For the third decade in a row, North Carolina’s election process is being interrupted because a court found redistricting unconstitutional. Republicans blame the court for the disruption but they have nobody to blame but themselves. They drew the dubious districts and they moved the primary season knowing that a ruling might come down.
Republicans ran as reformers in 2010 when they took control of the legislature and again in 2012 when Pat McCrory became governor. Instead of reforming elections, they just tried to rig the system for themselves. They had good teachers, though. Democrats gerrymandered districts for decades. With the use of new technology, Republicans perfected the process, drawing districts that assured their victories by splitting counties, precincts and communities.
For years, Republicans like Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger supported an independent redistricting committee that would end gerrymandering. Once they got power, though, they changed their tune. Holding onto that power became far more important. So, they became hypocrites.
This morning nobody knows what’s going to happen. The legislature will ask for a stay that would allow the elections to proceed. If it’s granted, we’ll likely have these districts until 2018. If it’s not, then our election is in turmoil. The March primary, at least for Congressional races, will almost certainly need to be moved. Some folks say the ruling may have an impact on a similar court case concerning state legislative districts. If that’s true, then the legislative primaries would need to be moved also.
Republicans could fix the situation. They could draw new, fairer districts and move the primary to the first Tuesday in May. We’re still in the time frame of a normally scheduled election cycle. Filing would last until the end of February and the primary would happen in May, just like always. They could leave the presidential primary in place if they wanted North Carolina to play a greater role in determining the nominee, but the race may well be going strong in May anyway.
It’s time for the legislature to pass redistricting reform. Voters have lost faith in the system because they believe politicians are self-serving and will say anything to win elections. Berger and company can garner good will by sticking to their original positions and pass the redistricting legislation they once claimed to support. It’s really time to quit subjecting North Carolinians to expensive lawsuits that leave our elections in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
I want to leave, but it may be too late for me. I’m 63 and UNC Hospital doctors and nurses are my last friends in life. I tried to work with the Democrats, they were too smart, and I’m too old. They know everything better than me. We need to load up on Security Resource officers in the schools so none of those kids get away with anything.
The doctor told me that the opiates I am on for all the pain I suffer have cumulative side effects that will likely shorten my life.
Medical Marijuana was defeated as an unknown and something the religious people are ignorant of.
They’d rather people get hooked on heroin. Hell they’d rather everybody was in prison and they could watch them on Lockup all weekend. MSNBC ain’t all bad.
Anyway whenever some kid with inherited land tries to make it with a cash crop that covers the taxes it is easy enough to take it and leave all that to the cartels out of Mexico where 10 thousand a year keep dying.
Hear they get to piss test whomever they stupid enough to ask for help. Lab Corp will keep on getting rich.
Recreational, or Medical, no one’s died in 5,000 years.
If it ain’t crooked it’s mean. One day they don’t have any money for the sick and medicaid, the next they found 400 million.
Better vote for that Bond so some rich can make more money, you know you’re held hostage. If the Army don’t want it you’re not going to get it. (I’m talking about that superhighway from Morehead City to I-40 and I-95. Senator Burr said something about it.)
The University system is turning into more of a joke than it was. 18 years of fraud. Well somebody won. Coaches get rich. Teaching assistants can starve with the rest of the 25 percent living in “Food Insecurity”.
Way to go there Senator John Edwards, you opened the door.
The Governor begs for us to sign some petition about Obama’s overreach? How about that case file he snatched off the Judge’s desk that may have slowed up some drills that always wreck your neighbors water?
The Army can have all the land and airspace they want. Heaven help us if the EPA stops more pollution of the water.
Trees are getting cut at an alarming rate to be sent to burn in the “clean” house furnaces of Europe.
Want to destroy your lands it is sure fire to cut down the trees and poison the water.
Tax Credits were lost for the independents engaged in building up a renewables business. That way the Corporations, either Tesla or Duke will be the only places to find work, if they ever see a reason. Duke would rather let everything blow up before ever replacing it ahead of time with a few cables and a bypass.
In-Q-Tel gave Venture Capital they got from the CIA to Semprius to make some great solar panels. The State gave them incentives. You’ll never see any benefits since now a days all goes directly to the Military. Instead of Exoskeletons to move bricks or sheetrock or help the bashed up and sick, moving artillery shells are all they will ever be used for. Some other Front will mark anything good up and all the spies will get some. Any energy source is good for some bucks somehow.
Bernie Sanders is calling for a Political Revolution since Fema has plans for Martial law that would make anything else a blood bath.
I’m pretty sure Trump supporters would like to beat me, if not kill anyone else crosses him or the self righteous want to reach up every woman’s dress and fix her. If she thinks her body is hers she’s got another thing coming. Well that stuff is for the boys always praying to God for guidance. If you need Trump to make you great, you’ve got some severe mental problems to start with.
I’m pretty sure those people who need God so much are simply sure that their mother and father never loved them. God will if you hate all the right people and are for a military that has all the killing machines of the future to leave laying on battlefields from one hemisphere to the next. Like in the movies, run out of bullets and just throw it away. You can always get another.
I been writing that young people ought just go to Uruguay since I noticed they kicked those peddling the TPP, a full stop take over by the Corporations, out.
Separation of Church and State. Went 10 years from oil like the rest of the world to 95 percent powered by renewables. Got a first rate port in Montevideo.
