When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Declaration of Independence — 04 Jul 1776
250 years of a nation being free of being subjects of a nearly absolute monarch that is elevated above the law is a good run by any measure when one looks back through history.
Democracies have always had a harder time surviving the innate human instincts of preferring to follow strong individual leaders and experiments in egalitarianism and voting for the people and the laws that would govern their society.
It starts off well and with noble intent but invariably narrower political and economic interests would often divide the population and create the conditions that authoritarian dictators can exploit to rule by ruthlessly punishing their perceived enemies and lavishing riches and power upon those who would happily trade what was right and noble for their own selfish desires.
That we were able to survive so long even with the abomination that is enslaving other human beings enshrined in our Constitution and only one official civil war (though one might well argue we’re now in the early stages of another one) and still largely be a functioning representative democracy is nothing short of remarkable, if not miraculous.
It was a good run but the writing’s clearly on the wall.
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024)
Some have argued that this landmark decision by the US Supreme Court which in effect declared that so long as the President may find some tenuous connection between their actions that would ordinarily be ripe for prosecution for criminal violations of the law and their official duties then the President enjoys immunity from such prosecution was the start of the era of the President effectively being an absolute monarch.
Nearly 250 years after our ancestors successfully staged a revolution against the greatest military power that had been seen on Earth throughout history based in no small part on the proposition that our future was best served by a government of and serving needs of the people without a monarch at it’s apex, the Supreme Court decided on strictly partisan grounds that the notion that even the most powerful amongst us was still subject to the rule of law was a load of bollocks in order to shield the President of their political party from accountability for actions that would have landed any of us ordinary people in the prisoner’s dock to answer to criminal charges.
But was this appalling decision really the beginning of the American monarchy we seem to be suffering through right now where the only institutions desperately trying to defend the notion of “equal justice under law” are the courts subordinate to the United States Supreme Court in which that phrase is prominently etched in the marble above it’s entrance?
A court that has completely lost the plot and seems far more interested in crowning a king/dictator than remembering the ideas and the Declaration of Independence that eventually led to the advent of one of the greatest documents applying checks and balances upon executive power the likes of which hadn’t been seen since King John was forced to sign Magna Carta at Runnymede.
I’d argue that the real enabling of the reign of King Donald I started five years earlier in the halls of that very same court…
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. I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.
NC Representative David Lewis
North Carolina in recent decades has been involved in many lawsuits that have eventually made it to the Supreme Court over the General Assembly’s repeated attempts to gerrymander it’s electoral districts either on a hyper-partisan basis or engage in racial gerrymanders and often both.
The North Carolina General Assembly and the vast majority of the electoral maps it has produced ever since the end of the Civil War should make it the poster child for why allowing politicians to pick their voters rather than the other way round is inherently evil and against the principles upon which this country was founded.
Gerrymandering electoral maps has been one of the rare instances of bipartisan cooperative behaviour on Jones Street for well over 100 years and it was no less evil when the Democrats were doing it during the Jim Crow era than what we see the current Republican party has been doing for the better part of 30 years.
But Rep Lewis’ surprising if not appalling statement during the 2016 redistricting process that led to Rucho v. Common Cause illustrates that there were aspiring tyrants literally just down the road from my house who were perfectly happy in gerrymandering a super-majority of their party in the General Assembly as well as make the House delegation sent to Congress equally unrepresentative of what is perennially one of the most purple states in the entire nation where both major parties rarely poll over 50% of the electorate even in “wave” elections.
Most of those gerrymanders were quite amateurish when compared to the “surgical precision” using big data warehouses with voter data down to the precinct if not individual voter that were the hallmark of North Carolina’s most recent racial and hyper-partisan gerrymanders.
Today, the successors to Lewis and Senator Bob Rucho are shoving an even more hyper-partisan gerrymandered map through the General Assembly after having stripped the Governor of any ability to veto it and require a super-majority of both houses on Jones Street to override (which they don’t actually have any more).
Looks like convicted felon and former NC Representative Lewis is going to get that 11th Republican district he’d coveted and crowed about trying to create for years after all and that’s a damned shame considering that of the 14 House seats that North Carolina butts warm on Capitol Hill, only one of those 14 are actually considered competitive and that’s the 1st District in the northeast corner of the state.
