OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A prominent North Carolina Democrat has decided to call it quits early after announcing he was retiring. Rep. G.K. Butterfield will be stepping down early to take a job as a Washington lobbyist, according to reports on Friday.
“I’m taking a new job tomorrow,” Butterfield announced suddenly, according to WRAL.
“It’s another phase of my professional life, so I’m looking forward to it,” the retiring Democratic lawmaker added in talking about his new role. “It will be a slower pace.”
He announced in November that he would be retiring at the end of the 117th Congress because of redistricting in his state. At the time, he blamed racial gerrymandering.
“The map that was recently enacted by the legislature is a partisan map,” he said in a video that was posted to YouTube, according to the Daily Caller. “It’s racially gerrymandered. It will disadvantage African American communities all across the First Congressional District.
Looks like some Democrats are a little too eager to leave Congress https://t.co/KxZb8GFYWF
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) December 31, 2022
“I am disappointed, terribly disappointed with the Republican majority legislature for again gerrymandering our state’s congressional districts and putting their party politics over the best interests of North Carolinians,” he said then.
As a result, Butterfield added, he said he was forced to “make the difficult decision that [he] will not seek re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Butterfield has served in the House since 2004; the Daily Caller said he declined to identify the lobbying law firm he will be working for.
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court denied requests from Republicans challenging congressional maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania that had been approved by politicized Democrat-controlled courts.
In a victory for Democrats, the nation’s highest court turned away efforts from Republicans in both battleground states to block state courted-ordered congressional districting plans.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the action concerning North Carolina.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the liberal justices, saying he didn’t want to interfere in this year’s electoral process because was already underway.
In separate orders, the justices allowed maps selected by each state’s Supreme Court to be in effect for the 2022 elections. Those maps are more favorable to Democrats than the ones drawn by the states’ legislatures.
“We will have to resolve this question sooner or later, and the sooner we do so, the better. This case presented a good opportunity to consider the issue, but unfortunately, the court has again found the occasion inopportune,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s order, joined by Gorsuch and Thomas.
In late November after the midterms, however, the nation’s highest court agreed to hear a North Carolina elections case that could have impacts in 2024 and beyond.
“Backed by Republican leaders at the N.C. General Assembly, the crux of the argument is that they and all other state legislators should have much broader power to write election laws, with courts mostly not allowed to stop them by ruling their actions unconstitutional. They’ve been tight-lipped about the case since filing it this spring, mostly preferring to avoid commenting on it to reporters and instead doing their talking through legal briefs,” the Herald-Sun reported.
“Beyond redistricting the case also has the potential to change how North Carolina and the 49 other states handle everything from early voting and mail-in ballots rules to voter ID, recounts, post-election audits, and anything else that could possibly affect an election,” the outlet added.
The report noted further:
In recent years under Republican leadership at the General Assembly — and a Democratic majority at the N.C. Supreme Court — a number of political lawsuits have led to state-level cases with huge implications for how elections are conducted.
Those include gerrymandering cases decided in 2019 and 2022 as well as lawsuits over lawmakers’ ability to amend the constitution to require voter ID and a ban on ex-felons voting after they leave prison — all of which have ended in rulings against the legislature. More cases are pending, including another one over voter ID and one advancing a state-level version of the same legal theory that’s about to be heard at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Moore v. Harper is predicated on who has the constitutional authority to set election policy – seven state Supreme Court justices or 170 state legislators,” Lauren Horsch, a spokeswoman for Berger, said in an email. “The U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause is clear that it’s the state legislatures, but recently state courts have taken it upon themselves to set election policy. In North Carolina, we have a state Supreme Court that has become a legislative body.”
