Excerpt By: Frost Illustrated. Written By: Frost Editor.
In recent years, since extremists took over the GOP in North Carolina, my home state has gained a worldwide reputation for intolerance and bigoted narrow-mindedness. Controlling all three branches of state government since 2012, they have remade the Old North State in an image that would be unrecognizable to Abraham Lincoln or to the Republicans and Democrats who stood together in America to resist the Dixiecrats and pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
A broad moral coalition of North Carolinians representing many colors, creeds, political affiliations have fought back hard against this extremism, and we have won—both in federal court and in the most recent election, when extremists lost control of the executive and judicial branches. But the extremist leadership in the General Assembly, who face a special court ordered election next year, have upended the democratic process and engaged in nothing short of a modern-day political and policy coup d’état.
GOP legislators have not only conspired to suppress the will of the voters, but also to seize power from a newly-elected Democratic governor in a special Christmas session. They have stripped power from the state Supreme Court, to which a second African American was just elected. They have consistently passed laws that harm the poor and working people of the state. And they have done all of this despite the federal and state courts ruling their actions unconstitutional on 13 separate occasions. This unprecedented scheme to enact major changes in the structure and functioning of government without the consent of the people or the authority of the Constitution should alarm the entire nation.
If such a blatant abuse of power goes unchallenged by people of good will, these legislators will do more than wipe away the rights of millions of North Carolinians; they will spread the virus of injustice throughout the body politic of the entire nation. Their actions will signal to other would-be tyrants that they can get away with non-democratic power grabs with impunity. The results could set civil, social, and economic rights back more than 50 years.
In light of all the wrongs perpetrated by a radically regressive legislature that violate our Constitution, our civil rights commitments and our moral values, we as the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP will meet and complete a formal proposal endorsed by the state executive committee to put before the national board that asks approval of and calls for an economic boycott of the state.
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