Every other Congressional district, the outcome is known before the first ballot is even cast.
Think about that really hard for a minute or two or longer if you wish.
That already has the hallmarks of maps drawn by politicians to guarantee the result they wish rather than politicians having to win over fairly drawn districts where they might have to actually present ideas and proposals to actually improve the lives of those constituents that live there.
Now, three guesses and the first two don’t count as to which district is going to be the one cracked and packed to produce another Republican going to Congress that likely wouldn’t have in a district that is majority Black that tends to vote Democratic.
That’s right, aspiring King Phil I (NC Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger Jr) is more than happy to eliminate the last vestige of a Congressional district that one would have to wait until the results were in on Election Day to actually know who won the contest.
That it will also almost certainly result in one of the three Black members of our Congressional delegation losing their seat in 2026 is just cruelly twisting the knife.
And that’s on top of all of the hyper-partisan gerrymandering that has led to a near super-majority for Republicans in Raleigh that seemingly isn’t going anywhere anytime soon thanks to this one line in the majority opinion of Rucho:
Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.
Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)
The plaintiffs and the court relied on maps produced using North Carolina’s own criteria on designing districts that conformed to geographic and regulatory/legal requirements (such as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that this abomination of a Supreme Court looks ready to chuck into the bin as they have pretty much the rest of it) so they had a good baseline for knowing an outlier map (or in this case, an “out-out-out-outlier” map!) that just screams hyper-partisan gerrymandering.
Justice Kagan correctly noted in her dissent that the majority on the Supreme Court who saddled the American people with the consequences of Rucho (and particular threw the citizens of North Carolina and Maryland to the wolves!) is that allowing politicians to choose their voters and insulating themselves behind an impenetrable wall depending on those same politicians to redress our grievances with redistricting is not the panacaea they think it is.
This Court has long understood that it has a special responsibility to remedy violations of constitutional rights resulting from politicians’ districting decisions. Over 50 years ago, we committed to providing judicial review in that sphere, recognizing as we established the one-person-one-vote rule that “our oath and our office require no less.” Reynolds, 377 U. S., at 566. Of course, our oath and our office require us to vindicate all constitutional rights. But the need for judicial review is at its most urgent in cases like these. “For here, politicians’ incentives conflict with voters’ interests, leaving citizens without any political remedy for their constitutional harms.” Gill, 585 U. S., at _ (KAGAN, J., concurring) (slip op., at 14). Those harms arise because politicians want to stay in office. No one can look to them for effective relief.
Kagan, J (dissenting) 29 — Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)
The majority disagrees, concluding its opinion with a paean to congressional bills limiting partisan gerrymanders. “Dozens of [those] bills have been introduced,” the majority says. Ante, at 33. One was “introduced in 2005 and has been reintroduced in every Congress since.” Ibid. And might be reintroduced until the end of time. Because what all these bills have in common is that they are not laws. The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for
Kagan,J (dissenting) 29-30 — Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)
legislative reform are slight.
The Court also figured that the state courts could handle the job they chose to chicken out of doing.
Unfortunately, a relatively recent change to North Carolina’s election procedures for NC Supreme Court justices is that it’s now a partisan election since 2016 where judicial races had been non-partisan since the early 1990s (and it was not entirely coincidental that Republican candidates started winning more judicial races in the early 1990s when they were partisan as they had been for much of the time since the end of the Civil War which lead the Democrats to change to non-partisan races).
Once again, partisanship has reared it’s ugly head in a place where it has no business being and the once relatively neutral to liberal-leaning NC Supreme Court has become yet another Republican super-majority that was so willing to preserve an overwhelming partisan advantage that they denied Justice Riggs her seat for several months due to baseless appeals and ignoring the fact that she’d won her election after three recounts.
It doesn’t seem to matter at all to the majority on the NC Supreme Court who is entrusted with protecting the citizens of this state from a US Supreme Court that has spectacularly failed them in Rucho have no qualms about ignoring law and precedent when they moved swiftly to rehear a case that the NC Supreme Court had ruled just months earlier that partisan gerrymandering of electoral maps violated several provisions of the NC Constitution including:
All political power is vested in and derived from the people; all government of right originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole.
