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In win for GOP, NC Supreme Court positioned to reverse major voting rights cases

The North Carolina Supreme Court's decision Friday to rehear a high-profile redistricting case and a controversial voter ID case indicates that the court's new GOP majority plans to undo voting rights rulings that had been seen as victories for Democrats.

Posted Updated
North Carolina Supreme Court
By
Will Doran
, WRAL state government reporter

In a rare move, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided Friday that two high-profile political lawsuits with major consequences for voters in the state need a do-over.

The cases have to do with voting districts and voter identification laws, and they're the first major orders by the state’s highest court since Republicans gained a majority on the bench.

Republican lawmakers lost the nationally watched redistricting case — Harper v. Hall — last year, when the court ruled that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

Writing for the majority Friday, however, Republican Justice Trey Allen said that the court is allowed to rehear cases when it’s possible “that the opinion may be erroneous.”

That’s what GOP leaders argued in a Jan. 20 court filing, less than three weeks after Allen and fellow new Republican Justice Richard Dietz were sworn in, flipping the court from a 4-3 Democratic majority to 5-2 in favor of Republicans.

Although only a month had passed since the court’s ruling in Harper v. Hall, GOP leaders said they now believed it was time for the court to reverse the ruling.

“The Harper experiment has failed, and it is time for this Court to recognize that, correct its errors, and return to the Constitution and this State’s traditional modes of interpretation,” Republican lawmakers wrote in their request to the new court.

The Republican majority also voted Friday to rehear a case in which the previous Democratic majority had ruled the 2018 voter ID law unconstitutional, due to racial discrimination.

The court's decision Friday to rehear the cases indicates that the court’s new GOP majority plans to undo the prior rulings. Friday’s rulings were both 5-2, along party lines.

Allen wrote that the court has the power to rehear cases if the losing side — in this instance, GOP legislators — can argue that there were “points of fact or law that … the court has overlooked or misapprehended.”

While it’s not entirely unheard of for the Supreme Court to rehear cases it has already decided, it is incredibly rare — only having happened twice in the last 30 years, Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote the dissent in the redistricting case.

Earls called the decision a “radical break with 205 years of history” based on partisan politics alone.

“Respect for the institution and the integrity of its processes kept opportunities for rehearing narrow in scope and exceedingly rare,” she wrote. “Today, that tradition is abandoned. Nothing has changed since we rendered our opinion in this case on 16 December 2022: The legal issues are the same; the evidence is the same; and the controlling law is the same. The only thing that has changed is the political composition of the Court.”

Partisan gerrymandering is the process in which state legislators draw new district lines for Congress, or the state legislature, that are so skewed toward one political party that they violate voters’ right to free elections, as spelled out in the state constitution.

Racially motivated gerrymandering has been considered unconstitutional since the 1980s, but that 2022 ruling was the first time the state’s highest court had ever agreed that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional, too.

In the voter ID case, the court’s other remaining Democrat, Justice Michael Morgan, used his dissent Friday to suggest the court also had partisan motives to rehear that case, rather than legitimate legal grounds. “There is no aspect of the case ... which meets the historically and purposely high standards to qualify for this Court’s exceedingly rare extension” for a rehearing, he wrote.

Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for Voting Rights at Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a statement Friday that her group — which helped sue the legislature in both cases — was disappointed. “The Court is giving legislators another bite at the apple, and we maintain that this is politically motivated and outside the scope of what’s permitted by the Constitution,” she said.

A spokeswoman for Senate Leader Phil Berger didn’t immediately provide a comment. A spokeswoman for House Speaker Tim Moore didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. They are among the Republican leaders who are defendants in both cases.

Republican leaders' loss last year in Harper v. Hall, the redistricting case, is what led GOP leaders to also file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case called Moore v. Harper. That appeal, with its controversial argument that state legislatures should be immune from judicial oversight on anything that would affect federal elections, led critics to say it could spell the end of American democracy by allowing for future presidential elections to be rigged.

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