NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD Sunday, September 18, 2022
382nd WEEKLY EDITION
This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this weekly platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we take back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation. Please join us every week. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.
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POSTED COVID data 9/11/2022 1:00pm EDT North Carolina
Click here for Covid-19 data from Worldometer Real Time World Statistics.
Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active
9/11 3,141,302 26,365 3,079,705 35,232
9/18 3,162,491 26,414 3,101,392 34,685
Track NC Covid Data Track NC Vaccine Data
Please jump the fold for links to recent stories and opinion.
Digby’s Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan, 9/15/2022
Considering whoppers told by conservative nominees in recent Senate confirmations, is it any wonder North Carolina Republicans believe conservative justices will find “a 204-year-old lie” persuasive?
Representatives from the Brennan Center demolish N.C. Speaker Tim Moore’s (R) argument for the “independent state legislature theory” (Politico):
This fall, the court will hear Moore v. Harper, an audacious bid by Republican legislators in North Carolina to free themselves from their own state constitution’s restrictions on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. The suit also serves as a vehicle for would-be election subverters promoting the so-called “independent state legislature theory” — the notion that state legislators have virtually absolute authority over federal elections — which was used as part of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The North Carolina legislators’ case relies in part on a piece of paper from 1818. But there’s a problem: The document they quote in their brief is a well-known fake.
Peer back into U.S. history (some most regrettable) and names from South Carolina appear regularly: John C. Calhoun, Charles Pinckney, Preston Brooks, Strom Thurmond. Lindsey Graham is destined to join them.
Pinckney’s name is attached to the fake in question, a document he submitted in 1818 that, scholars surmise, was Pinckney’s attempt to sell history on the notion that he was the true father of the Constitution. James Madison responded at the time with a “detailed refutation of Pinckney’s document along with the rest of his copious notes from the Convention. It was the genteel, 19th-century equivalent of calling BS.”
For over a century, the document, says “a modern-day researcher,” is “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history.”
Facing South, Billy Corriher, 9/15/2022
The North Carolina Supreme Court has broken new ground in protecting the rights of criminal defendants in recent years, even as other Southern courts have backtracked. North Carolina's high court, which has a 4-3 Democratic majority, has ruled along party lines to limit long sentences for juvenile offenders and cracked down on the longstanding problem of racism in jury selection.
But that progress could come to a halt next year, depending on the outcome of this year's high court election.
Two Democratic seats are on the ballot in November, and a national Republican group has pledged to spend millions of dollars to help flip at least one of those seats, which would give Republicans a majority. Court of Appeals Judges Richard Dietz and Lucy Inman are the Republican and Democratic candidates, respectively, for one seat. Justice Sam Ervin, an incumbent Democrat, is running for reelection against Republican Trey Allen, a former clerk to conservative Chief Justice Paul Newby.
NC Policy Watch, Lynn Bonner, 9/15/2022
Commissioners’ meetings in Surry County are a showcase of election conspiracy theories where distrust of the machines that count ballots plays a starring role.
The northwestern North Carolina county on the Virginia border is probably best known as the home of Mount Airy, the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry in his eponymous television show from the 1960s. This year, Surry County has been a stop on the circuit for prominent election deniers who falsely maintain that votes were engineered to have President Joe Biden win in 2020.
The county devoted nearly an entire May meeting to election deniers that featured David Clements, a former assistant professor at New Mexico State University who travels the country preaching about fraud. Clements, who lost his university job last year because he refused to wear a mask in class, urged Surry to hand-count ballots.