NC Constitution — Article 1, Section 2 (Sovereignty of the people.)
The people of this State have the inherent, sole, and exclusive right of regulating the internal government and police thereof, and of altering or abolishing their Constitution and form of government whenever it may be necessary to their safety and happiness; but every such right shall be exercised in pursuance of law and consistently with the Constitution of the United States.
NC Constitution — Article 1, Section 3 (Internal government of the State.)
For redress of grievances and for amending and strengthening the laws, elections shall be often held.
NC Constitution — Article 1, Section 9 (Frequent Elections)
All elections shall be free.
NC Constitution — Article 1, Section 10 (Free elections)
No person shall be taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the law of the land. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be subjected to discrimination by the State because of race, color, religion, or national origin.
NC Constitution — Article 1, Section (Law of the land; equal protection of the laws)
It should come as no surprise that one of the associate justices on the NC Supreme Court that dissented when a 4-3 Democrat majority tossed those maps as unconstitutional gerrymanders as Rucho demanded was none other than Phil Berger Jr, the very same individual who is now pushing through an even worse gerrymander than the one he enabled in the rehearing with a brand-new Republican majority on the court.
A gerrymander that the governor is now prohibited from vetoing along with a host of other provisions stripping power from North Carolina’s Executive Branch that were passed when it was clear that Democrats were going to win the majority of the Council of State thanks to the same Republican majority in the General Assembly that will be next to impossible to remove at the ballot box.
Election denialism, vote rigging, and violation of the principle of the separation of powers seems to be the feature of how politics is practised by the majority in Raleigh, not a bug they feel needs to be eliminated.
The actual voters are apparently an optional extra and have been for quite some time.
And gerrymandering is, as so many Justices have emphasized before, anti-democratic in the most profound sense. See supra, at 7–8. In our government, “all political power flows from the people.” Arizona State Legislature, 576 U. S., at _ (slip op., at 35). And that means, as Alexander Hamilton once said, “that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.” 2 Debates on the Constitution 257 (J. Elliot ed. 1891). But in Maryland and North Carolina they cannot do so. In Maryland, election in and election out, there are 7 Democrats and 1 Republican in the congressional delegation. In North Carolina, however the political winds blow, there are 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Is it conceivable that someday voters will be able to break out of that prefabricated box? Sure. But everything possible has been done to make that hard. To create a world in which power does not flow from the people because they do not choose their governors.
Kagan,J (dissenting) 32-33 — Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)
I would suggest that it’s effectively impossible when a Republican majority runs rampant and roughshod over any semblance of consideration for or of the minority.
The General Assembly has been allowed to seize power and have been aided and abetted in their actions by a North Carolina Supreme Court that is getting even more out of touch with North Carolina voters so how in the world are we supposed to have even a chance of voting our way out of this mess we’re in?
We are not now nor have we really ever been a state of extreme political views.
At best, the partisan swing statewide from one party to the other is rarely more than five or so percent over dead centre one way or the other and that’s usually a so-called “wave” election where one party is dramatically more unpopular than the other.
President Trump won North Carolina’s electoral votes all three times that’s he’s run for office (so far) but only in 2024 did he actually crack 50% in the general election and that barely at 50.9% of the electorate. In 2016, he garnered 49.8% of the vote and 2020 49.9%.
And yet our Congressional delegation and the General Assembly is far more extremely partisan than the actual population.
This is where Justice Kagan’s final observation comes home to roost and the majority in Rucho failed in this quite spectacularly and it’s citizens in North Carolina and similarly situated states who will ultimately pay the price…
Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.
Kagan,J (dissenting) 33 — Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)
So who knows, with the failure of our institutions to protect our version of democracy in this state, perhaps the only thing left to us is to look through all 400 years of our history when our colonial government was almost as corrupt as the Jones Street mob is now.
Given some of the royal governors we had and especially some of the ones foisted upon us by the Lords Proprietors (Seth Sothel comes to mind), it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that North Carolinians have historically had very little faith in strong executive authority which is why the office of Governor has been extraordinarily weak even in the best of times.
