House Speaker Tim Moore snagged a national audience with a letter published by the Wall Street Journal. In the letter, Moore takes on the NAACP’s legal effort to try and disqualify two Republican justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court from ruling on a key voter I.D. case. Carolina Journal, which has led reporting on the story, details Moore’s letter:
“When voters elected two new justices to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2020, they did so knowing full well who they were and what their job would be,” Moore wrote. “One is Justice Tamara Barringer, a former state senator. The other is Phil Berger Jr., a former North Carolina Court of Appeals judge who was elevated by the voters to the state’s highest court a full 10 years after his father became president pro tempore of the state Senate.
“Justices Barringer and Berger Jr. were not elected by the people with the assumption that they would not hear cases involving the constitutionality of our state’s laws,” Moore added. “The attempt to disqualify them from hearing cases the voters elected them to hear is a subversion of the will of the people and an insult to every informed voter. It would call into question the legitimacy of the state Supreme Court and do lasting damage to the confidence we have in our electoral process in North Carolina.
“What is it that the plaintiffs in this case are really trying to accomplish? They are attempting to relitigate elections they couldn’t otherwise win at the ballot box. But do we or do we not trust the voters to know who they are voting for? That is the real question.”
Just days ago, Locke President Donald Bryson laid out what’s at stake for voters and for the credibility of the state’s highest court in an op-ed published by the News & Observer.
To learn more, watch our discussion of this alarming scheme to use the courts to overturn voter I.D. in North Carolina.