You want to get as far from Tanks as you can, and they don’t have many in South America. On that side of the Oceans the spew from Fukushima of Cesium 137 isn’t going to so much give the fish and what all three eyes like the moths and the frogs.
Corn Cattle and Hogs are left for NC. Wealth starts and stops with agriculture and that economist William Petty said that work is so onerous you ought never pay anyone more than bare subsistence wages. (18th Century economist? Long ago anyway.) No matter Keynes and John Commons and Sen had statistics. (Women and children who can’t read starve.) They must drill that into whomever writes paychecks here. First thing out of any governors mouth to business is our good workers will work cheap. “We keep ’em poor and desperate. We make sure you’re the one who gets the money. You’re like us. Lets get lunch at the club and play some rounds.”
John Commons invented the phrase Cultural Lag, and said that he loved capitalism but unbridled greed always meant socialism.
You can ride horses in circles, but no bets at a track. If it ain’t the approved sports, forget it.
The movies? Just give all the money to whomever in LA and hope they like the bribes well enough to spend some money on hotel rooms.
EUE Screen Gems must run the studios as a tax write off.
The promises made about something far as the NC RR Company buy out? Something to do with the last mile, or the first mile. It’s long past since all the rights of ways being wrecked that anything of that what was 5,000 miles of track can do much more than the Amtrak that claims some monopoly, except for the Long Island RR.
Meaningful trade goes East and West. Amtrak goes from NY to Florida doesn’t it.
Light rail? What’s up with that but something for hobbyists? What’s so difficult about making heavy rail work? I heard of these computers can keep ’em separated.
Ah hell, I’m tired of thinking.
But I forgot to say, down in Uruguay marijuana is legal. That’s one way to keep the Coast Guard out, since all they do for the most part is partner up with whomever will “help” with the Drug War. Sweet way to find out all a nation’s secrets if you ask me.
When Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex, it was still a bit separate. Now the whole nation works for them. Permanent war all the time everywhere they want to go showing our flag, waving it around, getting some guys killed and promising to give everything back to the natives.
The rest of our so called allies are so used to us bleeding all over the place for them or the Saudis or Texaco? Phillips? BP, EXXON, (screw Total, they’re French), lifting a finger to stop a horror like Syria before it festers into a boil so ugly it would take WWIII to get some food to some trapped civilians who just didn’t flee with everybody else on their way to Germany where they’ll be taken care of and put into the labor force before they ever get drafted to go back and “Take Our Country Back?”
I’m tired of thinking about it. I love my wife. I love the people at the hospital.
I guess I’m just stuck here. Compromised. But I tell you, if I have to be miserable and in pain without respite with nothing to listen to on the radio but the navel gazers or the whiners, I’m gonna see if I can drag the rest of you all down into the mental sewer of unrelenting hatreds and ignorance with me.
North Carolina stands for Not Conscious far as I am concerned. Nothing I say or do matters here, and never did, and never will. This will never go past this virtual parlor room. Thanks Thomas. I’m going to bed now with my megaphone and the cat.
Thomas, we already have laws outlawing this sort of gerrymandering. Our politicians ignore those laws, apparently hoping that the federal courts will do the same thing as the NC Supreme Court in failing to follow those laws. Luckily for the people of North Carolina the federal court chose to follow the laws. Did you know that for State legislative districts the NC Constitution outlaws gerrymandering by outlawing the division of counties (and the inclusion of non-contiguous counties) in a district? Article II, section 3, part 3 reads as follows: “No county shall be divided in the formation of a senate district.” Article II, section 5, part 3 reads: “No county shall be divided in the formation of a representative district.” These are straightforward, simple laws that our politicians and judges have largely rejected in order to support illegal gerrymandering. Even in the face of the federal and state constitutional equal protection clauses and the Voting Rights Act, we have illegal gerrymandering. To end gerrymandering we need something more than new laws for the politicians and courts to ignore. We need to somehow force our politicians and judges to follow the laws we already have in place. Until we can make them follow the law the problem won’t be fixed by simply passing new laws. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a ready method of making politicians and judges follow the law other than voting them out of office. We can do that for many of them in November.
***Disclaimer: I am running for Wake County District Court judge this year, however District Court judges do not hear election law issues, so I would not have the chance to rule on anything touching on gerrymandering if I were elected.
And to that end sir, lies the problem. The only sanction is voting them out. If we started imposing civil and criminal sanction, willful and blatant violation would stop. Disbar those who do the research and then proffer the advice of adopting such blatant legislation that flies in the face of the principles upon which this state and nation were founded. We should not leave it to the individual to have to sue government to enforce the respective Constitutions of the states and the Federal government in order to get these kinds of laws remanded or struck down.
Sadly however, it’s no longer a nation of laws. Now, success depends more upon who rather than what you know. What matters is not the issues, but who has the most money to spend. Our legislators, our representatives, need us only until they have successfully attained the office they seek. At that point, the people cease to matter, until the next election cycle. Our political wisdom exists in 20-30 second sound bytes of clever phrases and snappy comebacks. None of which establish the groundwork for governance, only comeuppance; the majority got what it wished for.
Every word of this blog, Thomas, is smack on. There are honorable options for Berger et al to pursue, but there’s no reason nor recent history to say they will. Sorry times in the Tar Hell State, fair elections-wise…