Supreme Court Rejects GOP Bid to Transform Federal Election Law

Greg Stohr
·5 min read
4
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

(Bloomberg) -- The US Supreme Court rejected a sweeping Republican-backed effort to oust state judges and administrators from longstanding roles in federal elections, resolving a key constitutional issue in advance of the 2024 vote.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Ruling 6-3 in North Carolina redistricting case, the high court turned aside GOP arguments that the Constitution gives state lawmakers near-exclusive power to set the rules for congressional and presidential votes.

The Constitution “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Chief Justice John Roberts said for the court. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Roberts and the court’s three liberals in the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Critics said the so-called independent state legislature theory would have had dire implications for democracy, depriving voters of crucial layers of protection, wreaking havoc on election administration and changing a centuries-old constitutional understanding. Allies of former President Donald Trump used the argument in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Dalton said the court rejected an “extreme legal theory” that “would have opened the door for politicians to undermine the will of the people and would have threatened the freedom of all Americans to have their voices heard at the ballot box.”

Elections Clause

The fight focused on the Constitution’s elections clause, which says the rules for congressional races “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” unless overridden by Congress. A similar provision governs the appointment of presidential electors.

North Carolina Republicans contended the provision meant state courts had little if any role to play in scrutinizing voting maps and other rules crafted by their legislatures for federal elections. In rejecting that argument, Roberts said it couldn’t be squared with the court’s precedents or historical practice.

Read More: What Gerrymandering Means and Why It’s Here to Stay: QuickTake

Roberts qualified the ruling by saying state judges don’t have “free rein” in election cases and “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”

Election-law experts said that language was likely to mean further legal fights, with litigants contending that state supreme courts have overstepped their authority.

But the bar for those lawsuits will be very high, said Cameron Kistler, a lawyer at the nonprofit interest group Protect Democracy. “We will see cases, but I think almost certainly unless something really screwy happens, they’re going to lose, a lot,” Kistler said.

Stable Rules

All told, the decision means next year’s election will be held under much more stable and predictable rules set by state laws passed in this year’s legislative sessions, said Matthew Weil, executive director of the democracy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“We didn’t need to have another election where the rules were basically changing right up until the vote, which would have been likely to happen,” he said. “This shuts the door on that.”

North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, who led the fight on behalf of the lawmakers, said it was important the US Supreme Court resolved the issue, even though his side lost.

“Ultimately, the question of the role of state courts in congressional redistricting needed to be settled and this decision has done just that,” Moore said in a statement on his website. “I am proud of the work we did to pursue this case to the nation’s highest court.”

In resolving the case, the justices brushed aside objections that it had become legally moot because of unusual developments in the lower courts.

The North Carolina Supreme Court originally ruled in 2022, striking GOP-drawn congressional districts as so partisan they violated the state constitution. The ruling tossed out a map that was designed to give Republicans the advantage in 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts. State courts then imposed a different map, which produced a 7-7 split in last year’s election.

But Republicans took control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in the same election, and the reconstituted panel reconsidered the issue and overruled the earlier decision. The second ruling meant state lawmakers would have a free hand to draw the districts for the 2024 election no matter what the US Supreme Court decided.

Some of the litigants, including the Biden administration, urged the court to dismiss the case. The dissenters agreed, with Thomas calling the matter “a straightforward case of mootness.”

Elections Clause

The key question was whether the elections clause refers only to a state’s elected legislative body or instead to its broader lawmaking system, a category that includes officials authorized to make election-related decisions, citizens voting on ballot initiatives and courts exercising their traditional power to review laws.

Roberts said the court didn’t need to resolve whether the North Carolina Supreme Court’s first decision misread state law to such an extent it violated the elections clause. He said the state lawmakers in the case “expressly disclaimed the argument that this court should reassess the North Carolina Supreme Court’s reading of state law.”

But Roberts emphatically rejected the contention that the elections clause lets state legislatures ignore their own constitutions when drawing maps or setting out voting rules.

“Our precedents have long rejected the view that legislative action under the elections clause is purely federal in character, governed only by restraints found in the federal Constitution,” he wrote.

The court “soundly rejected the entirely lawless notion that state legislatures don’t have to follow their own state constitutional restrictions when they regulate federal elections,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law who has written about the independent state legislature theory. “They have staved off an enormous amount of potential chaos that would have ensued if they had gone the other way.”

The case is Moore v. Harper, 21-1271.

--With assistance from Emily Birnbaum and Ryan Teague Beckwith.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.