The Battle for NC Supreme Court is Key to Environmental Justice, Democracy
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the most brazen and politically sophisticated attempt to steal a major state election in North Carolina history.
State of Democracy One Year After Attempt to Steal NC Supreme Court Seat
The effort by state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin and the NC Republican Party to overturn the results of an election he narrowly – but clearly – lost by retroactively disqualifying over 60,000 voters who legally cast ballots in the election. The conservative-dominated NC Supreme Court intervened after both the State Board of Elections and lower courts ruled against the challenge, throwing out thousands of legal ballots and directing the Board of Elections to begin an abbreviated “cure” process for tens of thousands of others. Only a ruling from a federal District Court judge appointed by Trump halted that process and directed the actual winner of the election be certified.
NC Supreme Court Enters Partisan Politics
Last week ProPublica spotlighted the much longer story of how current NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby drove the process of turning that Court from an apolitical judicial body into a tool for cementing conservative control of North Carolina laws and policies. ProPublica is a nonprofit news organization which exposes legal abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust through investigative journalism.
Newby successfully lobbied the state legislature to make judicial elections partisan, eliminate public financing for judicial campaigns, and change campaign finance rules to allow more hard-to-trace “dark money” contributions to flow into state political campaigns. When a series of successful Republican campaigns for Supreme Court seats flipped the Court’s majority from Democratic to Republican, Newby swiftly engineered a reversal of the case which had found that extreme partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution’s “free and fair elections” clause.
Freed from that limit, the Republican-dominated legislature redrew North Carolina’s Congressional districts map from a competitive seven-to-seven split between the major parties to a 10-4 split favoring Newby’s own Republican party. Gene Nichol, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said “Newby has become the chief justice who destroyed the North Carolina Supreme Court as an impartial institution.”
Opposition to Strong Environmental Protection
Newby’s methodical concentration of power in Republican hands has been in service of his extreme conservative policy beliefs. Among these are opposition to strong environmental rules. Pro Publica wrote:
“The state’s administrative law office decides whether rules and regulations written by North Carolina agencies are in keeping with state law. Newby replaced the office’s longtime head with Donald van der Vaart, a climate change skeptic and fracking proponent who served in the first Trump administration. During van der Vaart’s tenure as chief administrative judge, which ended in July, he ruled against limits on potentially dangerous chemicals in drinking water set by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Van der Vaart declined to answer questions from ProPublica about these decisions, saying he could no longer comment on the court system now that he’s left.”
Dodging Ethical Guidelines
Newby on multiple occasions has skirted ethical guidelines for judges in his relentless pursuit of conservative policy goals. For example:
“According to the Center for Public Integrity, he ruled at least six times in cases involving Duke Energy or its subsidiaries while he and his wife held stock in the company, always siding with it. During that eight-year period, Newby and his wife’s shares were worth at least $10,000 each year, according to his disclosure forms. He also authored two opinions on a federal agricultural program from which he, as a farm owner, had earned income, while disclosing his participation in the program in court.”
Importance of Election Work
With extreme partisan gerrymandering locked in as the basis of legislative and Congressional district maps by the Newby Court’s rulings, there’s only one way out of his continued control of North Carolina’s highest court. That’s winning campaigns for the NC Supreme Court seats up for election in 2026 and 2028, electing qualified Justices who support pro-democracy and pro-environment principles.
NCLCV will continue to track these issues and the elections that will decide them, all to protect North Carolina’s environment and people
