Before we can begin to clap his exit, the dern Carolina Journal, the organ of the John Locke Foundation, immediately understands that Junior has his eye on the Chief Justice seat currently occupied by Rumpelstiltskin Paul Newby, the most highly partisan chief justice in our lifetime. In other words, last Thursday what Phil Junior was trying to say on X was "I'm not going to run for this seat on the Supreme Court, but for a wholly different seat -- the most important seat."
Symmetry. Berger first ran ten years ago in 2016 for the Supreme Court seat that Paul Newby was vacating so that he could run for Chief Justice. Berger has a practice of following in his master's footsteps. (Newby is required by law to retire at age 76. He'll be 73 in 2028, which means he would have to retire in the middle of that 6-year term. So tell me they haven't worked this all out in advance.)
Berger's reputation as a Republican partisan comes from his refusing repeatedly to recuse himself from deciding cases in which his own father, Phil Berger Senior (the about-to-be-former President Pro Tem of the NC Senate), was a defendant (who stood to benefit at least politically from the decision). The crucial Harper v. Hall redistricting decision, which had thrown out the Republicans' 2021 General Assembly districts as unconstitutional gerrymandering; the Voter I.D. case; the Leandro school funding case. Occasionally, when he's been challenged for his family relation he's referred the question of recusal to the other justices, and they always vote 4-2, "Hell, no! Junior doesn't need to recuse himself, because Daddy as a defendant is only a defendant because he was acting in his official capacity as leader of the Senate."
It was a regular Berger family duopoly of power.
A reminder of how Phil Jr. got hatched:
First, he ran in 2014 for the seat vacated by Congressman Howard Coble. He was backed by wads of money and the full-bore influence of his father, but Phil Junior lost to Mark Walker (of noted memory). Lost the Republican primary when a lot of pundits thought he'd win.
Following quickly that humiliating defeat, Phil Junior got himself appointed to an administrative law judgeship. In 2016, he took the next step and challenged Judge Linda Stephens for a seat on the Court of Appeals and won. That was the same year Trump arrived. Plus Junior benefited from a last minute legislative stunt that Phil Senior pulled off in the short session of the General Assembly the summer of 2016. He got the law changed as regards random "ballot order," insuring that candidates that belong to the same party as the sitting governor (Pat McCrory) get listed first on the ballot. Berger beat Stephens by a slim margin, 22,099 votes. He quit the seat in 2020, to run for the Newby seat on the Supreme Court. You could say the boy exhibits ambition, and he's in a hurry.