The Supreme Court finally got the hint on Republicans and voting rights | Opinion

North Carolina Republicans are too extreme even for a conservative U.S. Supreme Court whose members secretly pal around with right-wing billionaire activists.

The North Carolina GOP tried to uproot the nation’s democracy more than Republicans have long done in the Tar Heel state. The party wanted the court to remove checks and balances that would have effectively meant they could overrule the will of voters with little chance of being challenged.

Given what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 and Republicans across the country committed to lying about the 2020 presidential elections because they didn’t like the results, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 decision against North Carolina Republicans is colossal, though it doesn’t mean the fight against undemocratic voting maps has been won.

Those were the stakes in Moore v. Harper. That we had to rely upon this Supreme Court to save the democracy from North Carolina Republicans is particularly sobering. It was the Roberts-led court that in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, a ruling that opened the floodgates to laws that made voting more difficult for Black voters and others in vulnerable groups. Within two months of that Shelby County v. Holder decision, NC Republicans pushed forth a law the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Before Shelby, all of South Carolina and 39 counties in North Carolina had to get pre-approval to ensure voting changes would not be discriminatory because of the history of racist voting laws and practices in those areas. Roberts, relying upon a child-like understanding of race, said pre-clearance was no longer necessary. The country had changed and had shed its racist ways, at least on a wide scale in voting, he reasoned. He ignored warnings from civil rights groups and legal analysts who could see what would come from defanging one of the most important laws in U.S. history.

He even ignored his colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who rightly pointed out the absurdity.

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” she wrote in dissent.

A decade later, it seems Roberts is getting the hint, which is likely why he has since led the Supreme Court in a couple of surprising rulings that will force changes in voting maps for Louisiana and Alabama after initially doubling down on his Shelby rationale.

There’s no doubt that Republican legislators in North Carolina and South Carolina felt emboldened over the past decade to roll back voting rights because of the Roberts court. It has fueled political extremism and undermined faith in our democracy because the GOP knew it didn’t have to persuade more people to believe in its views; all it had to do was rig the game.

This week’s ruling doesn’t undo that damage, but it does stop some of the bleeding. Had North Carolina Republicans gotten their way, the GOP could conjure up rules that in effect made my vote – and your vote – null and void if they didn’t like the choice we made, and we’d have little recourse to challenge them. And that scenario could have played itself out across the country.

But it doesn’t feel as though we should be celebrating, at least not too vigorously. There’s no reason to believe those who wanted to uproot our democracy for their own ends will give up those efforts just because the Supreme Court gave them a slap on the wrist. If they get their way, what was an equal playing field during the 2022 midterm elections could become a gerrymandered map that could transform the state “into one that reliably elects 11 Republicans and just 3 Democrats in every election for the rest of the decade no matter how well Democrats do — a skewed result wholly at odds with North Carolina’s purplish electoral politics,” according to the Brennan Center.

There’s no time to rest. The court saved us from the worst-case scenario. But much work remains.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach.