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      Amazon and Google fund anti-abortion lawmakers through complex shell game

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      As North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban is due to come into effect on 1 July, an analysis from the non-profit Center for Political Accountability (CPA) shows several major corporations donated large sums to a Republican political organization which in turn funded groups working to elect anti-abortion state legislators.The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) received donations of tens of thousands of dollars each from corporations including Comcast, Intuit, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Bank of America and Google last year, the CPA’s analysis of IRS filings shows. The contributions were made in the months after Politico published a leaked supreme court decision indicating that the court would end the right to nationwide abortion access.Google contributed $45,000 to the RSLC after the leak of the draft decision, according to the CPA’s review of the tax filings. Others contributed even more in the months after the leak, including Amazon ($50,000), Intuit ($100,000) and Comcast ($147,000).Google, Amazon, Comcast, Wells Fargo and Bank of America did not respond to requests for comment. An Intuit spokesperson pointed out that the company also donates to Democratic political organizations, and that “our financial support does not indicate a full endorsement of every position taken by an individual policymaker or organization.“Intuit is non-partisan and works with policymakers and leaders from both sides of the aisle to advocate for our customers,” an Intuit spokesperson said in a statement. “We believe engagement with policymakers is essential to a robust democracy and political giving is just one of the many ways Intuit engages on behalf of its customers, employees, and the communities it serves.”A Bank of America spokesperson pointed to the company’s policy that donations to so-called 527 organizations such as the RSLC come with the caveat that they only be used for operational and administrative purposes, not to support any candidates or ballot initiatives. The CPA, meanwhile, argues that since the RSLC’s operations are explicitly designed to support candidates and ballot initiatives, such a policy is a distinction without a difference.Although these companies did not directly give these vast sums to North Carolina’s anti-abortion lawmakers, the CPA’s analysis is a case study in how corporate contributions to organizations such as the RSLC can end up being funneled into anti-abortion causes. When Republican state legislators successfully overturned a veto from the Democratic governor last month to pass the upcoming abortion ban, nine of lawmakers voting to overturn the veto had received campaign contributions from a group with links to the RSLC.The RSLC, which works to elect Republican lawmakers and promote rightwing policies at the state level, is at the top of a chain of spending and donations which eventually connected to rightwing candidates in North Carolina. This type of spending, which relies on channeling money through various third-party groups from larger organizations, is a common part of modern political campaign financing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn this case, the RSLC gave $5m to the Good Government Coalition political organization between June and November last year, which in turn gave $6.45m to the rightwing political group Citizens for a Better North Carolina. Finally, that organization gave $1m in independent expenditures to support nine anti-abortion state lawmakers who later voted to overturn the governor’s veto of the abortion bill.These donations are evidence that corporations are proving to be complicit in the broader movement to limit abortion rights, the CPA non-profit argues, even as many of these companies publicly tout women’s empowerment and employee access to healthcare.“Companies need to know where their money is ending up,” said Bruce Freed, the president of the CPA. “This should be a lesson – a lesson that they should have taken a while ago but that frankly is driven home right now with what has been happening in North Carolina.”Several of the companies, including Intuit and Bank of America, made statements last year offering to cover healthcare costs for employees who needed to travel out of state for medical procedures, in some cases explicitly mentioning abortion as an example. Google sent an email to employees acknowledging that Roe v Wade had been overturned and informed them about options for relocating to Google offices in different states.“Equity is extraordinarily important to us as a company, and we share concerns about the impact this ruling will have on people’s health, lives and careers,” the email stated.The companies which donated to the RSLC are also large donors to Democratic political groups, and tech giants such as Google and Amazon tend to spend millions each year more broadly on lobbying efforts.The RSLC, whose board members include former lawmakers, governors and White House advisers such as Karl Rove, boasts on its website that it spent more than $45m on supporting Republican candidates during the 2021 and 2022 election cycle.In addition to North Carolina’s abortion ban, South Carolina also passed a bill last week that would criminalize most abortions at six weeks into a pregnancy – generally a period before people know they are pregnant. A state judge issued a temporary halt on the ban within hours of Governor Henry McMaster signing it into law, and it will now be reviewed by the state supreme court.North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban is scheduled to go into effect on 1 July, drastically curtailing abortion access as many other southern states have passed near total bans. More

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      Fresh US abortion bans show Republicans trying to soften message

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      After repeated failed attempts to pass stricter bans, Republicans in some US states are changing their messaging, touting “common sense” abortion laws presented as more lenient than outright bans, but that are more restrictive than they seem when looked at in detail.Nebraska’s state legislature passed a 12-week ban on Friday, days after another 12-week ban cleared its final hurdle in North Carolina.Meanwhile, South Carolina’s senate will again weigh a six-week abortion ban that the legislature has repeatedly tried and failed to pass in previous weeks.In Nebraska, Republican lawmakers praised the ban as a compromise, but their Democratic colleagues did not see it that way. “This place is morally bankrupt,” said the Omaha state senator Machaela Cavanaugh. “I’m looking forward to 2025 when I no longer have to serve with many of you.” Cavanaugh filibustered for hundreds of hours in recent months in an attempt to stop the bill passed on Friday, an anti-trans measure to which the abortion ban was attached.Two weeks ago, a six-week ban was tanked in Nebraska, partly by one of its original co-sponsors – the Republican state senator Merve Riepe – who had come to think of it as too extreme, as many women do not yet realize they are pregnant at six weeks. Ahead of the earlier vote, which Riepe abstained from, he passed around a news article warning that abortion was hurting the Republican party, according to the Washington Post. Polling has consistently found that strong majorities of Americans oppose abortion bans.The Nebraska ban includes no exceptions for fetal anomalies or pregnancies incompatible with life and threatens doctors with jail time.Republicans in Nebraska’s technically non-partisan legislature (where each lawmaker nonetheless identifies either as Republican or Democrat) have painted the bill as a huge step down from the six-week ban.Nebraskans crowded the statehouse as the bill progressed on Wednesday, drowning out the lively debate on the house floor with angry chants and foot stomping. By the end of the night, lawmakers were forced to seek refuge, fleeing the capitol rotunda through a back tunnel flanked by police escorts in a bid to avoid angry protesters.With the legislative session about to end, lawmakers craftily advanced the ban by attaching it to a measure limiting gender-affirming care to transgender people.“You are willing to drive this state into the ground. You look ridiculous,” Cavanaugh, said on Wednesday, adding: “Women will die, children are dying, and you are responsible.”In North Carolina, the 12-week ban was passed on Wednesday, when Republican politicians overrode the Democratic governor’s veto. The fresh ban brings the current limit down from 20 weeks.Republicans described the bill as “pro-life plan, not an abortion ban”, as they passed it amid protestors chanting “shame” from inside the state legislature. But the bill will make it incredibly difficult to obtain an abortion in North Carolina, a state that has become somewhat of a safe haven for abortion in the increasingly restrictive Bible belt.Most notably, the bill limits the use of medication abortion – the most common US method of abortion – to 10 weeks of pregnancy, and requires three in-person visits to get pills or any other form of the procedure. Those restrictions will make it harder to get an abortion for those with uncompromising work schedules, those who can’t afford to pay for childcare and those traveling from out of state.Further worsening the effect of abortion bans on low-income people and women of color, it will also make people seeking abortions wait 72 hours between visits. It will require women to watch ultrasounds before they have an abortion, and to be warned about unfounded medical side-effects of abortion before having one.Strict licensing requirements written into the bill could also shutter a number of the state’s remaining 14 clinics, and oblige abortion providers to report details on people who have sought an abortion to the state department of health and human services.And in South Carolina on Wednesday, a six-week abortion ban finally progressed to the senate, after weeks of Republicans repeatedly trying and failing to move it forward. But even if it passes, it must be upheld by the state supreme court, which blocked a similar six-week ban earlier this year. (The composition of that supreme court has since changed – the judge who wrote the decision striking down the ban has been replaced by judge who GOP lawmakers hope will overturn it.) Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic women have repeatedly united in a filibuster to stop the bill from passing. They have said they plan to do so again.Some 900 amendments were affixed to the legislation – many by Democrats hoping to delay the passage of the bill. Some of those amendments included making the state liable for funeral costs of people who die after being denied an abortion, and making men liable for child support and the costs of half of all pregnancy expenses, starting from fertilization. More

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      How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t.

