Democratic NC Supreme Court Justice Michael Morgan won't run for reelection in 2024
Justice Michael Morgan, one of two remaining Democrats on the North Carolina Supreme Court's two remaining Democrats, says he won't seek reelection when his term ends next year.
"I've relished the challenge of making contributions to the rule of law which are fair, correct and enduring," he said in an interview Thursday. "And I would hope that I’ll be remembered as a faithful servant of the people of North Carolina."
Morgan was first elected to the court in 2016. With help from an endorsement by former president Barack Obama, Morgan's victory that year flipped the court from Republican to Democratic control.
He previously served as a trial court judge in district and superior court in Wake County, and as an administrative law judge. He said he's proud to have had such a wide-ranging judicial resume.
"With the incredibly good fortune to be the only person ever in NC to serve in four different judgeships over my 34 years of judicial service, I shall not seek to be reelected in 2024 as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina," Morgan wrote on Twitter to make his announcement.
The court's other Democrat, Justice Anita Earls, praised Morgan and his legacy Thursday.
"It has been an honor and a pleasure to serve with Justice Morgan," she told WRAL in a statement. "His long record as an outstanding jurist at both the trial and appellate levels is unparalleled."
Morgan’s 2016 win gave Democrats six years of control over the Supreme Court, from 2017 to 2023. Republicans won every statewide judicial election in 2020, and again in 2022, enabling them to flip control of the court this year. Democrats will have to put on a similarly dominant stretch of elections, over the course of years, if they hope to flip the court back — starting in 2024 with defending Morgan’s seat.
At least one Republican, N.C. Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, has already announced he will run for Morgan’s seat. It’s not yet clear who might run on the Democratic side.
Even if Morgan had run for reelection next year and won, he would've had to resign before finishing his term. Justices are elected to eight-year terms in office, but Morgan, 67, is just five years away from the mandatory retirement age for judges. The legislature has been considering extending the retirement age from 72 to 76 but has not yet taken action to do so.
Politics and the court
Just weeks after Morgan defeated Republican incumbent Bob Edmunds in 2016, state Republican lawmakers changed the rules for all future Supreme Court elections — ending their nonpartisan status, so that the candidates' party labels now show up next to their names on the ballot.
That change didn't begin the politicization of the court, experts and insiders have said, but did help ramp it up. Both political parties have spent tens of millions of dollars in recent years seeking control of the court.
Morgan and his fellow Democrats were accused by Republicans of making politically motivated decisions when they controlled the majority. Now that he's in the minority, Morgan has become an increasingly vocal critic of the new Republican majority for the same reason — sometimes using dissents to publicly accuse his colleagues of making decisions based more on politics than legal reasoning.
"I'm gravely concerned about the institutionalized traditions of this court," he said in an interview Thursday.
Last year the court’s Democratic majority ruled against the Republican-led legislature in two high-profile cases, on gerrymandering and voter ID. But after the GOP flipped control of the Supreme Court in the midterms, they promptly made the controversial decision to re-hear those cases.
And last month the new Republican majority reversed those voting rights decisions, handing wins to their Republican colleagues in the legislature.
Earls wrote the dissent in the gerrymandering reversal; Morgan wrote the dissent in the voter ID reversal. In it, Morgan accused Chief Justice Paul Newby and the court’s other Republicans of a “richly ironic” act of judicial activism and hypocrisy, given the complaints about judicial activism Newby had launched when Democrats controlled the court's majority.
“The five justices which constitute the majority here have emboldened themselves to infuse partisan politics brazenly into the outcome of the present case,” Morgan wrote.
And when the court's Republicans invented a new power for themselves earlier this year — increasing their ability to change legal precedent in the state without actually ruling on a case — Morgan criticized it as an unprecedented power grab, WRAL News reported.
"I do not agree with this majority’s departures from well-established and time-honored practices, traditions, and customs of this Court merely because these deviations conveniently serve the majority’s interests,” he wrote in his dissent.
