“Mr. Speaker. How dare you usurp this process!” –NC House Democratic Rep. Deb Butler
By: Sam Cryan ’22
On 9/11, with most Democratic members absent from the North Carolina House of Representatives after being told that there would be no votes that morning, a surprise budget veto override vote occurred. Since a two-thirds majority of the members present voted in favor, the veto over- ride moved to the Senate, thus breaking a long stalemate within the legislature. Every single day for the previous two months, the Republicans had placed the veto vote on the agenda, waiting for enough Democrats to be absent so that they could push their nightmare of a budget through. This budget is a Republican’s wet dream: implementing new corporate tax cuts, refusing to expand Medicare, ignoring teacher pay, and limiting funds to investigate chemicals polluting our waters. Thanks to a brazen abuse of power, it is now one vote away from becoming the 2020 budget for North Carolina.
As the Democrats’ microphones were being shut off right before the vote, one of them shouted, “Mr. Speaker. How dare you usurp this pro-
cess!” Yet this was just the latest in a long series of underhanded tactics that Republicans have employed to usurp democracy in North Carolina. Whenever I see a news article from North Carolina, where I was born and spent my whole life before college, I brace myself to read about whatever the NCGOP’s latest assault on democracy is. I’ve watched my home go from the model for a New South to the laughingstock of the other states.
Since gaining a majority in 2010, the NCGOP has systematically removed checks and balances within NC’s political framework, while promoting an extreme, conservative future for the state. For example, Republicans created House Bill 2, a law (which is still partially in effect) requiring people to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender on their birth certificate, a law which is estimated to have cost the state 3.76 billion dollars, not to mention the fact that it is based on an openly transphobic premise. When a Democrat won the governorship in 2016, the lame duck Republican administration stripped him of most of his powers. And then in 2018, the NCGOP attempted to force several state constitutional amendments through the legislature, two of which would have further diminished the governor’s powers. But this only barely covers the damages which Republicans have done to North Carolina’s economy and political structure. It’s gotten so bad that even my Republican friends on Facebook balk at the latest actions the legislature has taken.
Less than half of the voters in North Carolina want this extreme conservative future. After the 2018 election, in which Democrats got over 50 percent of the vote, the party only received 42 percent of the seats in the Senate and 45 percent in the House. With more votes than the Republicans, Democrats ended up only barely breaking a Republican supermajority. How did North Carolina get to be so broken?
The answer to this question requires a trip back to 2010—the year of the Tea Party, and a new mission among Republicans called the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP). REDMAP poured millions and millions of dollars into state congressional races around the United States, specifically targeting the legislative bodies that get to draw the new congressional boundaries. Republicans knew that whoever controlled the map-drawing process would be able to gerrymander the maps to make sure that the party stayed in control. The goal of REDMAP was to gerrymander in favor of Republicans, and it was chillingly effective.
Buoyed by this group’s money, Republicans were able to take majority control of North Carolina for the first time in over a hundred years, and with that control came the power to draw the new maps for the next election. Thus, the NCGOP guaranteed themselves a supermajority in the state House and state Senate, as well as the US House of Representatives—in 2010, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and six Republicans to the House; in 2012, that balance changed to three Democrats and ten Republicans. Reflecting on his work, Rep. David Lewis, one of the map drawers, said “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to ten Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it is possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats.” North Carolina had the most unfair districts of any state or country analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project, so much so that the project no longer considers North Carolina a democracy.
Wayne Goodwin, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, commented, “From targeting people based on their race to dividing them based on their political beliefs, Republicans for a decade have rigged our state and silenced voters to cling desperately onto power.” Now, however, change is possible. Just last month, a state court issued a ruling prohibiting the use of political leanings in drawing the district map in North Carolina, stating, “The 2017 Enacted Maps, as drawn, do not permit voters to freely choose their representatives, but rather representatives are choosing voters based upon sophisticated partisan sorting.” On top of that, every computer used in the redistricting process and every meeting in which legislators discuss redistricting must be livestreamed to the public, allowing an incredible amount of transparency between the politicians and their constituents. Bob Phillips, the plaintiff, calls it a “big win for our democracy.”
There is a chance now to fix the decade of decline that Republicans subjected North Carolina to, but the Republicans haven’t given up yet. Though Phil Berger, the Republican Senate Leader, has claimed, “We [the NCGOP] intend to respect the court’s decision and finally put this divisive battle behind us,” adding that “it’s time to move on,” one Republican politician was recently caught trying to make his home district an easy win for himself (he has since announced he will be retiring once his term ends).
Republicans also continue to try to pass off maps that still have significant Republican-favoring bias as new and bipartisan. The Republicans recently designed several gerrymandered maps, and then attempted to make their selection seem random by bringing in the state lottery machine to decide which of the skewed maps would be used. But randomly choosing between gerrymandered maps doesn’t mean that the maps aren’t gerrymandered. It is now up to the court to decide if the new maps are gerrymandered. I hope the courts recognize the Republicans’ latest trick and ensure that North Carolina’s maps “reflect the will of the people,” as the recent ruling says they must.
Republicans may still be trying to rig the game, clinging desperately to the power that they illegitimately stole almost a decade ago, but now people have noticed. Contacting your representatives and advocating for map-drawing reforms is one of the many ways to act and take back democracy. Additionally, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project has found possible routes to map drawing reforms in every state, along with laying out what individuals can do to get involved. Regardless of what happens with North Carolina’s maps, brand new maps are going to be drawn in 2020 for every state in the country. Only by holding the map drawers accountable can citizens expect fair maps.
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