Who will stop the unrelenting push in NC to disenfranchise Black voters? | Opinion
As one of its first defining steps, the new Republican North Carolina Supreme Court issued a warm and giddy embrace of extreme, politically partisan gerrymandering.
Our state constitution is now unbothered by political parties permanently entrenching themselves in power (at least Republican ones). Rigging elections to predetermine partisan outcomes is no transgression. Tar Heels enjoy no state constitutional right to equal political participation.
We’ve got a lot of liberties, but they don’t include the right to fair elections. We also have no state supreme court worthy of the name.
North Carolina Republicans, however, are not yet empowered to overturn the federal Voting Rights Act or the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. So the General Assembly’s newly enacted electoral districts can still be invalidated if they are the products of illegal race discrimination. And here there will likely be much to litigate, because our Republican lawmakers don’t seem to be able to resist targeting Black voters. Just ask the residents of the redrawn New Hanover County Senate district.
But that means the federal courts are charged with doing something that has never occurred throughout North Carolina’s long history — separating race from politics. Good luck with that.
Judges will explore intentions and purported deceptions, asserted motivations and methodologies, secret documents and “surgical precisions” to determine the proffered racial claims. The litigating line assumes political gerrymandering is acceptable while racial distinction is barred. But that prescription raises an even more overarching and foundational question — are the actions of the highly racialized Republican caucuses of the N.C. General Assembly to gain and expand their powers “racial” or merely “political”?
Here’s what I mean.
For the past 13 years, the governing Republican caucuses of our General Assembly have had either no, or almost no, African American members. This is not merely a question of aesthetics. Lawmakers have produced a heavily racialized substantive agenda. You know it— “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court,” racial voter suppression rules unequaled “by any other legislature in the country,” continued restrictions on Black voters so pronounced that they “intrude upon (foundational notions) of popular sovereignty,” an interred Racial Justice Act, increased barriers to the review police body-cam video, new penalties aimed at Black Lives Matter protesters, bizarre protections for Confederate statues, and more. It’s looking and governing like a White folks’ party.
So, my question — are the partisan gyrations of a racialized governing legislative caucus merely “political” or are they also “racial” steps to discriminate? When the often racially motivated N.C. General Assembly deploys politically biased strategies to entrench and expand its electoral power is that, somehow, immune from examination under the equal protection clause?
When North Carolina Republicans again deploy some of the most aggressively distorted redistricting practices in American history to further a radically anti-egalitarian legislative agenda — to entrench that agenda permanently into the social and political life of North Carolina — can it actually be that the 14th and 15th Amendments are untroubled?
Is it literally permissible, as N.C. leaders seem to claim, to impose debilitating restrictions on Black voters so long as the burden is supposedly levied because the potential voters are Democrats, not because they are Black? Over the centuries African Americans have been offered a dizzying array of justifications for abuse at the hands of a white majority in North Carolina. This one reeks like the others.
Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
