Charlotte Rep. Dan Bishop just sued NC’s courts. Here’s why
Dan Bishop, a Republican from Charlotte who represents North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, is suing the state courts.
Bishop wants to force the North Carolina Supreme Court and Court of Appeals to disclose how their members voted on controversial rulings that culminated in pushing back the 2022 primary elections by two months from March to May. The orders came as part of ongoing litigation over redistricting and the state’s new political maps — including districts for the state legislature and Congress.
“Transparency will be very good for the courts that keep disrupting our elections,” Bishop said in a tweet announcing the lawsuit.
Multiple lawsuits have accused the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly of drawing new political districts in such a way as to give their party’s politicians, like Bishop, an unfair advantage in future elections. If the maps are found to be unconstitutional, the delay ordered by the Supreme Court will make it more likely that new maps can be drawn in time to be used in 2022 and won’t have to wait until 2024.
Republicans opposed the decision, which was supported by Democrats. The Supreme Court has a 4-3 Democratic majority.
But, as The News & Observer previously reported, the court did not take the route that most associate with high-profile political cases in which justices hear arguments and then issue their ruling saying how each individual justice had voted. Instead, they used a lesser-known process called “conference” in which they are allowed to debate an issue in private and then give their ruling without saying even what the final vote was, let alone who voted which way.
Before the Democratic-majority Supreme Court ruled in favor of the liberal challengers in this case using the secrecy afforded by a conference, the Republican-majority N.C. Court of Appeals used the same method to conceal how its judges voted when they ruled the other way, in favor of GOP lawmakers.
The process is sometimes known as the “shadow docket,” particular in federal courts where the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has been increasingly using the more secretive process to handle politically tinged cases. But while it has always been a common tool in state courts, too, The N&O reported that it’s traditionally been used for much lower-profile decisions, often administrative in nature, and not for sweeping decisions like moving an election.
Just because it hasn’t been used in that way before doesn’t necessarily mean the justices and judges aren’t allowed to use it that way. But that’s what Bishop’s lawsuit will try to argue, in order to get the vote count made public.
“It’s breathtaking hypocrisy: judges require legislators to draw maps, debate maps, and vote on new maps in public,” Bishop said in a news release. “But they rule on them in the deepest, darkest recesses of the court system. No matter which side of the issue you’re on, every North Carolinian has a right to this information and everyone should demand transparency from our judges. There are no grounds whatsoever for our courts to operate in secret.”
The N&O has asked the courts system to say how both votes went, although a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the Courts declined to provide that information.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 10:56 PM with the headline "Charlotte Rep. Dan Bishop just sued NC’s courts. Here’s why."
