The North Carolina Supreme Court's new Republican majority granted a request from GOP lawmakers late on Friday and issued an order to rehear two major election law cases that, not even two months ago, saw the very same court strike down gerrymandered maps and a voter ID law for discriminating against Democrats and Black voters, respectively. Those rulings were issued by the prior Democratic majority, which Republicans ousted in last fall's elections.
In a blistering dissent, Democratic Justices Anita Earls and Mike Morgan (both of whom are Black) excoriated their five GOP colleagues (who are all white) for a "display of raw partisanship" that represents a "radical break with 205 years of history," referring to the year the court became an independent body in 1818. Authoring the dissent, Earls noted that the court had previously granted requests to rehear cases only two times out of 214 over the last 30 years.
The judicial principle that judges should respect their own courts' precedent, especially absent major factual differences between cases, predates the American republic. Republicans cited several state court decisions in an effort to validate their own, but Earls blasted their summation of these cases as "riddled with inaccuracies" and noted that these instances proved her point: Rehearings have only been granted in cases with specific errors in facts or applications of law and were limited in scope. Here, GOP petitioners here want nothing less than for the court to overturn the state constitution's guarantee that all voters share "substantially equal voting power."
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