Voting Rights May Be At A Critical Tipping Point

Moore v Harper and the Electoral Reform Act, are connected to a broader undemocratic plot.

Sometimes I feel like screaming at the mainstream media for failing to alert people to crucial (although complicated) issues affecting our democracy coming from different parts of government simultaneously.

Case in point: Moore vs. Harper, argued yesterday before the Supreme Court, and the Electoral Reform Act, which must be enacted before the end of this Congress because Republicans won’t touch it once they control the House.

The two are intimately connected but you wouldn’t know that from the mainstream media, which is treating them as two separate stories. Let me make the connection.

woman holds a black votes matter sign while walking away from a polling place or protest

In Moore, North Carolina Republicans aim to restore a redistricting map drawn by the GOP-led legislature but rejected as violating the state constitution by North Carolina’s supreme court.

North Carolina bases its argument on the bonkers “independent state legislature” theory, which interprets Article I Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution (authorizing state legislatures to prescribe “the times, places and manner of holding elections”) to give state legislatures sole authority over elections, without interference from state courts.

The theory sprang from the head of Justice William Rehnquist in 2000, who wrote (in a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore) that “the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.”