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      A North Carolina court, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that courts don’t have the ability to determine if a political map is legal, giving legislators a free pass.WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be.And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina.The North Carolina Supreme Court said that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. In addition, the justices said, any court-ordered standard “would embroil the judiciary in every local election in every county, city and district across the state.”The effect was to give the Republican-led legislature carte blanche to draw new maps for 2024 elections that lock in G.O.P. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.Under its current court-ordered map, North Carolina now elects seven Democrats and seven Republicans to the U.S. House. Maps drawn by the Republican legislature could mean 10 Republicans to four Democrats, or possibly 11 to three. Without judicial review, the only remedy is to vote the dominant party out using maps drawn to keep them in power.The 5-to-2 decision, which fell along party lines in a court led by Republicans, pointedly threw out a ruling by a Democrat-led court only a few months earlier that said such lines could — and should — be drawn. In that respect, the North Carolina ruling reinforced what seems to be a hardening partisan divide between jurists who believe unfair political maps should be policed and ones who do not.The U.S. Supreme Court also split along partisan lines in 2019 when it ruled 5 to 4, after decades of dithering, that it could not devise a legal standard to regulate partisan gerrymandering, though it suggested that state courts could.It is hard to separate party allegiance from jurists’ positions, said Paul M. Smith, the senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group that litigates voting rights issues.“One explanation would be that the courts decide cases about elections based on who will be helped,” he said. “On some days, I’m cynical enough to believe that.” Whether that consciously figures in court decisions, though, is less easy to say, he added.Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach.“The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of clear mathematical test, I respect the argument that judges’ political preferences might creep into the process.” Passing judgment on a legislature’s constitutional authority to set political boundaries can be a fraught exercise. In 1962, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, who had heard the historic redistricting case Baker v. Carr, suffered a nervous breakdown during the court’s deliberations and skipped the final vote.But some say that just because it is hard to create fair district lines does not mean it cannot be done.“I think that’s intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy,” Rebecca Szetela, a political independent and a member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, said in an interview. “We had a commission made up of 13 randomly selected voters of varying educational backgrounds, and somehow we were able to come up with fair standards.”The Michigan commissioners drew their first set of maps after the 2020 election, following orders not to give any party a “disproportionate advantage.” They relied on several statistical metrics to meet that standard. But overall, they decided that an acceptable range for the statewide ratio of votes to seats won would fall within five percentage points of their calculation of the state’s political preferences: 52 percent Democratic, 48 percent Republican.In practice, Ms Szetela said, the maps hewed closely to the calculated partisan divide. Still, some experts say that it is impossible to construct a standard that will be reliably fair. Daniel H. Lowenstein, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law, said that would-be regulators of partisan gerrymanders by and large know little of how politics really works. He said that he picked up such an education during the 1970s while working in the California Secretary of State office, and later while running the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says elections have to be fair,” he said, “and that’s a good thing, because different people all have different concepts of what it means to be fair.”Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale wrote a detailed analysis on the topic, “The Thickest Thicket,” in 1987. “I just don’t see any objective criteria that would be authoritative in assessing whether a gerrymander ought to be upheld or not,” he said. A few other state courts have set standards for partisan gerrymandering and applied them. Pennsylvania was the first state to strike down partisan gerrymanders in 2018, and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision last month stating that gerrymandered State Senate seats violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.Many voting rights advocates say the same computer-driven advances that enable today’s extreme gerrymanders also make it possible to easily spot them.In particular, software programs can now generate thousands and even millions of maps of hypothetical political districts, each with small variations in their borders. Using statistical measures, those maps can be compared to a map being contested to gauge their partisan slant.In actual court cases, the technique has shown that some gerrymandered maps produce more lopsided partisan outcomes than 99 percent and more of the hypothetical ones.Measures of partisanship have improved, as social scientists employed data analytics to tease out the partisan impact of map changes. One yardstick, called the efficiency gap, gauges how much the votes of one party are wasted when its voters are disproportionately packed into one district or carved up among several. Another, partisan bias, measures the effectiveness of a gerrymandered map by calculating how many seats the same map would give each party in a hypothetical election where voters were split 50-50. There are many others, and each has its shortcomings. For example, voters sort themselves geographically, with a lopsided share of Democrats packed in cities and Republicans in rural areas, for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan skulduggery. And some metrics are useful only in particular situations, such as in states where party support is closely divided.In a 2017 hearing in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called such metrics “sociological gobbledygook.” But if so, much of American jurisprudence carries the same label, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard University law professor who has been a leading advocate of standards to judge partisan gerrymanders.“In any voting rights case, people have to calculate racial polarization, which is a far more complex calculation than the efficiency gap,” he said. “You have to calculate the compactness of districts. You have to estimate voting patterns for minority voters and white voters.”“Tests involving some matter of degree are just ubiquitous in constitutional law,” he added, and nothing makes a partisan gerrymander case any different.Mr. Stephanopoulos and others also say that drawing a line between permissible and illegal political maps is not all that difficult. Courts make similar judgments in lawsuits claiming racial bias in redistricting, he noted. After the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964, judges quickly set a limit — 10 percent — on how much political districts could deviate from the new requirement to have substantially equal populations.Some gerrymandering yardsticks have already been suggested. For example, a political map might be assumed constitutional unless measures of partisanship uniformly argued against it. At that point, the body that drew the map would have to demonstrate another compelling reason for the way boundaries were drawn.Critics like Professor Lowenstein argue that any dividing line between unfair and fair maps will have an unwanted consequence: Every subsequent map may be drawn to extract as much partisan gain as possible, yet fall just short of the legal standard for rejection.“The ultimate question,” Professor Schuck said, “is how crude a fit should a court be willing to accept?”Then again, he pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court have answered that question: Future political maps, they have ruled, can be as crude as their makers want them to be.“Declining to apply a rule is still going to validate or invalidate what politicians have done,” he said. “There’s no total innocence, no virginity, as it were.” More

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      Fears grow in North Carolina as ultra-extreme Republican eyes governor’s mansion

