In 2017, as Cooper was taking office, the Republicans suddenly got it into their heads that it would be a good idea to merge the state’s elections commission and the state’s ethics commission. This was a pre-emptive response to Cooper’s promise to roll back existing voter suppression measures that had passed when the Republicans had control of the whole state government. The new policies almost guaranteed a permanent partisan gridlock which would maintain the status quo. Cooper saw that and vetoed the plan. The legislature overrode his veto and Cooper sued. A state court upheld Cooper’s case so the legislature changed a few commas and passed the thing again. Cooper sued, again, arguing that the legislature had violated the state constitution. (As Mark Joseph Stern explains in Slate, the N.C. constitution is uncommonly rigid on separation of powers.) On Friday, as the Raleigh News & Observer reports, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided it had had enough of this ridiculous finagling.
In a 4-3 ruling that breaks down along the court’s partisan lines, the justices found that a law passed in 2017 that merged the state Board of Elections with the state Ethics Commission and limited Cooper’s power to appoint a majority of its members violated the state Constitution’s separation of powers clause. The ruling, in a case that has attracted national attention, means that the governor’s party will control elections boards at the state and county levels, as has been the case for decades before Cooper defeated one-term Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. That could have implications for voting hours and poll locations in this year’s elections.
The state supreme court’s decision, written by Judge Sam Ervin IV, was quite clear that the state legislature had gone completely renegade in its attempts to suppress the franchise in North Carolina.
“The General Assembly cannot, however … structure an executive branch commission in such a manner that the Governor is unable, within a reasonable period of time, to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ because he or she is required to appoint half of the commission members from a list of nominees consisting of individuals who are, in all likelihood, not supportive of, if not openly opposed to, his or her policy preferences while having limited supervisory control over the agency and circumscribed removal authority over commission members.”
The Republican justices based their dissents on the argument that the decision, and the governor’s efforts to roll back the voter suppression campaign, were tainted by “partisanship,” which, I confess, is pretty damned hilarious. The Republicans in the state legislature howled along in tune. Once again, the importance of contesting all state elections is obvious here—North Carolina, alas, elects its judges—as is the fact that the franchise is hanging by a thread in a number of places. And, as you may have noticed, the state supreme court was authored by a judge with a familiar name. On May 17, 1973, Judge Ervin’s grandfather, Senator Sam Ervin, Jr. had this to say about another group of sleazy Republicans who poisoned another election.
“If these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other property of American citizens, but something much more valuable—their most precious heritage, the right to vote in a free election.”
They don’t use burglars in North Carolina. They use the law itself as a pry-bar and picklock. But the principle and the object of the theft remain the same. Some day, god help us, we may run out of Ervins.