Basically the Uptown Paper of Record concludes that court challenges to some of the proposed amendments to the state constitution will not pass legal muster:
You might have noticed something if you looked closely at the challenges to four proposed Republican constitutional amendments that will appear on the North Carolina ballot this November: For the most part, those challenges don’t involve the actual amendments.
There’s a reason for that: Such challenges usually fail across the U.S., and in North Carolina, the bar is even higher for success. Voters who want the N.C. amendments killed might be better off putting their hopes in something other than the courts.
…Why not challenge the actual substance of the amendments? Because there are no cases in which a judge has invalidated a state constitutional amendment on substantive grounds, so long as the amendment didn’t violate federal law. “The people are seen as the ultimate interpreters of state constitutions and in a way judges are hesitant to challenge,” says Wake Forest University professor John Dinan, a state Constitution expert, told the editorial board Monday.
That leaves ancillary issues like ballot language, and if that seems like a bit of a Hail Mary, well, yes. “State courts have generally set a very high bar for challengers seeking removal of amendments from the ballot,” says Dinan, “especially when considering claims that ballot language crafted by legislators is inaccurate.”
Fair enough. I understand that language in both constitutional amendments and referenda have been an issue in the past. But the assumption on the part of legal challengers is voters are too stupid to educate themselves and determine on their own whether or not they will vote yes or no. That said, the Observer concludes “the best way to beat the bad amendments, however, is the old-fashioned way — by getting the word out to voters that neither the amendments nor the lawmakers who crafted them have our best interests in mind.” Fair enough.