Our governor was the last one to actually be granted the power of veto in 1996 (by constitutional amendment) and even then the veto is not particularly burdensome to the General Assembly that only needs a 3/5ths majority to override rather than the customary 2/3rds and there are quite a few things that are off-limits from the Governor’s veto stamp including electoral maps.
It hasn’t helped matters that the Democrats elected to our Council of State have been effectively neutered by gross violations of the separation of powers masquerading as laws and a NC Supreme Court that doesn’t seem to care about that concept unless it was a Republican official being stripped of their historical and customary powers.
Our courts are now being stuffed with partisan hacks and the majority in the General Assembly seem perfectly content to take their marching orders from Washington DC which used to be a concept that would have been considered absolutely unthinkable prior to the “For Sale” sign placed on pretty much every elected office in the land with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).
So what does the Supreme Court truly think we can do about this state of affairs?
Sadly, I’m thinking it may well have to come down to taking a play out of our colonial ancestor’s playbook.
In the late 1760s, what passed for local government in the colony of North Carolina was described as the “courthouse rings” where various offices would be passed around amongst the county elite (so your sheriff one year would be register of deeds the next and clerk of court not long after that and so forth).
It wasn’t unusual for some poor farmer to make their way to the county seat to pay tax and then discover that the courthouse gang had looted and auctioned off everything on their farm if not the farm itself to their friends whilst the farmer was away from their land.
They were extraordinarily corrupt on a scale that might have made even our current government blush, so much so that royal Governor William Tryon had commissioned a study that discovered that these corrupt individuals had collected 64,000 pounds sterling of taxes above what the law actually allowed and of that amount, 48,000 pounds sterling could not be accounted for other than suspicion it lined more than a few pockets.
Governor Tryon meant well but that revelation pissed off the courthouse rings something fierce at having their dodgy dealings made public.
However, Governor Tryon also did a wonderful job of inflaming the passions of the citizenry by levying a tax of two shillings sixpence on every last person in the colony to finance the building of what would eventually become Tryon’s Palace in the colonial capital of New Bern.
I don’t know but that seems to have a familiar ring to me for some reason though in fairness the current offender supposedly isn’t financing this massive ballroom that only one person actually wanted with taxpayer dollars but I’m sure we’ll be screwed on that front soon enough.
For people who were already smarting under the unaccountable rule of corrupt officials who were robbing and cheating them blind, this tax was not only a princely sum for people who could ill afford it but it really angered people living in the western counties who would likely never see the building in their lifetime.
They had no effective means of redressing their grievances through the political process as they were often locked out of what little voting took place for not owning enough land and/or slaves. The courts were of little use except to cloak the theft of property by false pretenses with legal niceties and judicial orders.
So they did the only thing they could…take advantage of North Carolina’s world-leading abundance in so-called naval stores like pitch, turpentine, and the sticky substance from pine trees that would form the basis of this state’s nickname…tar.
North Carolina was also quite flush with poultry even then which provided an ample supply of feathers.
Edmund Fanning was but one of the more famous (or infamous given the sheer magnitude of his corruption) individuals to be painted in tar and then covered in feathers. That public humiliation was hardly unique to North Carolina at the time but judges and clerks of court would often find themselves the target of such a punishment, particularly during the Regulator Movement of the late 1760s culminating at the Battle of the Alamance in 1771.
Now, I’m not really suggesting we truly go back to these ancient methods of getting the attention of elected officials but it’s hard to imagine how utilising the traditional methods for effecting political change has a chance of working in this state when it’s been so rigged in favour of an increasingly out-of-touch aristocracy who legislate and act out of fear of being spent out of office and so unaccountable that they can’t be bothered to listen to the citizens they supposedly serve.
I really don’t have the answer to solving this problem.
What I do know is that our long history most certainly has had very unpleasant alternatives to civil discourse and a properly functioning system of representation, democracy, and courts of law.
Until our so-called leaders deign to govern our state the way North Carolinians ought to as opposed to being in mortal fear of what people who have no clue what the honour and dignity being North Carolinian truly means demand they do, I can’t help but wonder if that time when the citizens of this state truly will have nothing else left to lose is coming much faster than any of us really dares to believe.