The North Carolina General Assembly has been contemplating resetting all judicial terms in 2018 and requiring new elections every two years. Some have posited that this is an effort to continue the partisan polarization of justice, forcing judges to constantly campaign, while others have posited that this is the first move in a longer plot to make all justices appointed by the hyper-partisan, far-right GA.
To be frank, I have no idea what method our esteemed state legislature wants to use to further corrupt and attack North Carolina’s democracy. It is hard to imagine a more cartoonishly malicious set of policies than what the radicalized right has advanced in N.C. However, in an act of bad faith, I want to reach out to Republican legislators who have been forced to do all this plotting by themselves. Tim Moore, Dan Forest, Phil Berger and friends, here are some ideas that I think you might like.
As proponents of “school choice,” you have all been on the vanguard of undermining public schools, making the education sector more profit-friendly and overtly destroying the boundary between church and state.
Props to you in particular Dan Forest, for masterminding a particularly nefarious system by which the state takes schools from local districts and then gives you the authority sell them off to charter companies in the name of “innovation.”
That said, I think you could go further. You’ve already attacked both teachers and schools with prodigious energy, but the new frontier of attacking education is students. Where are the options for families who want schools that do not educate students? In the interests of government efficiency and corporate profit, I propose we unenroll all students in North Carolina and then sell off the school buildings to Duke Energy to hold coal ash. Don’t worry, we can still technically call the facilities schools.
That might not be a direct enough attack on democracy. Let’s try voting rights.
You’ve been real innovators there, racially gerrymandering so aggressively that a special assistant had to be appointed by a judge to draw electoral districts that did not purposefully attack black voters. However, you’ve been stymied in this district drawing. Let’s skip districts altogether and get right to the voter. I know you’ve already tried draconian voter ID laws, but we can go bigger. Partisan discrimination is perfectly legal so I think we make it illegal to vote in N.C. if you are not a Republican. Nothing embodies the values of N.C. politics more than a single party autocracy.
Are you still worried about the judiciary? That’s fair — they have been the one small protection against your extremist agenda. You can’t really get rid of them, but you could force them to be subservient to your political aims.
Two thoughts here: either force them to constantly run for election in already gerrymandered districts so that they have to focus on politics instead of justice, or just directly elect them and install ideological allies.
