Courts Keep Thwarting North Carolina Republicans. So They’re Trying to Remake the Courts.
Republicans in the state legislature have unveiled a radical plan to transform the judiciary.
www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/courts-keep-thwarting-north-carolina-republicans-so-theyre-trying-to-remake-the-courts/
[...]Now the legislature is taking up a host of controversial new proposals in a special session, including redrawing judicial maps for the first time in roughly 50 years to put more Republicans on the bench. The new maps would likely give Republican judges 70 percent of seats on North Carolina’s superior and district courts, according to an analysis by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a voting rights group based in Durham. The groups calls the new lines “a gross political gerrymander of our state’s legal system, designed to ensure that Republican judges will be elected in a disproportionate number of districts statewide.”
Republicans would pick up seats by pitting Democratic incumbents against each other. About 70 percent of the judges who would be forced to run against other incumbents under the new maps are Democrats, according to the SCSJ analysis. The Republican maps would also reduce the number of minority judges by pitting half of African American judges against other incumbent judges in cities like Durham and Greensboro. The new districts “bear an uncanny resemblance” to the racially gerrymandered state legislative maps struck down in court, the analysis found.
“These proposed changes would erode the public’s faith in the courts,” says Tomas Lopez, executive director of the voting rights group Democracy NC, which is lobbying against the new maps. “They come from the same place as the state’s badly gerrymandered maps and targeted voting restrictions.”
Republicans are also floating a proposal to require all state judges to run for election every two years—instead of the current four-year terms for district court judges and eight-year terms for superior court, appeals court, and supreme court judges—which would give North Carolina the shortest judicial terms in the country. “Some would argue that we do have some activist judges, and the thought would be if you’re going to act like a legislator, perhaps you should run like one,” Republican state Rep. David Lewis told radio station WUNC.
Republicans are particularly upset that the liberal majority on the state supreme court is safe at least through 2022, allowing the court to block GOP attempts to gerrymander electoral maps after the 2020 census.
Some Republicans, like state Senate leader Phil Berger, favor a more radical solution: ending judicial elections altogether. Under this proposal, the legislature would nominate candidates for the bench, and the governor would have to choose from among them to fill new vacancies, effectively allowing Republicans to select all judges. (Republicans hold a 50-seat advantage in the legislature.) Voters must approve this system through a constitutional amendment, which Republicans could put on the ballot in May, when voters will select state legislative candidates in the primaries. “This is just a way for legislators to cherry-pick their judges because they’re disappointed with how the judiciary hasn’t ruled their way,” says Melissa Price Kromm of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections, a government watchdog group that is leading opposition to the judicial changes. South Carolina and Virginia are currently the only states where state legislatures choose judges.
Even some Republican judges have reacted with dismay to the legislature’s changes. When the legislature reduced the size of the appeals court to block Cooper from appointing new members, Republican Judge Douglas McCullough retired early to allow the Democratic governor to name his successor. “I did not want my legacy to be the elimination of a seat and the impairment of a court that I have served on,” he said.