Supreme Court Blocks Extreme Republican Efforts to Absolve Checks and Balances Within State Governments
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Brooke Lillard
Lillard@redistrictingaction.org
Supreme Court Blocks Extreme Republican Efforts to Absolve Checks and Balances Within State Governments
Washington, D.C. — Today, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to grant emergency relief in two Republican lawsuits seeking unchecked power for state legislatures by absolving constitutional checks and balances within state governments. This follows efforts supported by the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) and the National Redistricting Foundation, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the NRAF, to oppose these extreme Republican lawsuits coming out of North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“Across the country, Republicans are being held to account by state judicial branches for their arrogant attempts to illegitimately draw their way to political power not earned from the voters,” said Eric H. Holder, Jr., the 82nd Attorney General of the United States. “The Republican Party professes to be the party of states’ rights, but when it comes to our elections and redistricting they did not hesitate to run to the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate state court decisions, after they were either caught breaking state laws or simply did not like the maps adopted by state courts.”
“Republicans are making it quite clear that they will do whatever it takes – even if it means eroding our federalist system as we know it – to circumvent the will of the people so they can lock in their own power. This time they were stopped, but their cravenness has been put on display, and we will not rest on our heels in the fight to protect our democracy.”
Last week, North Carolina voters (the Harper plaintiffs in Harper v. Hall), supported by the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF), the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF), and Pennsylvania voters supported by the NRAF (the Carter respondents in Toth v. Chapman) submitted their respective opposition briefs to emergency stay applications filed in the Supreme Court of the United States by Republican applicants. Click here to read the full response filed by NRF-supported North Carolina voters, and click here to read the full response by NRAF-supported Pennsylvania voters.
In Harper v. Hall, now styled as Moore v. Harper, North Carolina Republican applicants argued that the state court did not have the power to consider partisan gerrymandering cases. The applicants asked the U.S. Supreme Court to not only overrule the state supreme court’s substantive decision declaring that partisan gerrymandering violates multiple provisions of the North Carolina Constitution, but also to reinstate the 2021 congressional map that was found to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republican applicants in Toth v. Chapman argued that the state court did not have the authority to adopt a congressional map when the state’s executive and legislative branches failed to timely enact a map. Instead, the applicants proposed that all of Pennsylvania’s congressional elections should be conducted statewide – even though no state has ever conducted at-large congressional elections since redistricting became required after every census following Supreme Court cases in the 1960s.
The Republican effort to undermine our federalist system and give state legislatures the ability to gerrymander with impunity failed today, but the fight will no doubt continue. If these Republican efforts succeed, it will undermine more than a century of precedent and wreak havoc on the American federalist system as we know it.
The Supreme Court’s order in Pennsylvania is available here and the order in North Carolina is available here.
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