“North Carolina Governor Signs Law Limiting Successor’s Power”

Richard Fausset for the NYT:

But some here said that Republicans’ effort to hobble the incoming governor had few parallels in recent North Carolina history.

“Sure, the Democrats don’t have clean hands, but this is beyond anything I’ve seen them do,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of the nonpartisan group Common Cause North Carolina. “I think we’re in unprecedented, uncharted territory with this.”

Two major bills were approved by the legislature Friday. One of them, which was quickly signed by the departing Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, strips future governors of their power to appoint a majority to the State Board of Elections. The number of board members was expanded from five to eight, with the eight members to be evenly divided between the two major parties.

It also changes the state court system, making it more difficult for the losers of some superior court cases to appeal directly to the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court….

In a news conference Thursday, Mr. Cooper, the state’s veteran attorney general, threatened to sue the legislature over the changes. “Once more, the courts will have to clean up the mess the legislature made, but it won’t stop us from moving North Carolina forward,” he said in a statement on Friday.

Richard L. Hasen, a voting-rights expert and professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, has said that the changes to the elections board could be challenged in state and federal court. In a blog post, Mr. Hasen wrote that a federal case might allege violations of the Voting Rights Act, “in part because the legislature would potentially be diluting minority voting power and making minority voters worse off, just at the time that their candidate of choice (Gov. Cooper) is poised to assume power.”

Flashback to my 2014 HLR piece, Race or Party?: How Courts Should Think About Republican Efforts to Make it Harder to Vote in North Carolina and Elsewhere

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