The North Carolina GOP Is Trying Every Trick To Keep A Supreme Court Seat
Anita Earls has been the North Carolina GOP’s chief antagonist in the courtroom. Now she’s running for a seat on the state Supreme Court as a GOP threat to pack the court looms.
By Barry Yeoman | October 18, 2018
Judicial races in North Carolina tend to be low-key affairs. But the crowd gathered at a farmhouse near colonial-era Hillsborough last August — bluegrass on the screen porch, goats in the yard — gave a superstar’s welcome to the Democratic candidate for state Supreme Court.
For years, Anita Earls has been the go-to attorney in North Carolina for beating back assaults on voting rights. She’s had her hands full: Since the 2010 Republican landslide, the state legislature has operated like a perpetual-motion catapult, hurling one measure after another to reengineer the electoral landscape and seeing what sticks in court. Legislators have drawn electoral maps testing the outer limits of gerrymandering. They’ve tried to repeal ballot-access reforms that helped then-candidate Barack Obama carry the state in 2008. They canceled an election, changed how judges are selected, and are now trying to take control of the state’s elections machinery.
Each of these measures is a building block in a larger structure designed to maintain Republican power in the face of a demographic threat. North Carolina is growing more urban and racially diverse, trends that typically favor Democrats. “Building a seawall is not new,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and former official at the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “But it has been more blatant in North Carolina than it has been in many states.”
The Republicans’ onslaught has produced an outcry audible well beyond the state’s borders. Attacks on voting rights helped fuel North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement, which attracted international attention by repeatedly taking over the Legislative Building in Raleigh starting in 2013, leading to more than 1,000 arrests. The attacks also sparked a pile of lawsuits. Providing much of the courthouse muscle has been the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), a non-profit that Earls founded and until recently directed.
“She’s been the rock star on the legal front when it comes to voting rights here in North Carolina,” said Derick Smith, political action chair of the state NAACP, a key player in the Moral Monday movement. “Almost every facet, she’s been the lead, and we keep winning.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/the-north-carolina-gop-is-trying-every-trick-to-keep-a-supreme-court-seat
Anita Earls.............................
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough.......................vote
= new reply since forum marked as read