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      To Mark Robinson, gay and transgender people are “filth”, homosexuality is an abominable sin, and the transgender movement is “demonic” and “full of the spirit of the antichrist”.Muslim Americans, meanwhile, are invaders, and Robinson is not afraid to dabble in antisemitism: in his mind an international cabal of Jewish financiers make up a modern-day “four horsemen of the apocalypse”, who rule the banks in “every single country”.Lots of people have offensive and conspiracy-minded beliefs. But not all of them are running, as Robinson is, to be governor of North Carolina.And to people who don’t share Robinson’s views, the problem is that it looks like he could win – furthering the Republican party’s years-long lunge to what was previously rightwing fringe politics.“Mark Robinson would be the most extreme gubernatorial candidate but also governor that we’ve ever seen in our history,” said Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic party.The risk Robinson would pose if elected in November 2024 – polling is scarce at this stage, but experts believe the race between Robinson and Josh Stein, his expected Democratic opponent, is a toss-up – is real. Republicans control both the state house and senate, and the GOP expanded its lead in last year’s elections.Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor whose tenure is forced term limits to come to an end in 2023, has vetoed 52 bills from becoming law in his six years in office, the Assembly reported, including laws that would have rolled back gun control and reduced abortion access.With a Republican in the governor’s office – particularly a governor like Robinson – there would be no one to hold back a wave of rightwing bills.“We have bills right now going through our general assembly to ban gender affirming care for trans youth. We have a ban against trans athletes or young people competing in sports right now. We have a lot of discriminatory, just persecuting our own citizens-type of legislation happening in our state,” Clayton said.“And Mark Robinson is only going to be the person who’s going to make that worse.”There was a time, not that long ago, when North Carolina was seen as a future Democratic state.Barack Obama won there, narrowly, in 2008, and Democrats giddily held their national convention there in 2012, with the hope they could triumph in North Carolina for years to come. It didn’t happen, and Republicans have won every presidential election since.Republicans have super-majorities in the state legislature, yet Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina university, said elections for state positions like governor have tended to be close.“North Carolina has been right on the razor’s edge between Democrat and Republican. We were the bluest red state in the country in 2020 – of all states that Trump won, his margin was among the smallest in North Carolina,” he said.“I think it is the definition of a purple state in that it’s right in the middle. What it has not done at the presidential level is to swing – so it is a purple state but not a swing state.”Taken in isolation, Robinson’s back story is compelling. One of 10 children who grew up poor in Greensboro, he was elected North Carolina’s lieutenant governor in 2020, becoming the first Black person to hold the position.A former furniture manufacturer who has been declared bankrupt three times, Robinson credits his political career to a moment in April 2018: “My life changed when I gave a speech to the Greensboro city council that went viral,” he writes on his website.That speech gave a flavor of what was to come.There had been more than 50 mass shootings between January and March 2018, according to the Gun Violence Archive, but Robinson used his speech to rail against stricter gun control laws, claiming: “We need to drop all this division we have going on here.”“When are you all going to start standing up for the majority. And here’s who the majority is. I’m the majority,” Robinson said.“I’m a law abiding citizen who’s never shot anyone, never committed a serious crime, never committed a felony. I’ve never done anything like that. But it seems like every time we have one of these shootings, nobody wants to blame… put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet. You want to put it at my feet.”Polls have shown that most North Carolinians support stricter gun control laws, but it hasn’t stopped Robinson crowing about the issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe spoke at the National Rifle Association’s Texas convention in May 2022 – the gun lobbying event was held days after 19 students and two adults were killed in a school shooting in the state. In another event that month Robinson told a crowd that he owns an AR-15 – the assault-style rifle used in a majority of recent mass shootings – “​​in case the government gets too big for its britches”.Guns are far from Robinson’s only passionate issue.Gay rights and trans rights – specifically, the idea that the groups should have fewer – have dominated his communications in the past. After the 2016 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Robinson wrote on Facebook that he would “pray for the souls” of those killed and wounded, but added: “However, homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin.”In June 2021, Robinson told a crowd at a Baptist church: “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” and two months later declared that the transgender movement “is demonic and is full of the spirit of the antichrist”.Robinson has also said Muslim-Americans are “invaders” who “refuse to assimilate to our ways while demanding respect they have not earned”, and responded: “That’s exactly right,” when it was put to him by a pastor that the Rothschild family of “international bankers that rule every single national or federal reserve-type style of central bank in every single country”.Since becoming lieutenant governor Robinson has been accused of hypocrisy over his admission that he paid for his now wife to have an abortion in 1989, given he supports banning the procedure from six weeks after fertilization, but little seems to have dented his popularity – he is firmly the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.Robinson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but in the days following his 2020 election to lieutenant governor, Robinson declined to distance himself from several of his past remarks, which also include claiming Obama is an “anti-American atheist” and suggesting “half of black Democrats don’t realize they are slaves”.“He’s cut right out of the Trump mold, in that he is rhetorically extreme,” Cooper said.“He has a penchant for making extreme, bombastic and offensive statements, particularly about the LGBTQ community. He’s a candidate who is very comfortable in the culture wars and stoking the flames of the culture wars.”Given his history, and the looming threat of what he might do in office, Clayton said a victory for Robinson could have ramifications similar to those North Carolina experienced in 2016.Back then businesses, performers and even the National Basketball Association ditched the state after it passed a law which banned transgender people from using the public bathrooms that match their gender identities.If Robinson wins the Republican primary – which is “bordering on a certainty”, Cooper said – it could potentially cause problems for the Republican party at large, highlighting the extreme anti-LGBTQ views that lurk within the GOP.“He’s a risky candidate in a lot of ways,” Cooper said.“He will have ramifications up and down the ballot. But he’ll also motivate some voters, much like Trump motivated Republicans and Democrats, Mark Robinson’s going to do the same.” More

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      North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

