In three rulings handed down Friday by the North Carolina Supreme Court, extremists who have worked to consolidate power in Republican hands effectively achieved a political coup — at least temporarily. The court’s decisions give Republicans free rein to draw voting maps that favor their candidates in future elections, create a new and unnecessary barrier for voters through a restrictive ID requirement and disenfranchise 55,000 formerly incarcerated citizens.
In three rulings handed down Friday by the North Carolina Supreme Court, extremists who have worked to consolidate power in Republican hands effectively achieved a political coup.
Thus, in a single day, the court reversed the hard-fought wins of a decadelong movement to expand democracy in North Carolina. Some have framed this as an attack on Black people, but it is more than just that. By attacking democracy, these partisan extremists have harmed everyone.
Surely, those rulings have caused some to despair. If extremists can get away with using the highest court in the state to rubber-stamp their anti-democratic efforts, what are we to do? First, we must remember that this isn’t the first time that government officials in the South, sometimes officials in all three branches, have acted to subvert democracy. Our foreparents fought against slavery and Jim Crow and won when every public institution was allied against them. It’s our time now, and we don’t have a right to feel sorry for ourselves.
What Republicans are doing in North Carolina and, to a larger extent across the country, is what anti-democracy forces did in the late 1870s to reverse the gains made during Reconstruction and to resist the changes demanded by the Civil Rights Movement and women’s rights movements in the 1960s and ’70s. They may target Black people, liberal and progressive voters or the formerly incarcerated, but the truth is that they hurt most people by making it harder to pass policies that help those at the bottom and cause…
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