Editorial: Courts, again, remind GOP legislators of their proper place

Another week, another reminder from state and federal judges, to the Republicans who lead North Carolina’s General Assembly, that it is voters who pick their representatives to govern. That is what the American Revolution was all about.  Look it up:

In a five-day period state and federal courts lectured legislative leaders about democracy and the rule of law. Rigging elections is against the law, cancelling elections is against the law. It is a well-established foundation that there’s no monarchy or dictatorship ruling the United States.

Even people as powerful as Senate leader Phil Berger, state House Speaker Tim Moore, state Rep. David Lewis and state Sen. Ralph Hise, are not more powerful than the voters who are supposed to be able to put them in office through fair, open and free elections.

The judge said it was ok for the legislature to delay district and superior court judges because legislators were in the midst of redrawing those districts. She didn’t address the foolhardy and impulsive approach legislative leaders have taken to that task. It should not go unsaid, again, that the legislature’s approach is transparently partisan. It has NOTHING to do with improving the administration of justice – and will likely result in just the opposite.

It is the definition of disingenuousness to say, as legislative leaders did, that Eagles was “once again injecting chaos and confusion into North Carolina elections at the eleventh hour." Or further that her decision was politically motivated because she’d been appointed to her post by a Democratic president.

It is the legislature’s obsessive and unceasing efforts at electoral manipulation that’s brought tumult and uncertainty just days before North Carolina candidates are set to file for office in the 2018 elections. North Carolina taxpayers have been forced to waste millions of dollars paying lawyers – including Thomas Farr, whose nomination to a federal District Court judgeship has been embroiled in allegations of racism and voter intimidation – to use the courts to delay and stall. This has been going on since 2012.  It is past time to bring it to an end.

The junta leading the General Assembly has confessed its motives – to establishing permanent Republican Party rule in North Carolina by rigging election districts, the composition of state and local elections boards, voter registration procedures and ballot access. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country,” Lewis has said. A federal court order on congressional gerrymandering said that Lewis wanted to “give partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because he didn’t believe it possible to draw a map for 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”

If North Carolina is to be run by Republicans or Democrats, it is a decision left to voters in regular and frequent elections.

Citizens should be able to pick the people who represent them. Those who are given the high privilege to serve the people shouldn’t labor under the false notion that they’ve been empowered to treat citizens as serfs.

These efforts are an affront to the most basic and cherished principles of our nation’s founding. Those who fail to uphold them should not have the opportunity to represent our citizens – and voters should let them know it.

November can’t come soon enough.