If You Can’t Beat Them, Sue Them: NC Democrats Sue Over Canceled Judicial Primaries

RALEIGH – The Democrats of North Carolina haven’t had very much success at the ballot box in the last several years, outside of a razor thin victory that put Roy Cooper in the governor’s mansion. As a result, the Left of the Old North State has engaged in a level of litigiousness unmatched by even the most prolific of ambulance chasers – all in a petulant effort to stymie Republican policies from being enacted or implemented.

The latest example is this week’s news that a lawsuit has been filed by the North Carolina Democratic Party (NCDP) against Republican legislative leaders for legislation that canceled judicial primaries.

“The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina and names Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore and the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. Documents from the suit call the decision to cancel primaries, passed by the General Assembly’s Republican majority over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, unprecedented and irrational.

Holding partisan elections without having primaries violates the rights of the state and local parties to choose candidates of their choice, attorneys for the parties argue.

Moore’s office called the suit “a new low” for Democrats who continually “litigate what they cannot legislate.” Berger accused Cooper and the Democratic Party of “attempting to turn the judiciary into a full-time partisan battleground to achieve political outcomes they don’t have the votes to deliver on their own.”

It was Berger’s Republican majority that returned North Carolina to partisan judicial elections earlier this year, also over Cooper’s veto.”

If the NCDP wants to pass or prevent changes to laws, they should do a better job of winning state house and senate races. So far the only success their #BreakTheMajority campaign presided over is a Democrat state lawmaker switching to Republican.

In order to win elections, Democrats will have to separate themselves from the Far Left politics they have embraced and realize that there is a lot more to North Carolina than just their liberal enclaves of Asheville, Charlotte, and Chapel Hill.

“The suit asks a federal judge to reinstate judicial primaries quickly, due to the February filing period. There are some 150 judicial elections scheduled for next year, most of them for District Court judgeships.

The lawsuit quotes state Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin, the chair of the Wake County Democratic Party and a trio of former judges: Stephens, state Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, a former District Court judge, and Bob Orr, a former associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Stephens argues that a primary-less election would be “more like a lottery than an informed selection process,” an argument repeated throughout the suit. The retired judge also suggested what a number of Democrats have said as the GOP majority tinkers with the judiciary: That this is an assault on an entire branch of government that, in some cases, has overturned Republican-backed laws.”

Stephens? That’d be recently retired N.C. Superior Court Judge Don Stephens, who ruled against the General Assembly in Cooper lawsuits, and willfully served as the main act in this week’s political stunt by Cooper & Co., in which Stephens was to ‘represent’ the Cooper in N.C. Senate committee hearings.

The judicial districts in North Carolina have not seen necessary adjustments for population shifts in over 60 years. In tackling that issue, Republicans in the General Assembly reasoned that primaries in February were not compatible with the time required to pass the long overdue meaningful reforms.

This is the mandate held by a party repeatedly elected to legislative super-majorities. To the victor go the spoils.

Democrats might want to think about just how Republicans are able to resonate with so many people from Murphy to Manteo and learn a thing or two, instead of crying wolf to the judiciary every time the majority does something they don’t like.

Read more on the judicial reform spat here.

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