A busy Supreme Court week
Two rulings dominate North Carolina politics — but only one of them will have much of an immediate effect
Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings dominated North Carolina’s political news last week, though one was much more significant than the other.
The first came in the Moore v. Harper case, which deals with the role state courts can take in the electoral redistricting process. I broke down the full case in an article last October when the arguments were presented.
The Supreme Court basically took the middle-of-the-road path that I predicted — brushing aside the “independent state legislature” theory that never really stood a chance of being embraced. I’m not convinced that the General Assembly ever thought it had a shot, either.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court opinion refused to take any stance at all on whether the Democrat-majority N.C. Supreme Court overstepped its authority in essentially drawing its own maps for a Congressional election.
Setting guardrails for what’s appropriate and not appropriate for a judiciary to do is, in my mind, the much more interesting constitutional question — and …