NC Supremes Drag Allison Riggs

 

Okay, a thing happened last Wednesday at the NC Supreme Court that I kind of ignored even though the headline writers opted for calling it a defeat for Jefferson Griffin (who's been trying to purloin a Supreme Court seat for himself. Where have you been?), but the Court's refusal to grant Griffin an order to fast-track throwing out legal and legitimate votes incrementally until he can achieve the desired majority over Allison Riggs -- the Court's denial of Griffin was accompanied by a refusal to lift the stay preventing certification of the race by the State Board of Elections. The Court is throwing the case back for trial to the lower courts -- first Superior, then Court of Appeals, and thence, finally, to Paul Newby's coven of partisans for the ultimate decision: Shall we continue to have Allison Riggs on the Court, or will Jefferson Griffin succeed in undermining the democratic rule of law and eternally besmirch the Court?

In other words, maybe they can just keep Riggs off by dragging out the process for years.

Jeffrey Billman published in The Assembly an intense unpacking of the stuff that the judges wrote in their unanimous decision to deny Griffin's fast-track scheme -- all five Republican judges and Anita Earls, the lone Democrat, wrote their own opinions. Earls dissented on the refusal to lift the stay on declaring a winner. Earls, who gets under Newby's skin faster than any chigger, points out in her opinion that under state law (Billings includes a link) leaving a temporary stay in place for a trial indicates that “the petitioner is likely to prevail” -- kind of a dead give-away that her Republican colleagues are sending a message to the lower courts of their desired outcome.

Newby flashed his conspiratorial backside in his concurring opinion, according to Billings, called it “highly unusual” that Griffin was ahead on election night but fell behind when all the votes were counted. "It’s unclear whether Newby meant to raise the possibility of fraud or vote-counting improprieties—which Griffin has not alleged—but it’s not unusual for late absentee and provisional ballots to shift leads in close elections."

Newby’s comments “show a complete lack of understanding of how elections are conducted,” said Gerry Cohen, a Wake County Board of Elections member and former General Assembly special counsel. [Cohen is the authority on NC election law, since he helped draft most of it.]

Billings draws attention to why last Wednesday's decision doesn't look like any kind of victory for Riggs:

Newby also chided Griffin’s critics for accusing him of trying to “disenfranchise” voters. He called Griffin’s complaints “valid” and said they “may affect the outcome of the election.” Barringer and Justice Phil Berger Jr. cosigned.

That's some kind of a signal, no?

But wait! Parallel but separate legal action is also proceeding in the Federal system. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has been petitioned by Riggs to take the case away from the state on the basis that Griffin's request would retroactively disenfranchise voters and thereby "violate numerous federal civil rights laws,” including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Oral arguments in this case begin tomorrow.

What's Wrong With NC Democrats?

 

Jeffrey Billman is the best hoof journalist in the state. I first read his writing in Indy Week, where he was editor-in-chief for several years. I followed him to an emailed (sometimes daily) political newsletter, "Primer North Carolina," where I learned significant facts about consequential goings-on and admired his clarity, his depth, his instinct for finding the pulse of things, the greatest talent of any good investigative journalist. Billman's a prolific freelance now, and thank gawd for new internet publications like The Assembly, willing to underwrite good investigative journalism. (Subscriptions are more than reasonable and worth it.)

Jeffrey Billman has produced for The Assembly the most revealing investigation of the current fight for the chairmanship of the NCDP, between a 73-year-old incumbent blamed by many grassroots activists for the 2022 debacle and a 25-year-old upstart with proven skills for winning unlikely campaigns. (I've written extensively about both Bobbie Richardson and Anderson Clayton and don't intend to write more. Use the search function up top, if you don't believe me.)

For his article on the Democrats, "Tangled Up in Blue," Billman interviewed a lot of people, but the interview he landed with Morgan Jackson is by far the most diagnostic of what's gone wrong with the Democrats. Morgan Jackson is Chief Political Strategist for Governor Cooper and also for Josh Stein ("Governor in '24!"), and the state Party has traditionally spent money the way the chief political strategist for the governor wanted it spent. So in the current struggle for the chairmanship, you don't get any more establishment than Morgan Jackson. Jackson has his own consulting firm, Nexus Strategies. He has a clear financial stake in the status quo, which happens to be the reelection of Bobbie Richardson. for it's in his interest and in the collective interests of his guys to make sure the gears are turning correctly down at the state Democratic Party HDQs. 

