Get ready, NC. Two anti-democracy streams are poised to become a raging river.

I’ve long thought there to be two largely distinct branches in the North Carolina Republican Party’s stunning war on democracy.

The first is the older, more powerfully developed crusade centered, for a dozen years now, in the Republican caucuses of the N.C. General Assembly. We know its work well. These Jones Street lawmakers have given us the largest racial gerrymanders ever presented to a federal court; the most patent and pervasive partisan gerrymanders enacted in American history; and massive voter suppression efforts aimed at black Tar Heels with “surgical precision.”

All were meant to thwart the fair operation of the democratic system — slanting the playing field to entrench their power and crush the electoral prospects of their adversaries. The goal was to honor democracy in form, but rig it in practice. The political “referees” stack the deck to feather their own ample nests. They’ve been highly successful at it. They don’t storm the capitol. They don’t need to.

The second branch is focused in, and on, Washington, D.C. Its genesis is more recent — tied to the ascendancy of hoped for strongman, Donald Trump.

Its adherents seek a more frontal assault on the essentials of majority rule and democratic governance. They hope to impair confidence in the electoral system, directly overturn election results, promote candidates who will betray the obligations of public office, intimidate opposition through pervasive feints of violence, and degrade the foundational notion of truth itself, thus rendering democracy impossible to achieve.

They seek a permanent minority rule — assured to their traditional tribe, the real Americans. The white, the Christian, the male, the straight. They constitute a literal sedition caucus — aiming to overturn defining, foundational commitments to liberty and equality in favor of their own ascendancy.

They include not only insurrection enablers like Mark Meadows, Sydney Powell, Mark Martin, Cleta Mitchell, and the like — but Ted Budd, Madison Cawthorn and a heavy majority of the N.C. Republican House caucus. Folks who tried to overturn the 2020 election and claim they’ll happily do it again. They’re not the party of Lincoln. They seem to prefer Putin and Orban. It’s hard to tell what they actually stand for. They do what they’re told.

Oddly, I’ve never thought the two camps to be joined at the hip. I don’t really know Phil Berger and Tim Moore. But they don’t seem smitten with the likes of Donald Trump. I’d even guess (perhaps wrongly) that they’d be happy enough to see him fade from view.

Berger and Moore hardly need instruction from Trump about how to keep the boot on the necks of their adversaries. They were doing that here while Trump was still pretending to fire people on TV.

But now the new Trump Supreme Court prepares to merge the two troublesome camps. In late June, the justices, to the surprise of most, agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, North Carolina’s political gerrymandering case. Our legislative leaders, there, pressed the long derided “independent state legislature” theory — which the nation’s leading elections scholar indicates may crush “the ability of state courts to protect voting rights and stop partisan gerrymandering in federal elections.”

The Moore case will offer the General Assembly crowd what it most covets, unfettered power to engage in extreme partisan election rigging. What could be more appealing to a state legislature that has proven to be the country’s least trustworthy election regulator?

And, for the seditionists, Moore presents a new and powerful possible tool to tamper with electoral college results. It’s a glorious two-fer. Our separate anti-democracy streams are poised to become a single, raging river.