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| Justice Robert Edmunds |
That would immediately impact Supreme Court Justice Robert Edmunds, the Republican who wrote the majority decision last year saying the Republican gerrymandering of the General Assembly was perfectly okay. That Edmunds decision was recently turned back by the U.S. Supreme Court, who said, as in a similar Alabama case, North Carolina was unconstitutionally packing black voters into districts where they couldn't vote against Republican powers-that-be.
So here comes the Republican scheme to hold "retention" elections for the Supreme Court. No justice would have an opponent. Every justice, starting with Robert Edmunds, would be on the ballot in 2016 alone, and we would vote to retain him or not.
As Bob Geary asks, "what are the chances the voters will remove an unopposed justice?"
If the voters by some major miracle did vote to remove Robert Edmunds, the legislation passed by the Republicans in the General Assembly would mandate that Gov. Pat McCrory -- that independent thinker! -- would get to appoint the successor.
I dunno: maybe, eventually, the good citizens of this state will grow tired of this political opportunism, if they're even paying attention to what the Republican operatives are doing to us.
3 comments:
If this were happening in the old Soviet Union or in some African dictatorship, the smug-azz neocons would be all about how we need to teach those backward nations some democracy. These are classic Nazi tactics: just cut little slices away from responsible representative government--each one seemingly tiny by itself-- and pretty soon it's gone and corporate fascism reigns supreme. Eternal vigilance, George W (Washingon) said, is the price of liberty. Wake Up America and Take your country back from these dangerous ideologues.
This clearly violates the NC Constitution, which says that justices are elected and that the gov can only appoint justices that can't finish their term.
Would the ACLU be able to challenge this one in court? Any NC voter could be a plaintiff, since it's taking away that voter's right to cast a vote - elect - a Supreme Court judge.
Of course, the Republicans probably came up with this scheme with an eye towards 2016, a Presidential election year when more Dems will be turning out at the polls. They don't care about the long-term prospects of the law as long as it gets them what they want in the next election cycle - they can always try another tactic for packing the court next time around.
Twenty other states have judicial retention election laws, among them California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Colorado and Iowa, to name a few. Didn't realize so many states had adopted "Nazi tactics." Really scary! (If you're a paranoid liberal.)
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