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      When it had a Democratic majority last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.Such political jockeying once was limited mostly to confirmation fights over seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. But as the nation’s partisan divide has deepened, and the federal courts have offloaded questions about issues like abortion and affirmative action to the states, choosing who will decide state legal battles has increasingly become an openly political fight.The new Republican majority of justices said the North Carolina Supreme Court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the General Assembly had drawn.“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the majority. “Were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”Justice Newby said that Democrats who led the previous court had claimed to have developed a standard for deciding when a political map was overly partisan, but that it was “riddled with policy choices” and overstepped the State Constitution’s grant of redistricting powers to the legislature.Legal scholars said the ruling also seemed likely to derail a potentially momentous case now before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the same maps. In that case, Moore v. Harper, leaders of the Republican-run legislature have argued that the U.S. Constitution gives state lawmakers the sole authority to set rules for state elections and political maps, and that state courts have no role in overseeing them.Now that the North Carolina Supreme Court has sided with the legislature and thrown out its predecessor’s ruling, there appears to be no dispute for the federal justices to decide, the scholars said.The ruling drew a furious dissent from one of the elected Democratic justices, Anita S. Earls, who said that it was pervaded by “lawlessness.” She accused the majority of making specious legal arguments, and at times using misleading statistics, to make a false case that partisan gerrymandering was beyond its jurisdiction.“The majority ignores the uncontested truths about the intentions behind partisan gerrymandering and erects an unconvincing facade that only parrots democratic values in an attempt to defend its decision, ” she wrote. “These efforts to downplay the practice do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted.”Some legal experts said the ruling underscored a trend in state courts that elect their justices, in which decisions in politically charged cases increasingly align with the ideological views of whichever party holds the majority on the court, sometimes regardless of legal precedent.“If you think the earlier State Supreme Court was wrong, we have mechanisms to change that, like a constitutional amendment,” Joshua A. Douglas, a scholar on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said in an interview. “But changing judges shouldn’t cause such a sea change in the rule of law, because if that’s the case, precedent has no value any longer, and judges really are politicians.”The state court also handed down two more rulings in politically charged cases, overturning decisions that favored voting-rights advocates and their Democratic supporters.In the first, the justices reconsidered and reversed a ruling by the previous court, again along party lines, that a voter ID law passed by the Republican majority in the legislature violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution.In the second, the justices said a lower court “misapplied the law and overlooked facts crucial to its ruling” when it struck down a state law denying voting rights to people who had completed prison sentences on felony charges but were not yet released from parole, probation or other court restrictions.The lower court had said that the state law was rooted in an earlier law written to deny voting rights to African Americans, a conclusion that the Supreme Court justices said was mistaken.The new ruling undid a decision that had restored voting rights to more than 55,000 North Carolinians who had completed prison sentences. Those rights are now revoked, lawyers said, although the status of former felons who had already registered or voted under the previous ruling appeared unclear.The ruling on Friday in the gerrymander case, now known as Harper v. Hall, came after partisan elections for two Supreme Court seats in November shifted the seven-member court’s political balance to 5-to-2 Republican, from 4-to-3 Democratic.The Democratic-controlled court ruled along party lines in February 2022 that both the state legislative maps and the congressional district maps approved by the Republican legislature violated the State Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, free elections, free assembly and equal protection.A lower court later redrew the congressional map to be used in the November elections, but a dispute over the State Senate map, which G.O.P. leaders had redrawn, bubbled back to the State Supreme Court last winter. In one of its last acts, the Democratic majority on the court threw out the G.O.P.’s State Senate map, ordering that it be redrawn again. The court then reaffirmed its earlier order in a lengthy opinion.Ordinarily, that might have ended the matter. But after the new Republican majority was elected to the court, G.O.P. legislative leaders demanded that the justices rehear not just the argument over the redrawn Senate map, but the entire case.The ruling on Friday came after a brief re-argument of the gerrymander case in mid-March.North Carolina voters are almost evenly split between the two major parties; Donald J. Trump carried the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote. But the original map of congressional districts approved by the G.O.P. legislature in 2021, and later ruled to be a partisan gerrymander, would probably have given Republicans at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Using a congressional map drawn last year by a court-appointed special master, the November election delivered seven congressional seats to each party. With the decision on Friday, the G.O.P. legislature is likely to approve a new map along the lines of its first one, giving state Republicans — and the slender Republican majority in the U.S. House — the opportunity to capture at least three more seats. More

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      The ‘Diploma Divide’ Is the New Fault Line in American Politics

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      The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will ebb and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear.Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least one major political realignment: educational attainment is the new fault line in American politics.Educational attainment has not replaced race in that respect, but it is increasingly the best predictor of how Americans will vote, and for whom. It has shaped the political landscape and where the 2024 presidential election almost certainly will be decided. To understand American politics, candidates and voters alike will need to understand this new fundamental.Americans have always viewed education as a key to opportunity, but few predicted the critical role it has come to play in our politics. What makes the “diploma divide,” as it is often called, so fundamental to our politics is how it has been sorting Americans into the Democratic and Republican Parties by educational attainment. College-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees — especially white Americans, but increasingly others as well — are now more likely to support Republicans.It’s both economics and cultureThe impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.The road to political realignmentThe diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.In 2024, Democrats are likely to enter the general election with 222 electoral votes, compared with 219 for Republicans. That leaves only eight states, with 97 electoral votes — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — up for grabs. And for these states, education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.The 2024 mapA presidential candidate will need a three-track strategy to carry these states in 2024. The first goal is to further exploit the trend of education levels driving how people vote. Democrats have been making significant inroads with disaffected Republicans, given much of the party base’s continued embrace of Mr. Trump and his backward-looking grievances, as well as a shift to the hard right on social issues — foremost on abortion. This is particularly true with college-educated Republican women.In this era of straight-party voting, it is notable that Democrats racked up double-digit percentages from Republicans in the 2022 Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania governors’ races. They also made significant inroads with these voters in the Senate races in Arizona (13 percent), Pennsylvania (8 percent), Nevada (7 percent) and Georgia (6 percent).This represents a large and growing pool of voters. In a recent NBC poll, over 30 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they were not supporters of MAGA.At the same time, Republicans have continued to increase their support with non-college-educated voters of color. Between 2012 and 2020, support for Democrats from nonwhite-working-class voters dropped 18 points. The 2022 Associated Press VoteCast exit polls indicated that support for Democrats dropped an additional 14 points compared with the 2020 results.However, since these battleground states largely fall in the middle of education levels in our country, they haven’t followed the same trends as the other 42 states. So there are limits to relying on the education profile of voters to carry these states.This is where the second group of voters comes in: political independents, who were carried by the winning party in the last four election cycles. Following Mr. Trump’s narrow victory with independent voters in 2016, Mr. Biden carried them by nine points in 2020. In 2018, when Democrats took back the House, they carried them by 15 points, and their narrow two-point margin in 2022 enabled them to hold the Senate.The importance of the independent voting bloc continues to rise. This is particularly significant since the margin of victory in these battleground states has been very narrow in recent elections. The 2022 exit polls showed that over 30 percent of voters were independents, the highest percentage since 1980. In Arizona, 40 percent of voters in 2022 considered themselves political independents.These independent voters tend to live disproportionately in suburbs, which are now the most diverse socioeconomic areas in our country. These suburban voters are the third component of a winning strategy. With cities increasingly controlled by Democrats — because of the high level of educated voters there — and Republicans maintaining their dominance in rural areas with large numbers of non-college voters, the suburbs are the last battleground in American politics.Voting in the suburbs has been decisive in determining the outcome of the last two presidential elections: Voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Phoenix determined the winner in the last two presidential elections and are likely to play the same pivotal role in 2024.These voters moved to the suburbs for a higher quality of life: affordable housing, safe streets and good schools. These are the issues that animate these voters, who have a negative view of both parties. They do not embrace a MAGA-driven Republican Party, but they also do not trust Mr. Biden and Democrats, and consider them to be culturally extreme big spenders who aren’t focused enough on issues like immigration and crime.So in addition to education levels, these other factors will have a big impact on the election. The party that can capture the pivotal group of voters in the suburbs of battleground states is likely to prevail. Democrats’ success in the suburbs in recent elections suggests an advantage, but it is not necessarily enduring. Based on post-midterm exit polls from these areas, voters have often voted against a party or candidate — especially Mr. Trump — rather than for one.But in part because of the emergence of the diploma divide, there is an opening for both political parties in 2024 if they are willing to gear their agenda and policies beyond their political base. The party that does that is likely to win the White House.Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and is a senior adviser to the Brunswick Group.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself in gerrymandering case

