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The North Carolina Supreme Court may be set to put the brakes on a constitutional amendment that would require voters to produce a valid ID before casting a ballot.
According to a Friday report, the state’s highest court ruled 4-3 along party lines that the requirement, which was added to the North Carolina constitution in 2018 via amendment, could be invalid because the GOP majorities in the state legislature were allegedly the result of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
The high court’s ruling did not overturn the amendment, which voters ratified that year, but the justices did send the case back down to a lower court for further review.
“In the final week of the final regular legislative session preceding the 2018 general election, a General Assembly that was composed of a substantial number of legislators elected from districts that the United States Supreme Court had conclusively determined to have resulted from unconstitutional racial gerrymandering enacted legislation presenting six constitutional amendments to North Carolina voters,” Justice Anita Earls wrote for the Court’s Democrat-appointed majority, The Daily Wire reported.
The outlet adds:
The two amendments at issue in the case were the voter ID amendment, as well as another amendment preventing the state income tax from ever being raised above 7%. The amendments were passed by a three-fifths majority of both chambers of the legislature; but the voter ID amendment only passed by two votes in the state House of Representatives and three in the Senate; the tax cap amendment passed by just one vote in the House and four votes in the Senate. In the general election in 2018, both amendments were ratified [by] a majority of voters.
At the same time, a federal court ruling found that nearly 30 legislative districts were illegal racial gerrymanders; 100 of the state’s 170 legislative seats had to be redrawn, the Associated Press reported. Judges allowed the state legislators elected in 2016 to serve their two-year terms. But in 2018, using redrawn legislative maps, voters in the state broke Republican supermajorities in both houses, the Raleigh News & Observer added.
State Republican leaders were outraged by the ruling.
“Four Democratic justices have all but thrown out the legitimate votes of millions of North Carolinians in a brazen, partisan attempt to remove the voter ID requirement from our Constitution and deny the people the ability to amend their own Constitution,” state Sen. Paul Newton, a Republican who co-chairs the Senate Redistricting and Elections Committee, said in a press release, the News & Observer reported.
“This is a direct attack on our democratic form of government from the most activist court in the state’s history,” he added.
Meanwhile, the paper added, Justice Phil Berger Jr., a Republican whose father is Senate leader Phil Berger, suggested in a dissent that state Republicans may want to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter.
“Striking at the very heart of our form of government, the majority unilaterally reassigns constitutional duties and declares that the will of the judges is superior to the will of the people of North Carolina,” Justice Berger wrote. “At what point does the seizure of popular sovereignty by this Court violate the federal constitution?”
The original case was brought by the NAACP, which argued that while voters may have approved the amendment, it was passed initially by an unconstitutional legislative majority.
“We conclude that … the North Carolina Constitution impose[s] limits on these legislators’ authority to initiate the process of amending the constitution under these circumstances,” Earls wrote, going on to add that the lower court’s ruling invalidating the amendments was overly broad, The Daily Wire noted.
“In particular, the trial court should have examined … whether the legislature was composed of a sufficient number of legislators elected from unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts—or from districts that were made possible by the unconstitutional gerrymander—such that the votes of those legislators could have been decisive in passing the challenged enactments … In this case, however, the record is clear that votes of legislators from unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts could have been decisive,” Earls added.
House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, also lambasted the ruling, calling it a “judicial coup,” while pledging to continue fighting for the amendments in court.
“This party-line ruling is in direct contradiction to the rule of law and the will of the voters,” Moore said in a statement. “I will continue to fight for the Voter ID and Tax Cap Amendments, which were overwhelmingly approved by the people of North Carolina. It’s time to end the judicial coup that is unilaterally altering our constitution and subverting the will of North Carolina voters.”
