Leading Off
● North Carolina: No state has been at the vanguard in the Republican war on voting rights quite like North Carolina. In the last week alone, Republican legislators have enacted two new laws over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, one of which a court already temporarily blocked. Republicans also advanced another four bills, all designed to make voting more difficult and give the GOP an electoral advantage—and all of this is on top of months of repeated efforts to undermine Cooper and overturn the results of last year’s elections. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s dive in.
Campaign ActionCooper ousted Republican Gov. Pat McCrory from office in the 2016 elections, entitling Democrats to gain one-seat majorities on the boards of election for the state and every county. However, Republican legislators have now overridden Cooper’s veto of a new law that would eviscerate these majorities by requiring the governor to choose equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans (the state parties would supply the governor with lists of potential nominees). Although Republicans claimed that this equal partisan division is about fairness, their true purpose was to ensure deadlocks throughout the state in order to prevent Democrats from overturning previous GOP voting restrictions.
Republicans have also turned their gaze on the court system itself. Last year, the GOP won an 11-to-four majority over Democrats on the state Court of Appeals, but three Republican judges would have reached mandatory retirement age during Cooper’s term. Existing law would have allowed Cooper to appoint Democratic replacements for those judges, who would then serve until the next election. However, rather than let Cooper fill those vacancies and swing the court to just a one-seat GOP majority, Republicans overrode Cooper’s veto to enact a new law that simply eliminates these seats upon a vacancy, reducing the court from 15 to 12 members.
Despite dubious Republican claims that they acted because the court’s workload had declined, this “reverse” court-packing bill was so flagrantly undemocratic that one of those very same Republican judges who was facing mandatory retirement in May, Douglas McCullough, promptly resigned a month early on Monday before the veto override took place. McCullough not only excoriated Republican legislators for injecting partisanship into the judiciary and burdening the court’s remaining members, his resignation allowed Cooper to appoint a Democratic replacement, which he did the same day.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2oQLpaw
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