North Carolina

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself in gerrymandering case

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Mark Meadows Won’t Face Voting Fraud Charges in North Carolina

      by

      The state attorney general said there was “not sufficient evidence” to bring charges against Mr. Meadows or his wife, Debra Meadows.Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, will not face voter fraud charges after officials determined that he did not fraudulently register to vote and cast a ballot in North Carolina during the 2020 presidential election, the state attorney general said on Friday.The attorney general, Josh Stein, said there was “not sufficient evidence” to bring charges against Mr. Meadows or his wife, Debra Meadows.The State Bureau of Investigation conducted the investigation and found that because Mr. Meadows was “engaged in public service” in Washington, he was qualified for a residency exception, officials said. Under North Carolina law, if a person moves to Washington or other federal territories for government service, then the individual will not lose residency status in the state.The couple also signed a yearlong lease, which was provided by their landlord, for a Scaly Mountain, N.C., residence listed on their voting registration, prosecutors said, and cellphone records showed Mrs. Meadows was in the area in October 2020.Mr. Meadows was a North Carolina member of Congress until March 2020, when he went to work in the White House. Then, six weeks before the 2020 election, the couple registered to vote using the address of a modest, three-bedroom mobile home with a rusted roof in Scaly Mountain.Law enforcement officials in Macon County, a rural community in the mountains of western North Carolina, became aware of questions surrounding Mr. Meadows’s voter registration in early March after The New Yorker revealed that he had registered to vote at a residence where he did not live.The North Carolina Department of Justice then asked the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate if any laws were broken.Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.“My office has concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt against either Mr. or Mrs. Meadows, so my office will not prosecute this case,” Mr. Stein said in a statement. “If further information relevant to the allegations of voter fraud comes to light in any subsequent investigation or prosecution by authorities in other jurisdictions, we reserve the right to reopen this matter.”Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Mr. Meadows, declined to comment on Friday.Despite cases of voter fraud being rare, Mr. Meadows has been one of the primary speakers boosting former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud both before and after the 2020 election.During an August 2020 interview on CNN, Mr. Meadows warned of fraud in voting by mail and said people are able to register to vote in multiple places at once, leading to fraud. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting law

