Is an overturned Supreme Court race what NC’s most powerful Republican really wants?

(Editor's note: This colum first appeared in the News and Observer, February 5, 2025)

We stand at a moment of peril in North Carolina. The Republican dominated General Assembly, aided and abetted by the most partisan state Supreme Court in America, has deployed extreme political gerrymandering to dramatically marginalize Democrats in the state legislature. Despite winning, often handily, the major statewide races — where elections can’t be stolen through the drawing of district lines — Democrats won only a third, or a little more than a third of the seats in the House and Senate. As Sen. Lisa Grafstein has shown: ”More people in this state, in our election, voted for Democrats to represent them in the General Assembly than voted for Republicans.” And yet the Republican advantage is lopsided. (You get the votes, we get the seats.) 

When voters, as they typically do, engaged in the perceived heresy of electing a Democratic governor, attorney general and other member of the Council of State, Republicans turned to the Carolina two-step — gutting the coveted offices of powers to prove to the voters that they won’t get their way. The moves, of course, violate the North Carolina Constitution, aggrandize Republican lawmakers and effectively overturn election results. In any other state, the Republicans’ actions would be thrown out by the courts without pause but not here. Our justices, as they have repeatedly proven, are not actually judges. Don’t let the robes fool you.

Now there’s more. A defeated Supreme Court justice candidate, Jefferson Griffin, wants the North Carolina Supreme Court to steal a seat for him. So much for the rule of law. Democracy is old school. The case has triggered procedural intricacies, and, to be sure, national outrage. But our Republican justices have, shockingly, blocked the certification of Allison Riggs’ election and four justices, a majority, have shown they’re ready to do the deed. Perhaps no other court in the land would commit the theft. But our crew is seemingly up for it. It’s just their Huckleberry. What could be more thrilling than selecting their own new member? What a way to own the libs. In the process, they’ll demonstrate that Democrats will be effectively, or completely, marginalized in all three branches of North Carolina government even when they’re the majority. Invitations to Mar-a-Lago await.

Is this, when the push becomes the final shove, what state Sen. Phil Berger Sr. wants for North Carolina? Berger Sr. is immensely powerful. At the least, he’s the state’s most potent Republican leader. But it’s possible he’s not merely an angry ideologue like his son, Justice Philip Berger Jr. or Chief Justice Paul Newby. Berger Sr. knows, surely, that stealing the Riggs election will destroy the North Carolina Supreme Court as an institution for decades. Newby may not know it, but Berger Sr. does. Is this additional theft of authority worth that?

It will also uncover the anti-democratic entrenchment and sought-after permanent minority rule for all to see, across the nation and perhaps the planet. North Carolina Republicans will no longer be able to pretend that they believe in the American experiment. They’ll show themselves as simple authoritarians, first, last and ever. Will Berger Sr. allow, or require, his minions to cross this bridge too, too far? Or might he say, in effect, we’re willing to cheat to win, we’ve been doing it for more than a decade. We’re the masters. But we won’tliterally, after all these centuries, cast democracy out of North Carolina.

We’ll know soon.