Democrats celebrate Supreme Court state election law ruling

Democrats are celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, calling the Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislature theory” a win in the fight for voting and civil rights.

“Free and fair elections are fundamental to our democracy — and Republican state legislatures don’t get to unilaterally decide election laws without restriction or review,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the lead Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a tweet.

“This is a good decision that curbs some of the power of Republican state legislatures and affirms the importance of checks and balances,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The comments come after the Supreme Court ruled that state courts do possess the right to review state election laws, a rejection of the “independent state legislature theory.” Proponents of the theory argued that state legislatures can set election rules with little oversight from state courts. The 6-3 decision, which saw Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh join the three liberal justices on the court, prompted immediate reaction from Democratic officials across the country. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.

In his dissent, Thomas argued that the "framework" offered by the majority would "have the effect of investing potentially large swaths of state constitutional law with the character of a federal question not amenable to meaningful or principled adjudication by federal courts." Thomas also noted that the case was moot; the lower court, the North Carolina Supreme Court, had vacated its original ruling that sparked the petition to the Court.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who received considerable attention during the 2020 election in her role as her state’s chief elections officer, said Tuesday the ruling was a “welcome signal in advance of 2024.”

North Carolina’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic frontrunner in the state’s competitive gubernatorial race in 2024, tweeted Tuesday that the ruling “reaffirmed the most central principle of our democracy: that the people, not politicians, have political power.”

Former President Barack Obama weighed in as well, tweeting Tuesday that the ruling “makes clear that courts can continue defending voters' rights—in North Carolina and in every state.”

Despite their praise of the decision, Democrats still voiced caution for the fight ahead over election laws.

“Republican legislators in North Carolina and across the country remain a very real threat to democracy as they continue to pass laws to manipulate elections for partisan gain by interfering with the freedom to vote,” Cooper said.