Letters from an American - January 12, 2025

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

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January 12, 2025. Almost 10 weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and former Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general and they broke the Republicans legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the former governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also re-elected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state Supreme Court. Republicans refused to accept the voters' choice. In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of

relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September's Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor, and prohibited the Attorney General from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support. The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state's election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots. Outgoing Governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a sham and playing politics, but the legislature repassed it over his

veto. He and new governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina's Constitution. There's an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation Red Map, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the

2010 census. It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than a hundred years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina's districts so that the state's congressional delegation went from a split of seven Democrats and six Republicans in 2010 to a nine-four split in favor of Republicans in 2012, despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015, that split had increased to 10-3. The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina's House of Representatives has 120 seats. Its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won

the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans 43.95%. And yet, in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats 43. And the North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans 47.4%. But in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats 17. When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing, with more black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote. When courts found those maps unconstitutional because

of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map, divided, members said, not according to race, but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two. I'm making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage, said State Representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats, because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans

and 2 Democrats. Lewis declared, I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country. That map too skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state house and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed a clear mandate to advance their policies. The fight over

those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rocco v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019, a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution's guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state's Supreme Court agreed. The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022. North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census. But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring

2022, the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage. In 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. But they also re-elected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who

can vote in North Carolina. There's been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court. Griffin wants it in front of the state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday, the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the State Elections Board from certifying Riggs's win, while it hears arguments in the case. As Will Duran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure that Democrats could not flip the court,

leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census. The Princeton gerrymandering project gives North Carolina an F for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy Fisk of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further

restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making vaccine harm a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of anti-migrant laws. This right-wing lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daley Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power,

and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite Southern enslavers, who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, and tried to take over the country. The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement, underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful. And today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin Van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country's politics

than his time as a political leader in New York. In the early 1800s, Van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine, and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York's 36 electoral votes, the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly, to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren's focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial

dominance, although he came from a family that enslaved its black neighbors, but on money and power. Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the US Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising reform of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats

claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states. That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial gender and religious minorities,

it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation. When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, based on his idea that electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. And when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone. in their favor alone.