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On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings [1]

['Michael Wines']

Date: 2023-02-05  

“It took this court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public that our decisions are fleeting and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench,” they stated.

The degree of partisanship in North Carolina’s judiciary is mirrored in other politically divided states like Wisconsin and Ohio, where judges are increasingly perceived as political actors, not neutral arbiters of the law.

Supreme Court races in North Carolina were nonpartisan affairs until the Republican legislature ordered candidates to run as partisans, with R’s and D’s beside their names on Election Day ballots, beginning five years ago. The Republican legislature in Ohio made the same move beginning with last November’s court races. In both instances, the changes were widely seen as politically motivated — and, indeed, both supreme courts have since tilted to the right.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections are ostensibly nonpartisan, but candidates run as liberals or conservatives who almost invariably support one party or the other on contentious issues. Arguably the most important election in America in 2023 is the April 4 contest for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where Democrats are trying to regain liberal control of a court on which conservatives hold a 4-to-3 majority. Wisconsin Democrats want to overturn the state’s 1849 law prohibiting abortion in nearly all cases, and the court has the potential to make crucial rulings on election issues in a key swing state in 2024 if there are presidential election challenges.

And there, as in Ohio and North Carolina, partisan control of the court is seen as the key to preserving or undoing gerrymandered political maps that have locked in Republican dominance of the state legislature for more than a decade.

In those and other states, once-sleepy races for the bench have become multimillion-dollar affairs financed by ideological PACs, wealthy donors and, often, the political parties themselves.

Ms. Doran said that it is impossible to completely divorce politics from the bench. “Politics is inherently part of governance, and courts are part of our government,” she said, adding that Republican victories in November’s court races showed that voters wanted a more conservative judiciary.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/us/north-carolina-supreme-court-voting-rights.html?smid=tw-share

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