In deep purple North Carolina, Republicans no longer even pretend not to cheat

There’s a strong argument to be made that North Carolina Republicans have, for many years, not been serious about adhering to legal and constitutional norms when it comes to the state’s elections.

In 2016, former state Rep. David Lewis (a man later convicted of multiple felonies) proclaimed on the House floor during a redistricting debate that he and his colleagues had intentionally rigged a new U.S. House map to guarantee a 10-3 Republican majority in a deeply purple state in which Democratic candidates frequently win the most votes — only because, Lewis said, he couldn’t figure out a way to make the map 11-2.

Ever since then, GOP leaders have made it plain that winning and accumulating power are all that matters. Any subsequent statements about fair and honest elections were merely a smokescreen designed to provide a crutch for friendly judges overseeing inevitable post-election court cases and/or to con a distracted public.

That said, professions of pure motives have remained a regular feature of the Republicans’ public approach to election law. Common sense – and ultimately, a Trump-appointed federal judge – confirmed that it was baloney, but even GOP state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin went to extreme lengths earlier this year to at least pay lip service to the notion that his effort to overturn Justice Allison Riggs’ narrow victory in the November election by tossing thousands of legally cast votes was somehow motivated by a commitment to justice.

As has been made clear in recent days, however, this disingenuous game-playing has finally been officially abandoned. As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported, both state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Caldwell) made this remarkable fact crystal clear last week when they took to social media to admit that the new U.S. House map GOP legislators intend to pass into law this week is motivated by but one factor: doing the bidding of President Trump.

This is from Hall:

“President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat.”

And this was from Berger (a man who, two decades ago, sponsored bipartisan legislation to turn the state’s redistricting process over to an independent commission), in a statement on social media after the map’s release Thursday:

“The #NCGA is ready to help Republicans secure Congress and move @realDonaldTrump’s agenda forward!”

It’s important that North Carolinians grasp the substance and significance of these statements and the dramatic and deeply troubling sea change they represent in how laws are being made in our state.

Two of the most important elected leaders in North Carolina have now publicly admitted that they are willfully and quite cheerfully trashing one of the most fundamental premises of representative government — the idea that the composition of a legislative body should at least do a reasonable job of representing the voters who elected it — in favor of a crude and blatant power grab.

This represents a stunning new low in the Republican-led march toward autocracy.

Sure, there’s nothing new about gerrymandering. Both parties have engaged in it regularly down through the years — often disguised in hypocritical pretenses — but never in such a blatant, crude and overtly anti-democratic way.

GOP defenders may try to claim that Berger and Hall’s overt bragging about their actions and motives is somehow refreshingly honest, but that ignores the way it degrades our democracy. When our leaders stop even pretending that they are motivated by anything other than raw power, longstanding fundamental premises of democratic government and fair play are relegated to very thin ice indeed.

And of course, the statements themselves represent an outrageous perversion of how representative government is supposed to work.

Earth to Sen. Berger and Rep. Hall: the composition of Congress has nothing at all to do with who happens to sit in the White House. And even if it somehow did, the fact that Trump eked out 50.8 percent of the vote in last year’s North Carolina presidential contest hardly represents a “clear mandate.”

To the contrary, last year’s election represents but the latest in a long line of races in which North Carolinians have repeatedly shown themselves to be a closely divided lot that leans toward a desire for political dialogue and compromise, not Trump’s ongoing radical assault on the national social contract.

Tragically, at this point, there’s little if anything North Carolinians can do to resist this latest assault on their democracy. State law gives the General Assembly virtual carte blanche to rig electoral maps without the Governor’s approval, and Republican judges have repeatedly rubberstamped such schemes.

As noted in this space a couple months’ back, the best hope for both our state and nation is that those who reject this latest perversion will eventually win enough elections so that they’re able to overturn it and, at last, usher in a system of independent and lawful redistricting. One prays that the decision of Republicans to stop pretending about who they are and what they’re up to will ultimately help abet the process.

• Senior contributor and award-winning journalist Rob Schofield authors regular commentaries and hosts the 'News & Views' weekly radio show/podcast. A part of NC Newsline since 2006, he served as editor from 2017 to 2025 and, prior to that, worked for many years as an attorney championing the rights of low-income people and civil liberties.