Let's Show Judge Bob Edmunds the Way To Go Home

The dark shaded area in that map is North Carolina House District 48, which a panel of three federal judges last August singled out for special comment: "one of the most bizarre and sprawling districts" enacted by the NC General Assembly as part of their racial gerrymandering, now ruled unconstitutional. (In a bizarre twist, the three-judge panel left these gerrymandered districts in effect for the 2016 elections.)

Anyway, NC Supreme Court Justice Bob Edmunds is catching flak because he had ruled, in advance of the three-judge federal panel, that districts like this one were perfectly all right with him. The three-judge federal panel overturned him, and thereby hangs Judge Edmunds' reelection prospects.

He's being attacked in a 30-second TV ad for approving of racial gerrymandering, and Republican big-wigs in the state (GOP Exec. Dir. Dallas Woodhouse, NCGOP Chair Robin Hayes) are screaming bloody murder, that their Supreme Court Justice Edmunds is being unfairly "race-baited."

The TV ad spotlights US House District 12, not NC House District 48, but the point the ad is making seems amply justified in respect to any of the heavily gerrymandered districts enacted by the Republican General Assembly and which Republican justices on the NC Supremes find no fault with.

Edmunds needs to go. Just remember how the Republican overlords in the General Assembly attempted to jury-rig Edmunds' reelection with the "retention election" scheme, also ruled unconstitutional.

This Stinks To High Heaven

Justice Robert Edmunds

Hard to believe -- but, no, it isn't hard to believe at all -- having done their best to suppress the vote and gerrymander themselves into perpetual power, the Republicans in the General Assembly are now moving very fast to make sure that the current members of the state's Supreme Court (4-3 Republican) do not have opposition for their jobs in 2016 and beyond.

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.