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      The North Carolina supreme court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a major gerrymandering case that could have significant implications for US voting rights.In a highly unusual move, the North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself and get rid of congressional and state legislative districts it approved last year. The GOP-drawn map that was struck down could have produced a 11-3 advantage for Republicans in the congressional delegation. The one that replaced it was far less advantageous to the GOP and wound up producing a 7-7 split in the 2022 midterm elections. The court’s decision would likely allow Republicans to get a more advantageous map back in place.Demonstrators gathered outside the state supreme court in Raleigh on Tuesday as the justices heard oral arguments in the case, Harper v Hall. Much of the back-and-forth at the hearing focused on whether there were metrics the court could use to measure partisan gerrymandering. Phil Strach, a lawyer for the legislature, argued that because there were no clear metrics, it was not something the court could regulate.Anita Earls, a Democrat on the court, pushed Strach to explain whether that meant the legislature could essentially do whatever it wants when it comes to drawing districts. If the state legislature were to adopt a rule that explicitly said any congressional plan had to result in an 11-3 advantage for Republicans, she asked, could the state supreme court do anything to stop it? Strach suggested it could not.“Some things, your honor, are beyond the power of this court,” he said.Lali Madduri, a lawyer representing those challenging the map, accused lawmakers of playing a “cynical game, hoping that this newly constituted court will reverse course and abdicate its fundamental duty of judicial review”. Sam Hirsch, another lawyer for the challengers, said that an effort to impose new legislative districts could be unconstitutional since North Carolina’s constitution prohibits mid-decade redistricting for the state general assembly.Republicans won control of the North Carolina supreme court last fall and the new 5-2 GOP majority granted a request from the legislature to reconsider its redistricting ruling last month. The court had only granted similar requests twice before in the last 30 years. US courts do not typically grant requests to overrule their own rulings absent a major change in the case. The only thing that changed in the North Carolina case was the makeup of the court, Earls wrote in a searing dissenting opinion earlier this year.“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,” she wrote. “I write to make clear that the emperor has no clothes.”That rehearing decision could have reverberations at the US supreme court, which is separately considering the case and could issue a decision that could upend US election law.In December, lawyers for the legislature asked the justices to overrule the state court and endorse a fringe legal theory that would prohibit state courts from policing the drawing of congressional districts and other federal election rules. Such a ruling from the US supreme court would upend US election law, removing state courts from policing federal elections. Earlier this month, the US supreme court asked for briefing on how the decision to rehear the case in North Carolina affected its own authority to issue a ruling.In addition to the redistricting case, the North Carolina supreme court is also set this week to rehear a previous decision striking down the state’s voter ID law. More

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      in Elections

      Anti-Gay? Anti-Science? Antisemitic? Run for Governor of North Carolina!

