No lawmakers epitomize this truth more than those in the state of North Carolina: When Republicans lose, they cheat. Ever since Tar Heel Republicans lost the state's gubernatorial race in 2016 while the rest of the country went red, GOP lawmakers have worked diligently to undermine the will of the voters. They have tried to strip the new Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, of his power to restore voting rights, appoint judges, and even legally challenge GOP legislation.
In the meantime, the raft of conservative laws they've passed have largely been turned back by federal and state courts alike.
Now, since North Carolina Republicans have proven themselves unable to pass legislation that's constitutional, they've decided to game the system by changing the referees. The New York Times writes:
Judges in state courts as of this year must identify their party affiliation on ballots, making North Carolina the first state in nearly a century to adopt partisan court elections. The General Assembly in Raleigh reduced the size of the state Court of Appeals, depriving Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, of naming replacements for retiring Republicans.
And this month, lawmakers drew new boundaries for judicial districts statewide, which critics say are meant to increase the number of Republican judges on district and superior courts and would force many African-Americans on the bench into runoffs against other incumbents.
“Instead of changing the way they write their laws, they want to change the judges,” Mr. Cooper said as he sat in a 19th-century, high-ceiling library at the Executive Mansion, which he has occupied uneasily since succeeding Pat McCrory, a Republican. The legislature has overridden nearly a dozen of his vetoes. The latest was on Monday, when lawmakers sustained a bill to eliminate judicial primary elections, which Mr. Cooper called part of an effort to “rig the system.”
Mitch McConnell gamed the system and won when he denied Barack Obama the chance to fill a Supreme Court seat last year and then gifted it to Donald Trump by changing the Senate rules. He’s currently in the process of working to pack the lower courts now.
North Carolina lawmakers must figure, why not? God forbid they start passing laws that might pass constitutional muster.