"It all begins and ends with money," Jackson told Billman. Which ... no kidding!

So the big establishment doubt about Anderson Clayton, the insurgent, is pecuniary. Can a 25-year-old upstart be able to raise the money? Billman says the party under Richardson's management raised a record $29 million in the '21-'22 cycle. Can Anderson Clayton do as well? Or even rake in a more average $20 million? She'll actually need more than that to mount a sustenance plan for activist organizing in the rural counties.

You betcha the money will come for Anderson Clayton!  I feel it myself. I don't think I've ever given anything directly to the state Dems (except my sweat and my blood), but with a new leader who has both a vision and a clue, I would be generous. Others would too. The fecklessness of the Raleigh apparatus frankly caused me to resent the county party's assessment for "the sustaining fund," which all county parties are required to pay to the central office. What's the money going to? 

Clayton doesn't lack for confidence in herself. She forecast to Billman that "donors will open their wallets if there’s a clear vision for how to make North Carolina a beacon of the South.” I agree. 

Jonah Garson, the young Chapel Hill lawyer who ran for the NC House in 2020 in the Democratic primary and is a past chair of the Orange County Democratic Party and is currently running for one of the vice-chairmanships of the state party, told Billman:

“I know from being in conversations with donors, mainly in the context of resourcing legislative campaigns, but also as chair of the Orange County Democrats, that there are a number of donors in state and out of state who would love to fund and feel a part of aggressive, on-the-ground field operations,” he said. “But you just need a strong, credible vehicle for building out strategies and executing plans.”

 "Aggressive, on-the-ground field operations." 

Orange County Senator Graig Meyer agreed that the state party has lacked a taste for blood, shying away from aggressive politics and "too dependent on outside groups to attack Republicans instead of doing it themselves." For example, Ted Budd never got successfully tagged as the good ole boy extremist he was.

Anderson Clayton gets the last word: "This party needs bite again."

We'll find out Saturday.

NC's Voter Photo ID Law, Resurrected by the 4th Circuit

I can't be everywhere all the time, and I'm thankful for Jeffrey Billman and his Primer/North Carolina email newsletter for catching this action. I'm copying him here blatantly: 

Just in time for, um, next year’s municipal elections, the state’s voter ID law—passed in late 2018—is back. Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a district court decision blocking the law, ruling that we have to give the NC General Assembly the benefit of the doubt:

The outcome hinges on the answer to a simple question: How much does the past matter? To the district court, the North Carolina General Assembly’s recent discriminatory past was effectively dispositive of the Challengers’ claims here. But the Supreme Court directs differently. A legislature’s past acts do not condemn the acts of a later legislature, which we must presume acts in good faith.

This isn’t the end of the road for opponents, as WRAL explains:

“This decision dealt with an injunction blocking implementation of the requirement, but a full trial on the constitutionality of that requirement is still to come in federal court. A separate lawsuit was also filed targeting this law at the state court level, and there’s a third lawsuit targeting multiple amendments to the state constitution, including voter ID. All three cases remain active.”

Some Statewide Early Voting Turnout Numbers

 

I'm indebted to Jeffrey Billman's new PRIMER/North Carolina (and see below about Billman's valuable fresh contribution to your appreciation for hard news), who's indebted to political scientist Michael Bitzer, for the following early voting statistics from North Carolina (through last Saturday, October 17):

A total of 1,433,772 votes had been cast in North Carolina as of the close of business on Saturday, counting both Absentee By Mail (ABM) and Absentee One-Stop (in-person voting). That number equals 20% of registered voters in the state and 46% of the total number of absentee voters in 2016 (46% of the 2016 vote in only the first three days of early voting, holy cow!).

By party:

Democrats: 46%

NoPartyAffiliation: 28%

Republicans: 25%

By generation:

Boomers: 45%

Gen X: 22%

Millennials: 14%

Greatest/Silent:14%

Gen Z: 5%

By regions:

City: 31%

Urban suburb: 26%

Surrounding suburbs: 24%

Rural: 19%

Important: 22% of these votes — roughly 308,000 — came from people who either didn’t vote in 2016 or registered afterward.

Burning questions and snap assumptions proliferate in my brain as I peruse those numbers -- like Unaffiliated voters out-voting Republican voters, let alone the surging turnout of Democrats -- and the lagging performance of Gen X, Millennials, and (yikes!) Gen Z (sort yourselves out, kids!) -- but beyond that I'll leave you to your own private cogitations.