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      The 2024 governor’s race in North Carolina just got underway. You care.Not because this state is the nation’s ninth most populous, though that’s reason enough. But because what happens here is a referendum on how low Republicans will sink and how far they can nonetheless get.Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina announced his candidacy last week. At present he’s the likeliest Democratic nominee. He’s a mostly conventional choice, with a long résumé of public service and unremarkable politics. I say “mostly” because he’s in one way a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Jewish governor.The likeliest Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is also a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Black governor. But that’s the beginning, middle and end of anything forward-looking and progress-minded about him, and he’s extremism incarnate: gun-loving, gay-hating and primed for conspiracy theories, with a garnish of antisemitism to round out the plate.Robinson hasn’t formally declared a bid, and he could face and be foiled by a primary challenge from a less provocative rival. But as Tim Funk noted in an article in The Assembly about Robinson’s flamboyantly combative speeches during Sunday worship services across the state, he was recently introduced in Charlotte as “the next governor of North Carolina.”Heaven forbid. His election would almost certainly retard the state’s economic dynamism by repelling the sorts of companies and educated young workers attracted to it during the six years that Gov. Roy Cooper, a moderate Democrat who cannot run for another term, has been in office.And if 2024 smiles on Republicans, Robinson could indeed emerge victorious. Both of the state’s senators are Republicans; the newer one, Ted Budd, beat his Democratic opponent, Cheri Beasley, by more than three percentage points in November. In two other statewide elections that month, for seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court, Republicans also prevailed. And Stein’s re-election as attorney general in 2020 was a squeaker. He won by just two-tenths of 1 percent.He came out of the gate last week focusing as much on the brief against Robinson as on the case for himself, making clear that a Stein vs. Robinson race would in large measure hinge on the question of how much bigotry and divisiveness Republican and independent voters in North Carolina are willing to endorse, indulge or be persuaded to overlook. Given what a national mirror this state is, the answer will have relevance and resonance far beyond it.We’re approaching a crossroads in North Carolina, my home for the past 18 months, and I can already feel the anxiety rising, including my own.Funk captured Robinson well in that Assembly article: “In the Gospel According to Mark Robinson, the United States is a Christian nation, guns are part of God’s plan, abortion is murder, climate change is ‘Godless … junk science,’ and the righteous, especially men, should follow the example of the Jesus who cleansed the temple armed with a whip, and told his disciples to make sure they packed a sword.”Robinson’s religion is indeed the whipping, slashing kind. It mingles cruelty and snark. When Paul Pelosi was assaulted in his home by a hammer-wielding intruder, Robinson didn’t offer prayers for his recovery. He expressed doubt that Pelosi was an innocent victim — and mocked him.He has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and to the transgender rights movement as “demonic.” He’s preoccupied with the devil, whose hand he saw in the movie “Black Panther,” which was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist,” he railed in a Facebook post that could have used some copy-editing.His whole persona could use some copy-editing. It’s all exclamation points.But that’s his power, too. “Mark Robinson is extremely popular with the Republican base and the Republican rank and file,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. (He has no relation to Roy.) “The reality is that he’s a compelling speaker. And just as many Republicans thought that Donald Trump went too far but at the same time were happy he gave the finger to ‘the establishment,’ Mark Robinson has many of the same advantages.”Another factor that could work perversely in his favor: He wasn’t in politics before his current stint as lieutenant governor, a position that doesn’t require him to take votes or issue vetoes or anything like that. “So his profile is self-created,” Cooper said. He can tweak his stances or outright change his script without any actual record, at least beyond his many wild statements, to contradict him.But Mac McCorkle, a longtime Democratic strategist who is now a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy (where I also teach), said that while North Carolinians have elected their share of firebrands like Robinson to Congress, they have made different choices for the very different job of governor, who guides the day-to-day functioning of the state.“Do people want somebody prosecuting the culture wars when there’s a hurricane?” McCorkle asked. He’s inclined to think not. “We haven’t had a shouter as governor, well, ever.”But then we hadn’t had a spectacle like the far-right rebellion against the ascent of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in at least a century and a half. We hadn’t had a House speaker coddle the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene until Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican Party has gone off the rails but keeps hurtling forward, damage be damned. We’d be foolish in North Carolina to trust that we won’t be part of the wreckage.For the Love of SentencesAndy MurrayAsanka Brendon Ratnayake/Associated PressRepresentative Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, reacted on Twitter to one of the assignments given to a new House Republican from New York: “I’m thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal — the top prize in Mathematics — for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers.” (Thanks to Caryl Baron of Manhattan and Norma Johnson of Northampton, Mass., among others, for nominating this.)In an obituary for David Crosby in The Los Angeles Times, Steve Chawkins wrote that many of Crosby’s finest songs from the 1960s and 1970s were, half a century later, still “stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare.” (John Russial, Eugene, Ore., and Lee Margulies, Ventura, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Peter C. Baker revisited the classic children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” by Judith Viorst: “‘I went to sleep with gum in my mouth,’ the book begins, and that would be a good opening sentence on its own — Kafka with a splash of David Sedaris — but from there it careens forward, one clause tripping into the next, undisciplined by anything so polite as a comma.” (Liz Lesnick, Manhattan)In The Washington City Paper, Noah Gittell noted that “The Son,” which is the writer and director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to his 2020 movie “The Father,” “is not the sequel its title implies, nor is it the second film in a trilogy that concludes with ‘The Holy Ghost.’” (Randolph Richardson, Southbury, Conn.)