McCrory Law Suit Will Be Heard by Terrence Boyle

Judge Boyle

Governor McCrory and his legal team sued the Feds over HB2 in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which is almost entirely stocked with Republican/conservative judges. It's a miracle! Because who should draw the McCrory suit but one of the most notorious conservatives on the Federal bench in North Carolina, Judge Terrence Boyle.

Boyle cut his teeth in the "culture wars" of the 1970s as an aide to Senator Jesse Helms. He was elevated to the Federal bench by President Ronald Reagan and twice nominated for a seat on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals by both presidents Bush. Those nominations failed because both times the U.S. Senate was under Democratic control, and Democrats considered Boyle a regressionist on civil rights.

Currently, Boyle is one of the best known judges in the Eastern District of North Carolina and serves with an all-white cast of other, mainly Republican judges. The Eastern District encompasses 24 counties including much of the state's "black belt" -- demographically, the Eastern District is 27 percent African American -- yet in its 143-year history, that court has never had a black judge.

President Obama has appointed two different black women to that court. The first was blocked by Senator Richard Burr -- because he could -- and Burr has promised to block the second one as well. Currently, the Eastern District has a vacancy on the court going back more than a decade, because both presidents Clinton and Obama have been stymied by Republican senates.

So ... Judge Boyle will hear McCrory's complaint that HB2 does not violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How inexplicably fortuitous for McCrory's lawsuit to fall into the lap of a judge already hostile to the Civil Rights Act of 1964!