- North Carolina's Supreme Court just issued an important decision on who can amend the state constitution.
- A Democratic majority ruled lawmakers from gerrymandered districts could not propose amendments.
In a ruling hailed by North Carolina's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the state Supreme Court on Friday said the state constitution can't be amended by lawmakers if they come from districts with borders created in a racially-gerrymandered way.
The 4-3 decision sends back to a lower court a case involving the process by which the North Carolina general assembly can amend its state constitution.
The NAACP v. Moore case was filed in November 2018 in an attempt to invalidate two constitutional amendments: one requiring a photo ID to vote and one capping the state's income tax rate.
With its new opinion,the North Carolina Supreme Court said that members of the assembly coming from districts with unconstitutional racial gerrymandering could not propose amendments to the state constitution.
Three-fifths of the state House and Senate are required to vote to amend the state constitution in North Carolina. In 2018, the general assembly was composed of "a substantial number of legislators elected from districts that the United States Supreme Court had conclusively determined to have resulted from unconstitutional racial gerrymandering," according to the majority opinion from the North Carolina Supreme Court.
"We conclude that article I, sections 2 and 3 of the North Carolina Constitution impose limits on these legislators' authority to initiate the process of amending the constitution under these circumstances," the opinion says. "Accordingly we reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals that reversed the trial court's order declaring the Voter ID and Tax Cap Amendments void and remand to the superior court for further proceedings consistent with the guidance set forth in this opinion."
North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, decried the state Supreme Court's actions as "judicial activism" and a "judicial coup."
"This party-line ruling is in direct contradiction to the rule of law and the will of the voters," Moore said in a statement online. "The people of North Carolina will not stand for the blatant judicial activism and misconduct that has seized our state's highest court, and neither will I."
North Carolina's NAACP President Deborah Maxwell celebrated the court's ruling in a statement to the local NBC affiliate, WRAL.
"Rigging elections by trampling on the rights of Black voters has consequences," Maxwell said. "No legislature has the right to use racially gerrymandered maps — infecting more than two-thirds of the districts of this state — to steal power from the people to change our state's constitution."