North Carolina’s Advice to Georgia

By GENE NICHOL

It looks like Georgia is now in the crosshairs for pioneering constitutional repression. Our neighbors to the south have initiated previously unseen moves in electoral repudiation – threatening to surpass even North Carolina in rejecting the central premise of American government.

Voting and civil rights enthusiasts now call for national boycotts of Georgia businesses and governments. Major league baseball has already launched the project. Proponents point, unsurprisingly, to the successful protests lodged against North Carolina’s animosity-driven “bathroom bill.” One wonders if our Republican lawmakers are feeling jealous.

We, of course, have a good deal of expertise in stoking the denial of fundamental rights to solve problems that don’t exist. And we have, over the last decade, amassed the country’s strongest record in violating our citizens’ rights to political and racial equality. So what lessons might we offer our friends in the Peach State?

First, over two centuries into our national experiment, it is still possible to face a majority political party that is overtly and definingly anti-democratic. Having been a constitutional lawyer for nearly a half century, I wouldn’t have thought that possible.

But as noted historian Anne Applebaum recently wrote of the new right authoritarian movements sweeping the US and Europe: “Why should different parties be allowed to compete on an even playing field if only one of them deserves to rule.”

Applebaum’s warning echoes N.C. Republican David Lewis’ boast that he and his colleagues repeatedly cheated in drawing district lines – giving us what the nation’s leading election law expert called ‘the most brazen and egregious” political distortion yet seen in the United States — because they deserved to rule:

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew this map to foster what I think is better for the country.”

Second, beware of people who wrap themselves in flags and announce fevered pledges of allegiance. They may, in fact, be seditionists. As Barack Obama put it a few weeks ago: “America is a place where you don’t have to look a certain way, it’s fealty to a creed that matters.”

The white Republican caucuses of the NC legislature have rejected both of Obama’s assertions. They do seem to think you have to look a certain way to deserve full membership. And their party has repeatedly broken “fealty” to “the creed” that defines us as a people. Sometimes traitors wear American flags on their lapels.

Third, if you’re going to govern a state by rejecting democracy and the American promise, you’re going be required to lie a lot about why you are doing what you are doing.

You won’t say, for example, that you are suppressing the vote. You’ll be protecting against fraud that can never be discovered. You won’t be trying to overturn democratic elections, you’ll just be out to “stop the steal.” You won’t mean to marginalize black voters, you just don’t like “souls to the polls” programs. It has nothing to do with who is going to the polls on the sabbath.

We’ve learned up close in North Carolina that the new agenda of our Republican Party is authoritarian not democratic; it is seditious not patriotic; it is faithlessly un-American, not allegiant; it is rooted in falsehood, not reality.

We’ve also seen that, for some, it is not as a large a leap as one might guess from these transgressions to more violent ones – rejecting Lincoln’s warning that in a democracy “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.”

Of course, in candor, I’m guessing in Georgia they already know most of these things.

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, May 1, 2021

Populist.com