One supposes that it’s not an especially unusual phenomenon for politicians who ascend to power to do everything they can to cling to it. Between the ability to shape public policy and the trappings that come with inhabiting high office, political power is almost always an addictive drug that’s hard to kick. That said, it’s also one of the hallmarks and great strengths of American democracy that, for most of the last 250 years, politicians of all parties have accepted – usually honorably – the will of voters.
Tragically, however, this great tradition of honor and discipline was egregiously abandoned by Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election – an action that led directly to the infamous January 6, 2021, insurrection. And now, five years later, it’s clear that this new practice of, when necessary, taking every conceivable step to evade the will of the citizenry in order to cling to power, has become the new modus operandi of Trump’s party in North Carolina.
We, of course, should have seen this coming. That the fear of voter decisions and the willingness to subvert them had become a new Republican tactic of choice was first made blatantly obvious in 2013 when the GOP-dominated General Assembly began enacting election law changes (like the infamous Monster Voting Law) that went to extreme lengths to both suppress the vote of disfavored groups – most notably voters of color – and rig electoral outcomes through the use of extreme partisan gerrymandering.
The practice continued in the weeks immediately following the 2016 election. That was the period during which the lame duck GOP-dominated General Assembly hastily convened to enact laws stripping the newly elected Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, of an array of basic powers long and logically attached to the office.
Never mind that voters chose Cooper with the eminently reasonable expectation that he would wield authority – like numerous important appointment powers — long and naturally associated with the role of a state’s chief executive. Ignoring the obvious will of voters, GOP legislators moved quickly to remove them, and in most instances, seize them for themselves.
And in recent years, sadly, this trend has only continued to metastasize and become even more ingrained.
See, for example, the ongoing effort to take gerrymandering to ever greater depths by, quite literally, rendering the results of almost all legislative elections foreordained and rigged to elect large Republican majorities. Late last year, the GOP took this practice to a new and truly preposterous level when, heeding the dictates of Dear Leader Trump, it further rigged the state’s congressional elections so that our deeply purple state will almost assuredly be represented by a U.S. House delegation of 11 Republicans and 3 Democrats.
And then of course, there was the almost laughably bizarre move to, in the aftermath of Democrat Josh Stein’s landslide victory in the 2024 election, seize even more gubernatorial power – like appointing the state Board of Elections – and hand it to, of all people, the state’s accountant (i.e. the auditor). It was move so blatant and utterly contemptuous of the will of voters that it left many observers to conclude that Republicans would have gladly handed the seized power over to whatever GOP office holder happened to be handy – the Labor Commissioner? Agriculture Commissioner? – if the new GOP auditor, Dave Boliek, hadn’t been so cynically ready and willing to play along.
But wait, there’s more. As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported on January 19, the governor’s office isn’t the only one from which Republicans have shown themselves more than willing to seize powers in contravention of the voters’ judgment. Newly elected Democratic Attorney General Jeff Jackson is also a target.
Despite ample evidence that Jackson has worked hard to approach the task in a nonpartisan manner guided by the letter of the law and the likelihood of demonstrable harm to our state, Republican legislators advanced legislation last year that would strip the AG’s office of one of its central and most important constitutional duties – to challenge unlawful presidential executive orders that harm the state. One GOP lawmaker even promised he and his colleagues would wreak vengeance and render Jackson’s office “a feckless, empty shell of a position that has no authority to do anything,” if he dared to contest their action. Try to imagine that such a move could have occurred if Dan Bishop were AG and Kamala Harris in the White House.
All these moves come on top of many years of repeated legislative microaggressions toward Democrats elected to Council of State offices like the Superintendent of Public Instruction and Secretary of State via budget cuts and other power grabs.
Will this trend continue in the New Year? It’s hard to imagine that it won’t. While gerrymandering and political power jockeying has always been a feature of American politics, the modern, Trumpified Republican Party has taken both phenomena to new and extreme levels never seen before in American history. The only question that remains at this point is how much longer voters will stand for the fear and contempt directed their way by politicians supposedly sworn to serve them.
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