Editors at the Washington Examiner warn readers about Democrats’ hyperbolic responses to the Moore v. Harper congressional redistricting case.
To hear Democrats like twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tell it, democracy will end if North Carolina Speaker of the House Timothy Moore prevails in the case being argued before the Supreme Court, … Moore v. Harper.
“The right-wing Supreme Court may be poised to rule on giving state legislatures — yes, you hear me correctly: state legislatures — the power to overturn presidential elections,” Clinton recently said in a fundraising video for a far-left legal group.
If this sounds ridiculous, it’s because Clinton and all the Democrats making this argument are ridiculous. Here are the facts.
In 2021, after receiving the updated census numbers, the North Carolina legislature did what every state legislature does every 10 years: It redrew the state’s federal congressional map. Some far-left activist groups did not like the map created by the legislature (which is controlled by Republicans), so they asked the North Carolina Supreme Court (which was at the time controlled by Democrats) to draw a new map.
Absolutely nothing in the North Carolina Constitution in any way transfers the power to draw congressional maps from the legislature to the courts or any other independent body or to the people via referendum. The Democrats who control the state Supreme Court used just one sentence in the state constitution, “All elections shall be free,” to invent out of thin air a complete and total transfer of power to draw congressional maps from the legislature to the state Supreme Court.
The power of any state to draw congressional maps for a federal election derives from the U.S. Constitution, not from state constitutions. And the elections clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 4) clearly states, “The times, places, and manners of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
