In December 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court delivered two key wins for voting rights advocates, striking down a voter ID bill as racially discriminatory and blocking a congressional gerrymander designed to hand most of the state’s seats to the GOP.
But just a few weeks later, Democrats lost their control of the court as two newly elected Republican justices were sworn in, giving the GOP a 5-2 majority. As that new GOP majority quickly ordered the voter ID and gerrymandering cases to be reheard, Justice Anita Earls, one of the Democrats who remained on the bench, issued a fiery dissent denouncing the move as a “radical break with 205 years of history.”
“It has long been the practice of this court to respect precedent and the principle that once the Court has ruled, that ruling will not be disturbed merely because of a change in the Court’s composition,” Earls wrote.…
