The US Supreme Court rejected a sweeping Republican-backed effort to oust state judges and administrators from longstanding roles in federal elections, resolving a key constitutional issue that fueled partisan strife in the 2020 presidential contest.
(Bloomberg) — The US Supreme Court rejected a sweeping Republican-backed effort to oust state judges and administrators from longstanding roles in federal elections, resolving a key constitutional issue that fueled partisan strife in the 2020 presidential contest.
Ruling 6-3 in North Carolina redistricting case, the high court turned aside GOP arguments that the Constitution gives state lawmakers near-exclusive power to set the rules for congressional and presidential votes.
Chief Justice John Roberts said in the majority opinion that state courts don’t have “free rein” to reject maps and other rules crafted by lawmakers. But he also said the Constitution “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Roberts and the court’s three liberals in the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
Critics said the so-called independent state legislature theory would have had dire implications for democracy, depriving voters of crucial layers of protection, wreaking havoc on election administration and changing a centuries-old constitutional understanding. Allies of former President Donald Trump had used the argument as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The case was being closely watched by both partisans and election administration experts for how it might affect the next year’s election.
The decision means the 2024 election will be held under much more stable and predictable rules set by state laws passed in this year’s legislative sessions, said Matthew Weil, executive director of the democracy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“We didn’t need to have another election where the rules were basically changing right up until the vote, which would have been likely to happen,” he said. “This shuts the door on that.”
Read More: What Gerrymandering Means and Why It’s Here to Stay: QuickTake
In resolving the case, the justices brushed aside objections that it had become legally moot because of unusual developments in the lower courts.
The North Carolina Supreme Court originally ruled in 2022, striking GOP-drawn congressional districts as so partisan they violated the state constitution. The ruling tossed out a map that was designed to give Republicans the advantage in 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts. State courts then imposed a different map, which produced a 7-7 split in last year’s election.
But Republicans took control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in the same election, and the reconstituted panel reconsidered the issue and overruled the earlier decision. The second ruling meant state lawmakers would have free rein to draw the districts for the 2024 election no matter what the US Supreme Court decided.
Some of the litigants, including the Biden administration, urged the court to dismiss the case. The dissenters agreed, with Thomas calling the matter “a straightforward case of mootness.”
Elections Clause
The fight stemmed from the Constitution’s elections clause, which says the rules for congressional races “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” unless overridden by Congress. A similar provision governs the appointment of presidential electors.
The key question was whether that phrase refers only to a state’s elected legislative body or instead to its broader lawmaking system, a category that includes officials authorized to make election-related decisions, citizens voting on ballot initiatives and courts exercising their traditional power to review laws.
Roberts said the court didn’t need to resolve whether the North Carolina Supreme Court’s first decision misread state law to such an extent it violated the elections clause. He said the state lawmakers in the case “expressly disclaimed the argument that this court should reassess the North Carolina Supreme Court’s reading of state law.”
But Roberts emphatically rejected the contention that the elections clause lets state legislatures ignore their own constitutions when drawing maps or setting out voting rules.
“Our precedents have long rejected the view that legislative action under the elections clause is purely federal in character, governed only by restraints found in the federal Constitution,” he wrote.
The court “soundly rejected the entirely lawless notion that state legislatures don’t have to follow their own state constitutional restrictions when they regulate federal elections,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law who has written about the independent state legislature theory. “They have staved off an enormous amount of potential chaos that would have ensued if they had gone the other way.”
The case is Moore v. Harper, 21-1271.
–With assistance from Emily Birnbaum and Ryan Teague Beckwith.
(Updates with reaction starting in seventh paragraph.)
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