Bon Appetit! NC GOP Serves Itself Two New Turd Sandwiches

While You Were Ogling DeeCee...
Something else happened yesterday while you were possibly transfixed by the pre-dawn arrest of Roger Stone followed by the complete capitulation of DJT ("wall" has shrunk to "wah"). And didn't Nancy Pelosi show every man in Washington how to wear your balls out? Why did I ever doubt her?

Meanwhile, in North Carolina...

Dallas Woodhouse

1. Load, Aim, Shoot Your Eye Out

We had not even noticed that in their newest Board of Elections law, the Republicans in the General Assembly explicitly prohibited anyone serving on the board who had worked at "electioneering" in the past 48 months. Seriously. Dictionary definition of "electioneering": "the activity of trying to persuade people to vote for a particular political party."

Beyond the restoration of the 3-2 governor's-party architecture of the old old SBOE, I had no idea what else was buried in that law. Evidently, Dallas Woodhouse didn't know either. He's NC GOP Executive Director, and in contravention of his party's law, he presented two (of four) nominees for the SBOE who violate the explicit language of the statute, Francis Deluca and Buck Newton. Governor Roy Cooper actually knows what's in the law, and he demanded two more names, eligible people rather than partisan knights.

Though Cooper gave Woodhouse until Monday to produce two new nominees, Woodhouse coughed them up immediately and under the signature of Republican Party Figurehead Chair Robin Hayes. We'll follow up presently on those two new names in a separate post.

Woodhouse is ruthless but sloppy. Like Twitterman. I like that in an adversary.

Footnote
Four Eggers remains as a nominee, along with Dallas Woodhouse's cousin Eddie, who has served on the Wake County BOE.


2. "Is it me, or has it gotten hot in here?"

NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin announced he would be leaving the bench in February to become dean of the law school at Regent University, Pat Robertson's Christian mill in Virginia. Governor Cooper gets to replace him on the court (and that someone will have to run in his/her own right in 2020).

After the November election of Justice Anita Earls, the Court was 5-2 Democratic majority. With Cooper's ability to appoint Martin's replacement, it may now go to 6-1.

Relatively speaking, that's pretty huge. The NC GOP goes from trying hard the last two years to jury-rig the judicial system in North Carolina, to this:

State Board of Elections Screwing With Wake County

Struggling this morning to get our heads around a late-night emergency teleconference last night at 10 p.m. -- on a Sunday night -- conducted by the State Board of Elections (SBOE) to appoint a vacancy on the Wake County Board of Elections. The SBOE notified the public 90 minutes before the meeting.

What did the SBOE do last night? It appointed Eddie Woodhouse to the vacancy (about whom, more below), ostensibly because the Wake BOE was under a judge's order "to rank the ease" of using four different district plans for electing the Wake School Board and County Commission this fall. Republican redistricting of the county has been ruled unconstitutional by the Fourth Circuit.

Mark Binker has the only press report we've seen on last night's surprise SBOE meeting. But Greg Flynn has come forward with the back story (in a Facebook post):

In 2000 President Bill Clinton made Judge Roger Gregory the first African American judge to serve on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, by recess appointment. Judge Gregory's nomination had been opposed and placed on hold by Jesse Helms. Eddie Woodhouse was a spokesman for Helms at the time.

Judge Gregory was one of two federal judges who decided that recent Wake redistricting plans were unconstitutional. Chafing under that decision which overturned his own, lower court judge James Dever has asked the Wake Board of Elections to rank 4 plans in order of preference, including the unconstitutional plan and two other unconstitutional plans.

Last night the State Board of Elections had an emergency meeting to appoint Eddie Woodhouse to a vacant seat on the Wake board. Now Woodhouse, protege of Jesse Helms, cousin of Dallas Woodhouse (executive director of the NC Republican Party) gets to prioritize a plan declared unconstitutional by a judge actively opposed by his former boss Jesse Helms.