Rumors of the death of voter ID in North Carolina may have been greatly exaggerated.
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear NC GOP legislators’ appeal of a lower court decision striking down NC’s notorious 2013 voter ID law (the 4th Circuit decision that famously found that law to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision”).
Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision was not, however, based on the merits of the lower court’s ruling, but rather on the narrow question of whether plaintiffs (NC Republican legislators) had standing to bring such an appeal.
Chief Justice Roberts, a lifelong opponent of voting rights who penned yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling, all but openly invited Republicans to go back to the drawing board and try again (this time, hopefully, with just a little less surgical precision):
it is important to recall our frequent admonition that ‘[t]he denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case.
Roberts’ caveat is, indeed, a well-established point of law. In fact, it is so well understood that it simply didn’t need saying. And so, coming from the man who joyfully eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, it might well seem to carry a certain double meaning.
That double entendre was by no means lost on the hapless plaintiffs. As the Raleigh News & Observer reports this morning:
Within hours of the release of the order, N.C. Republican Party leaders were calling for a new law that would incorporate some of the same ideas in a manner that they thought could withstand judicial review.
[….]
“Republicans will continue to fight for common sense and constitutional voter ID measures, similar to what many other states already have,” state GOP Chairman Robin Hayes said.
[….]
In a joint statement posted on N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore’s Facebook page, he and Senate Leader Phil Berger said that “all North Carolinians can rest assured that Republican legislators will continue fighting to protect the integrity of our elections by implementing the commonsense requirement to show a photo ID when we vote.”
OK, Berger: if that’s the way it’s going to be, bring it on. For in the immortal words of James Cleveland, NC’s legions of passionate and unflagging voting rights defenders say as one:
I don't feel no ways tired,
I've come too far from where I started from.
Nobody told me that the road would be easy,
I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me.
As I reported yesterday, GOP legislators have already succeeded once this year in threatening a death-blow to early voting with their insidious new law, SB68. And now they’re pretty much certain to try to kick democracy while it’s down with a new, ‘improved’ voter ID law — one that will somehow attempt to unring the bell of shameless racial animus that was the old law’s undoing.
The battle for democracy ain’t over till its over. And in North Carolina, it’s never over.
Game on. Forward together, y’all.
