections of African Americans that occurred during the violent end of Reconstruction.”
Atty. Joyner continued, “These decisions are vivid reminders that if you do not vote and participate in the political process, your rights and protections are vulnerable to those who are elected and control governmental institutions. During the 2022 elections, too many African Americans did not vote and several political campaigns did not seek and promote their involvements at the polls. As a results, these voting results were predictable. It will now take decades to restore the level of political participation that we will need in order to protect the political power that African Americans and people of color possessed, but failed to utilize.
“The newly entrenched Supreme Court has abandoned the promises and protections of the North Carolina Constitution and unless these precedents are reversed,” Joyner added, “ the coming years will likely lead to further declines in the political participation and powers of our communities.”
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