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay marveled at the stamina of the Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, whose spirited play in a recent match seemed to surprise his younger opponent: “Murray looked like he was running around a cottage, trying to close the windows amid a thunderstorm.” (Steve Garvey, Monroe Township, N.J.)In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson described the importance of a journalist’s inquisitiveness: “Explaining complex ideas in simple terms requires pulling myself out of a pit of ignorance using the rope of other people’s expertise.” (Bernie Cosell, Pearisburg, Va. )In The Times, Pete Wells noted that a plate of fried fish at the restaurant Masalawala & Sons “comes with a small dish of kasundi, a condiment that starts with freshly ground mustard. American yellow mustard has the same relationship to kasundi that a butter knife has to a chain saw.” (Karlis Streips, Riga, Latvia)Also in The Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom reflected on reactions to a TikTok stitch of hers: “I knew a lot of the anger had to do with my critics being Extremely Online, a condition where social media compels us to read thinly, strip out all context and get to the part where we can be insulted as efficiently as possible.” (Bronwyn Alfred, Worcester, Mass., and Paul Spitz, Cincinnati)And Maureen Dowd sat down with Nancy Pelosi, who is no longer the speaker of the House: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.” (Gloriana Roig, Manhattan, and Faith Delaney, Emerald Isle, N.C., among many others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, put “Sentences” in the subject line and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Watching and DoingThandiwe Newton in “God’s Country”IFC FilmsI learned a new word the other day. More than a word, really. A role. A job. “Spokescandy.” That’s, um, a candy that speaks for its whole class of candies. The way a press aide speaks for a politician, only fattening. And if you’re scratching your head, well, get ready to scratch harder when you read this very amusing and very depressing article by Daniel Victor on M&M’s, footwear, Tucker Carlson and Maya Rudolph. It falls squarely into the robust category of contemporary American life as a satire of itself.In this charming take on the queues of New York in The Times, Dodai Stewart noted that the city that never sleeps “often stops in its tracks.”It’s never a mistake to follow the Washington Post critic Robin Givhan to the intersection of politics and fashion, and she spends some time there in this glance at the crew necks of George Santos.After Academy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, Oscar analysts noted that the best actress field omitted two Black women who were thought to be in contention: Danielle Deadwyler, who starred in “Till,” and Viola Davis (“The Woman King”). I want to mention a third Black woman who never even generated significant award-season buzz, but should have: Thandiwe Newton. Her performance in “God’s Country” as a college professor at violent odds with two white hunters who trespass on her land is heartbreaking, even if the movie itself goes curiously slack for stretches when it should be gathering in intensity. It’s streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.In advance of the Tuesday, Feb. 7, release of the paperback edition of my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” I did an interview with Preet Bharara for his excellent podcast, “Stay Tuned With Preet.” You can listen here. Our discussion ranged far and wide, taking in politics, restaurants and more. On Saturday, Feb. 11, I’ll be at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village, near my Chapel Hill, N.C., home, for a discussion centered on the book. Here are the event details.On a Personal Note (Odd Neighborhood Names)Rattanachai Mok-Ngam/EyeEm, via Getty ImagesWow. In my item last week about the absurd appellation of my North Carolina neighborhood (the Highlands), I invited you to send me any oddly named enclaves and streets around you. And more than 550 of you did. Thank you!It’s going to take me a while to read through all of those emails, so what follows is the fruit of just a smattering of them. But as I work through as many of the rest as possible, I’ll occasionally write and publish brief addenda to this dispatch.Before today’s amusing collection, a serious thought, or rather question, that several of you, including Karen Akerhielm of Greenville, S.C., raised. “Why do so many towns in the South have neighborhoods that still contain the word ‘plantation’?” she asked, noting that in Greenville, “there is Kilgore Plantation (a very upscale residential neighborhood) as well as Plantations at Haywood and Stoneledge Plantation (both apartment complexes). I’m sure they’re trying to evoke the idea of Southern mansions and warm hospitality, but how can you use the word plantation without making people think about slavery?”I don’t think you can. Renaming is in order. And it’s occurring, as this 2020 article in The Washington Post and this NPR report from the same year explain. It can’t happen fast enough.And there are many, many other names available. Your emails made that charmingly clear.Karen Baierl of South Bend, Ind., remembered that her parents once resided in a suburban Milwaukee subdivision called Parc du Chateau. “They lived on La Fontaine Court and some of the other streets in the subdivision are Marseille Drive, Colline Vue Boulevard, La Rochelle Court, and Le Chateau Drive. This is a subdivision in the middle of the Midwest, truly one of the least French spots in the country.”Beth Gianturco of Williamsville, N.Y., marveled at how seriously a neighborhood in the Buffalo suburbs near her takes the first two syllables of its name. Royalwoods comprises Viscount Drive, Dauphin Drive, Infanta Drive, Contessa Court, Rana Court, Pasha Court and Pharaohs Court.Brian Hood of Seattle wrote: “I was once a construction worker and helped build a housing development with the name Boulevard Lane. It struck me as so absurd at the time and still does. ‘Wide Grand Street Narrow Alley’?”To continue this oxymoronic streak, Steven Cobb of Salisbury, N.C., noted that a street near his former home in Louisville, Ky., was called Wooded Meadow Way. “To my thinking, it’s either woods or a meadow — it can’t be both.” On a visit to Melbourne, Fla., he spotted the Turtle Run neighborhood. “Because it’s near the ocean, ‘turtle’ is appropriate,” he wrote. “But I never saw one do more than crawl, even to get across the busy road in front of the subdivision.”And for a segue in the spirit of the tortoise and the hare, Edward Jeremy Hutton of Harpers Ferry, W.Va., remarked on the bunny love of the Briar Run development in nearby Ranson, W.Va., with streets named Peter Rabbit Drive, Cotton Tail Drive, Cottontail Court, Fuzzy Trail Drive, Whiskers Way, Thumper Drive, Jack Rabbit Lane, Bugs Court, Velveteen Court, Trix Court, Flopsy Court and Mopsy Court. Hippety, hoppety, someone got carried away. More