      by

      Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting lawGroups submitting amicus briefs to supreme court case in support of Republican lawmakers received $90m in anonymous donations Conservative donors poured tens of millions of dollars of anonymous “dark money” into groups supporting Republican lawmakers in a supreme court case that could upend American election law.The donors backed several groups that have filed supreme court amicus briefs in support of North Carolina legislators in Moore v Harper, according to a recent analysis. They are pushing for a ruling that would take ultimate decisions about voting rights and congressional gerrymandering away from state courts and hand those powers to state legislatures, of which Republicans now control the majority.Could the US supreme court give state legislatures unchecked election powers? Read moreEight conservative groups that submitted amicus briefs in the supreme court case have received close to $90m from dark money donors since 2016, according to Accountable.US, a liberal leaning watchdog group that tracks government corruption.Several of these conservative bastions are also champions of restrictive voting laws.Conservatives want the supreme court to adopt the independent state legislature theory, a once fringe idea now promoted by a coterie of conservative groups that filed amicus briefs, including the Honest Elections Project, the Claremont Institute, and the Public Interest Legal Foundation. The groups boast strong ties to rightwing lawyers Leonard Leo, John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell respectively. Eastman and Mitchell were allies in Donald Trump’s baseless crusade to overturn the 2020 election.Sparked by a North Carolina gerrymandering fight, Moore v Harper has attracted strong opposition from many liberal and some conservative legal experts, who call it a partisan attack on voting rights by prominent conservative groups. Opponents of the case say they’re using a discredited legal theory to boost GOP political fortunes in coming elections.The leading dark money financier of the conservative groups that filed amicus briefs was DonorsTrust, which contributed a whopping $70.5m, Accountable data shows.Other top dark money donors to groups that filed amicus briefs include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and America First Works, which, respectively, gave $6.1m and $4.8m to outfits that supported the independent state legislature theory. The long time conservative Bradley Foundation boasts Mitchell on its board, while the non-profit America First Works has been allied with Trump since its founding in 2016 under another name.The dark money routed to some of these groups took circuitous routes. For instance, America First Works gave $4.8m to DonorsTrust that was earmarked for the Honest Elections Project, according to Accountable.The Honest Elections Project, which has been a leading advocate for tougher voting laws in recent years, was founded by Leo, a legendary fundraiser, lawyer and co-chairman of the powerful Federalist Society. Leo was instrumental in advising Trump on his three conservative supreme court nominees.DonorsTrust, known as the ATM of the right, has been very generous with other projects Leo has helped spearhead. In 2021, for example, Leo’s 85 Fund – a dark money conduit for conservative legal campaigns and other priorities – received its largest single grant of $17.1m from DonorsTrust, which doled out close to $190m that year.US supreme court hears case that could radically reshape electionsRead moreCritics of the right’s drive to push the independent state legislature theory note the strong influence of well-financed conservative groups along with several like-minded justices.“The ISLT [independent state legislature theory] has been fueled by several conservative justices’ dissents, and other statements, coupled with amicus briefs and public arguments supporting the theory from think tanks, litigation shops, and partisan political organizations,” Thomas Wolf, the deputy director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian.Two key Democrats in Congress, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, submitted an amicus brief arguing forcefully against the independent state legislature theory, highlighting the role of conservative groups funded by dark money who have supported voter suppression efforts.“Many of the petitioners’ amici actually attempted to undermine the 2020 election by relying on this theory,” Whitehouse and Johnson wrote. “Other amici share connections with groups and individuals who played a role in those attempts. Still others are presently engaged in voter-suppression and election-subversion efforts.“Rarely has such a noxious assemblage of amici appeared before this court, and their secrecy about their funders and connections does this court a grave disservice,” they added.The high stakes for democracy behind Moore v Harper and other recent supreme court cases involving dark money funded groups trouble Whitehouse, he said.In tandem with Johnson, Whitehouse has introduced legislation that would require amicus filers to disclose funders who donated $100,000, or more than 3% of their gross revenues.In an interview, Whitehouse said his proposed bill coincides with other efforts he has made to have the supreme court change its reporting rules for amicus filers backed by dark money.“I’ve been pushing the supreme court to update their reporting requirements,” he said about the dark money behind several high-stakes cases, but to date the court has “shown no interest”.The independent state legislature theory played a key role in Trump’s failed crusade to get states to invalidate the 2020 election results and was the handiwork of Eastman, who filed the amicus brief for the Claremont Institute, a conservative California based thinktank, that made a similar argument.Eastman’s involvement with Trump’s baseless drive to overturn the 2020 election results, which included promoting an alternative elector scheme to block Congress certifying Joe Biden’s as president, could lead the January 6 panel investigating the Capitol insurrection to file a criminal referral to the justice department for him, as well as Trump and others, according to a recent CNN report.On a related legal front, Eastman’s refusal to turn over 101 documents to the House panel led federal judge David Carter to rule this year that there was substantial evidence Eastman had conspired with Trump to block Congress from certifying the 2020 election results. The “illegality of the plan was obvious”, Carter wrote.Just how much the amicus briefs from Claremont and other conservative outfits backed by dark money will influence the supreme court’s ruling on the independent state legislature theory is hard to discern.Oral arguments in Moore v Harper were heard by the supreme court on 7 December. The court’s three liberal-leaning justices expressed their strong opposition to North Carolina lawmakers’ position, and some conservative justices including Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh also indicated their skepticism about some maximalist versions of the theory.Billions in ‘dark money’ is influencing US politics. We need disclosure laws | David Sirota and Joel WarnerRead moreThe genesis of the Moore v Harper case was a ruling by the North Carolina state supreme court in early 2022 that invalidated districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature on the grounds they were an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander”, unfairly favoring the GOP.North Carolina legislator Timothy Moore appealed the state supreme court ruling, and a voter named Rebecca Harper was a named plaintiff in a challenge to the state’s gerrymandered maps.Significantly, North Carolina is one of six states where state courts have ruled in recent years that partisan redistricting plans for Congress violated state constitutions.Moore v Harper has also sparked significant legal blowback from some prominent lawyers with conservative pedigrees including J Michael Luttig, a former appeals court judge who is a co-counsel for litigants opposing the independent state legislature theory.“This case swarms with amicus briefs supporting petitioners that elide a salient fact: the doctrine they encourage this Court to adopt – the ‘independent state legislature’ theory – is one of the fringe legal theories deployed in a failed legal plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,” Whitehouse and Johnson wrote in their brief.TopicsUS supreme courtThe fight for democracyUS political financingUS politicsRepublicansLaw (US)North CarolinanewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      The Election Is Over. Now Comes the Battle for Voting Rights in 2024