Now, about the estimable Jeffrey Billman and his daily, free newsletter (though you can also subscribe, which I did, which gives you more, including access to the archives). Billman used to edit the Indy Week in Durham and produced a daily newsfeed which I would devour and often steal from, but he's gone fully independent, and I'm all for supporting the work of independent news sources when so many newspapers are going caput. Here's how Billman describes his labor of love:

If you’re trying to figure out what this newsletter is about, think of it like this: Imagine your news-junkie friend obsessively consuming media from the Triangle, North Carolina, and across the country, boiling down all of the essential stories to their core points, putting things in their historical and political contexts, and giving you the rundown while you have your morning coffee.

Suits me! You can join him on Facebook, where you can also sign up for the free daily newsletter or go further like I did and throw a little money his way. He's already become essential reading for me. 

Raleigh Office of Indy Week Destroyed During Street Protests

The Indy Week is a vital independent journal that I depend on for fearless on-the-ground news from the capitol city -- especially the writing of editor Jeffrey C. Billman, whose daily email summaries of what's up have become a must-read ritual for me (see below for a link for signing up for those emails). It was the final let-down of the day yesterday -- after another tragic week -- when we got this news from Billman:

I awoke this morning to learn that, following the George Floyd protest-turned-riot, our downtown Raleigh office looked like this:

Fortunately, no one was hurt. But our reporter Leigh Tauss was working inside when the first person threw a brick through the glass. She escaped into a hallway and then took an elevator downstairs as looters came in. After she left, sometime around 2:00 a.m., others came by, stole a computer, and set our office furniture ablaze. That set off the sprinklers, which soaked everything for the next four hours until the property manager arrived.

Needless to say, the office—and everything in it—is a total loss.

Leigh was downtown last night doing what the INDY has done since its founding in 1983: providing fearless, high-quality local journalism amid a crisis. Like the community we serve, our small, independent news organization has already been facing an unprecedented economic shutdown.

Throughout, our readers have sustained us by joining the INDY Press Club, our membership program.

Now, like others in downtown Raleigh, we are picking up the pieces. And once again, we are asking for your support. Our community needs fiercely independent reporting more than ever—and today, we need your help more than ever.

Your contributions to the INDY Press Club will allow us to continue making better journalism to foster a better community.

If you can, please join our growing community of donors by contributing $12 a month or $100 today—or more, or less, whatever you feel comfortable with—so we can get back to doing what we do best: providing our region with the best independent local reporting and enterprise coverage our small but mighty newsroom can produce.

In solidarity and hope for a better tomorrow,

Jeffrey C. Billman, editor in chief

I contributed immediately, and I hope you'll consider it too. Check out the Indy Week website: https://indyweek.com. Here's the link for signing up for daily email newsletters: https://indyweek.com/supporttheindy/indy-week-newsletter-sign-up/

The trashing of the Indy Week office is a tragedy that we can help heal.

Joe Biden's Problem

I try not to out-right steal other people's writing, but Jeffrey Billman is making it hard for me. I get his daily Indy Week email, which has become indispensable for keeping up with any number of North Carolina and national storylines.

"Joe Biden's Self Quarantine"
Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, April 30, 2020

I saw Joe Biden on TV this morning categorically denying the Tara Reade sexual assault allegations, and I noticed Kevin Sier's editorial cartoon in the Charlotte Observer. So I naturally went right to that section of Billman's daily email that headlined this:

→ TARA READE IS BECOMING A PROBLEM FOR JOE BIDEN. 

And absorbed a long, long piece that turned over every piece of evidence with just the right mixture of skepticism and open-mindedness:

For a month or so, Joe Biden’s campaign acted as though Tara Reade’s allegation that he had—how to put this politely—digitally penetrated her against her will in 1993 would go away on its own....

Then, in mid-April, the major national newspapers dug in, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

A former intern for another lawmaker told both papers that Reade had told her about the assault at the time, but she declined to go on the record.

Reade said she told her mother about the assault, but her mother was dead.

Another friend told the NYT that Reade had told her in 2008 that Biden touched her inappropriately and that she’s had a traumatic experience working in his office.

Reade’s brother had this curious exchange with WaPo: “In another recent interview, Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, said she told him in 1993 that Biden had behaved inappropriately by touching her neck and shoulders. … Several days after that interview, he said in a text message that he recalled her telling him that Biden had put his hand ‘under her clothes.’ ”

All in all: Not good for Biden, but not fatal. So long as another shoe didn’t drop.

