North Carolina’s Battle for Democracy and Decency

By GENE NICHOL

No doubt many Americans regard the November election as the paramount electoral contest in modern history. I’m among them. I wish the president good health. But removing the most incompetent, dishonest and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House is required unless we are to abandon, like cowards, the American experiment.

But North Carolina, itself, is also engaged in a defining battle to reclaim its foundational commitments to equality and democracy. Tar Heels, too, decide whether we’ll abandon what has constituted us as a people.

Since 2011, the NC General Assembly has waged the stoutest war against people of color and low-income citizens seen in a half-century. All-white Republican caucuses, dominating both houses, have attacked the participatory rights, antidiscrimination guarantees, and equal dignity of African-Americans. They’ve tried to build a bridge to 1953.

Poor Tar Heels have been similarly targeted and demonized – robbed of health care, unemployment compensation, tax credits, food assistance, childcare and legal services, to provide largesse for the rich. Reverse Robin Hood, on stilts.

Women and the LGBT community have been assailed as well. An astonishing mandatory sonogram law enlisted a woman’s body, pocketbook and doctor in a Stalinistic scheme to coerce Tar Heels from exercising their reproductive rights. Internationally derided bathroom bills and singular licenses to discriminate against lesbians and gay men rounded out what the New York Times called North Carolina’s “pioneering work in bigotry.”

The author of the 14th Amendment, John Bingham, said it demands “equal and exact justice for any person, no matter whence he comes, or how poor, how weak, how simple, how friendless.” Today’s Republicans seek to bury Bingham’s mandate.

And they haven’t stopped there. The General Assembly has also moved to torpedo the fundaments, the bases, of American constitutional democracy.

Lawmakers have interfered with the judicial election process, limited judicial review of legislative acts, manipulated the size of the Court of Appeals for partisan purposes, aided Republican candidates in Supreme Court races, interfered with gubernatorial appointment powers, cancelled judicial primaries, threatened disobedient judges with shortened terms, gerrymandered judicial districts, and more. Even Donald Trump hasn’t assaulted the courts like Senate leader Phil Berger has.

Republicans have also used legislative powers more ruthlessly than any other state assembly to tilt the democratic process in their favor. They enacted the most extreme political gerrymanders in American history, enthusiastically limited the right to vote, overturned local elections, and stripped traditional powers from officeholders when Democrats were elected. National commentators called the package “a legislative coup one might expect in Venezuela, not the US.”

And in an effort to conceal their crusade against equality and democracy, the GA has repeatedly and unapologetically abandoned truth itself. That’s not my opinion, or just my opinion, but the frequent explicit finding of reviewing courts. Pervasive lying about legislative motivation reveals an inexcusable cynicism about democratic power and an absence of character so potent it renders one unfit for office.

So the political battle now waged in NC is not only brutal, it’s defining. Rejecting our fundamentals of governance, our social compact, is a more serious transgression than merely being careless or mistaken or hyper-zealous or wrong. It is more scornful of our story. More contrary to the red, white and blue.

Our political war, then, is about more than politics. It’s about the promises that constitute us as a commonwealth. Our character as a people. It is, at bottom, a struggle for our way of life, our principles of governance, and our very decency.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020

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