      by

      Voters rebuffed the most aggressive efforts to weaken democracy in the midterms. But battles over election districts and ballot restrictions that could prove crucial in 2024 have already resumed.WASHINGTON — With Raphael Warnock’s victory in the Georgia Senate race on Tuesday, the major midterm elections are over.But the battles over voting rules, restrictions and political boundaries that will help determine who wins the next ones barely paused for ballot-counting before resuming in force.Indeed, the day after Mr. Warnock’s election, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potentially seismic case brought by Republicans in North Carolina that could give state legislatures significantly expanded power over election laws — and virtually unlimited authority to draw gerrymandered maps.The landscape is familiar. Democrats who took control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota are preparing legislation to to broaden voting access, including measures in Michigan that would mandate absentee ballot drop boxes.Republicans, who control a majority of legislatures across the country, are proposing new restrictive legislation they say would combat election fraud, though it remains exceedingly rare. And though both parties have benefited from gerrymanders, Republicans are far more likely to make it a centerpiece of their electoral strategy.In the Ohio Legislature, Republicans are poised to pass bills that would stiffen the ID requirement for casting a ballot, limit the use of drop boxes and end automatic mailings of absentee-ballot applications to voters.In North Carolina, a Republican sweep of state Supreme Court races last month makes it likely that the State Legislature will be able to gerrymander existing nonpartisan maps of congressional and legislative districts before the 2024 elections.In Wisconsin, both parties are girding for an April election that will determine partisan control of the state’s already politicized Supreme Court — and either open or shut the door on a legal challenge to an impregnable Republican gerrymander of the State Legislature.Some of that jockeying for power always goes on beneath the radar of most voters. But in the wake of more direct attacks on democracy by insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol and by election deniers in last month’s vote, the divergent legislative priorities of the two parties — and particularly Republican reliance on restrictive voting measures and supercharged gerrymanders — reflect what has become a ceaseless tug of war over the rules of American politics and governance.“It’s not the same thing as throwing out the vote count and putting in the wrong count,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “But it’s a form of unfair gaming of the system to gain electoral advantage, in a way that shuts out legitimate voters.”The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      This Case Should Never Have Made It to the Supreme Court