Then a shoe dropped. Not, like, a size-12 Doc Martin. More like a size-4 slipper. Reade had said that, after she told her mother about the assault, her mother had called in to Larry King’s CNN show. Last weekend, someone dug up a recording.

“In a Larry King Live segment that aired on August 11, 1993, on CNN, an unnamed woman calls in to the show with her location identified on the screen as San Luis Obispo, California. The show was about the cutthroat nature of Washington, DC, politics and media. ‘Yes, hello. I'm wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington?’ she asks. ‘My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.’ ”

“The woman does not mention sexual assault or harassment, nor does she describe in any detail what ‘problems’ she might be referring to. Her daughter’s name and Biden's are also not mentioned. In a phone interview with CNN Friday night, Reade told CNN that she is certain the voice in the video belongs to her mother, Jeanette Altimus, who died a few years ago.”

And then another shoe, this one a little more impactful. A former neighbor of Reade’s told Business Insider that in the mid-1990s Reade had told her about the assault, and another former coworker said that Reade told her that she’d been sexually harassed and then fired when she complained about it....

I appreciate Billman's summary of the action thus far, which seems fair and fairly complete, because I wasn't likely to go search it all out for myself. So I'm thankful for his work.

Billman also spends a good deal of space on Republican charges that Democrats are hypocrites. I get that. I certainly do. And don't relish the charge. Uncannily, Billman exactly captures the mental gymnastics many of us fall back on when accused of hypocrisy:

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Assume Biden is innocent. (If you want to read a former federal prosecutor throwing shade on Reade’s allegations, here you go.) What can Biden possibly say? Reade’s allegation is unprovable; it’s also unfalsifiable. She can’t give a date or location where this happened—things that would allow Biden to show he was somewhere else.

So you say, “These allegations aren’t true.” Then what? If you attack Reade, you’ll be accused of doing what Republicans did to Christine Blasey-Ford. You’re stuck with “believe all women, just not this one.”

It’s a no-win scenario for even the deftest and most innocent politician. Biden certainly isn’t the former; the latter … well, continue reading.

HYPOCRITE: There are dueling thoughts I’ve been wrestling with this week: 1) Instinctively, I don’t think Biden did it. 2) I know that I think that because I don’t want to think that he did it.

It’s not because I’m a Biden fanboy; he wasn’t my choice in the primary (Warren). It’s not because he’s on my “team”; my “team” is thinking Donald Trump poses a threat to American democracy. If Biden got replaced between now and November, pretty much anyone (ahem, Warren) would be fine.

It’s because, as boringly generic and sometimes infuriatingly terrible as his politics are, Biden always struck me as an earnest, genuinely decent guy. OK, so, the Anita Hill hearing was not his finest hour. And his habit of invading women’s personal space is gross, but even that didn’t seem ill-intentioned so much as geezer-is-out-of-touch. I’ve known men like that—empathetic, affectionate, maybe a first-rate bullshitter, but not a predator.

My gut didn’t give Kavanaugh the same benefit of the doubt, not for a second. I’ve known men like him, too—children of privilege, self-important and self-righteous, feigning indignancy and projecting rage. It’s not hard to imagine the worst.

Does that make me a hypocrite? Perhaps. More likely, it makes me human....

I don't feel defensive about Biden's embarrassment in this matter. He wasn't my first choice in the primary either, nor my second choice. If there's a swelling movement to replace him with another candidate at the Democratic National Convention, well ... throw me in that briar patch!

Here's Billman's conclusion:

LONG STORY SHORT: Politically, Biden needs to do just enough today to keep the women’s groups on board and (best case) get the media to move on—in other words, deny, don’t be defensive, sound credible, don’t say anything dumb, don’t attack Reade, and apologize to the women you’ve made uncomfortable. He can’t do much else. 

Republicans are still going to make Reade a prop to distract from Trump and paint Biden and his female VP nominee and Democrats in general as hypocrites, and the left’s Never Bidens will use her to justify voting third party (“the lesser of two rapists,” etc.). All that’s baked in already.

If Biden doesn’t screw up, the only thing that changes the equation is a second credible accuser.

Billman's entire take on the scandal seems well considered and wholly logical and caused me to contribute to the "Indy Press Club" to KeepItIndy.com. We need honest opinion brokers like Jeffrey Billman. He's a crucial part of my information universe.