      by

      “The most important case for American democracy” in the nation’s history — that’s how the former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig described Moore v. Harper, an extraordinary lawsuit that the Supreme Court considered in oral arguments Wednesday morning. Judge Luttig, a conservative and a widely respected legal thinker, is not one for overstatement. Yet most Americans aren’t paying attention to the case because it involves some confusing terminology and an arcane legal theory. It is essential that people understand just how dangerous this case is to the fundamental structure of American government, and that enough justices see the legal fallacies and protect our democracy.First, the back story on the case: In 2021, North Carolina lawmakers redrew their congressional maps. The state had 13 districts at the time, and its voters were more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But the Republicans who are in control of North Carolina’s legislature didn’t want fair maps; they wanted power. In one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the nation, they drew 10 seats intended to favor themselves.The North Carolina courts were not amused. A panel of three trial judges found that the 2021 maps were “intentionally and carefully designed to maximize Republican advantage” — so much so that Republicans could win legislative majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. The State Supreme Court struck down the maps, finding they violated the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free elections, free speech, free assembly and equal protection.That should have been the end of it: A state court applying the state Constitution to strike down a state law. But North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers appealed, arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not give state courts authority to rule on their congressional maps — even though the legislature had passed a law authorizing the courts to review redistricting plans like these. Instead, the lawmakers are relying on an untested theory that asserts that state legislatures enjoy nearly unlimited power to set and change rules for federal elections.In 2000 the chief justice at the time, William H. Rehnquist, proposed the idea in his concurring opinion on Bush v. Gore, and the independent state legislature theory has been floating around the fringes of right-wing legal circles ever since.To be clear, this is a political power grab in the guise of a legal theory. Republicans are trying to see if they can turn state legislatures — 30 of which are controlled by Republicans — into omnipotent, unaccountable election bosses with the help of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The theory has no basis in law, history or precedent. The idea that state lawmakers exist free of any constraints imposed by their constitution and state courts makes a mockery of the separation of powers, which is foundational to the American system of government. By the North Carolina lawmakers’ logic, they possess infinite power to gerrymander districts and otherwise control federal elections. It is a Constitution-free zone where no one else in the state — not the governor, not the courts, not the voters through ballot initiatives — has any say.On Wednesday morning, Justice Elena Kagan rejected the theory out of hand, saying it “gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”In practice, the theory that the petitioners in the case are seeking to use would turn hundreds of state constitutional provisions into dead letters in federal elections. For instance, 48 states affirmatively guarantee a right to vote in their constitutions. (The federal Constitution still does not.) Most state constitutions guarantee free, fair, equal or open elections. Even the secret ballot — so fundamental to American democracy — is a creature of state constitutions. If the justices accept the most aggressive version of the independent state legislature theory that the petitioners want them to and even if they accept a weaker version, provisions like these could become invalid overnight, because the theory holds that state constitutions have no authority to impose any regulations on federal elections. (The Constitution and federal law remain supreme, so challenges to state legislative actions could still be brought in federal courts.)Some of the justices insist that they don’t — they can’t — pay attention to the real-world outcomes of their rulings. They’re just interpreting law. By that logic, this case should be rejected on its merits.First, the theory is based on bad legal interpretation. The Constitution uses the word “legislature” in describing who has the power to regulate federal elections. Because of this word, the theory’s supporters claim, state legislatures have nearly unlimited power in that realm. But as Judge Luttig has noted, the theory has “literally no support” in the Constitution. To the contrary, the framers who wrote the Constitution were concerned that state legislatures had too much power, not too little. The text they wrote makes many references to the powers of those legislatures and of Congress, but it never says or implies that they are immune to review by the judicial branch.Second, the theory is based on bad history. The best evidence its supporters offer is a two-century-old document that has long been known to be fraudulent. Written in 1818 by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, a founding father, it is purported to be a replica of the plan for government that he introduced three decades earlier at the Constitutional Convention. But what he submitted in 1818 was not the real deal. James Madison suspected this immediately, as have virtually all historians to examine it in the years since.When the theory’s supporters sought to claim that the practices of early state legislatures proved that their side should win, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded, “Yes. If you rewrite history, it’s very easy to do.”Third, if the Supreme Court accepts this theory, it will create a logistical nightmare in states across the country. That’s because the theory applies only to federal elections, not state elections, in which state courts unquestionably have a role to play. As a result, there would be two sets of rules operating at the same time, one for federal elections and one for state elections. Chaos and confusion would reign.Most important, the Supreme Court has already implicitly rejected the theory many times over. In precedents stretching back decades, the court has made clear that state courts have the power to set limits on what lawmakers can do when it comes to federal elections. As recently as 2019, the court rejected a plea for it to stop the extreme partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and other states. In doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that this is exactly the role that state courts should play. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” he wrote.At Wednesday’s argument, Justice Samuel Alito appeared to reject that premise. He accused elected state court judges, like those in North Carolina, of being political actors themselves. “There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of this decision on democracy,” said Justice Alito, who has given openly partisan speeches to outside groups and voted consistently in alignment with Republican policy priorities. “Do you think that it furthers democracy to transfer the political controversy about districting from the legislature to elected supreme courts where the candidates are permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting?”Another way to appreciate the absurdity of the theory is to consider who has come out for and against it. On one side, a large and bipartisan group of judges, government officials, former lawmakers, leading historians and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have rejected it. These include a co-founder of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, the chief justices of all 50 states, multiple Republican former governors and secretaries of state and civil rights organizations.On the other side, you will find a far smaller and less bipartisan cast of characters — among them, the Republican National Committee, a group of Republican state attorneys general and John Eastman, a former law professor last seen helping Donald Trump plan an illegal and unconstitutional coup to stay in office (an act that has exposed Mr. Eastman to a real risk of criminal prosecution).That so many justices would take the theory seriously is bad enough. Three of them — Justices Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — appear to favor the independent state legislature theory, as they suggested in an opinion in an earlier stage of the case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has also indicated his openness to it. It’s worse when the public trust in and approval of the court have fallen to historic lows, thanks largely to aggressively partisan recent opinions, as this board has argued.There’s an old saying that only close cases make it to the Supreme Court. If they weren’t close, they would have been resolved in the lower courts. But Moore v. Harper isn’t a remotely close case. A ruling for the North Carolina lawmakers would flood the federal courts with election litigation that normally plays out in the states, upending the balance of federalism that defines American government. That’s not a conservative result; it’s a dangerously radical one.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