Daily Herald opinion: North Carolina ruling highlights need to remove politics from selecting judges

This editorial is a consensus opinion of the Daily Herald Editorial Board.

In at least three states, last November's elections had profound, specific implications for the future of significant controversial issues within their boundaries - and perhaps beyond.

Wisconsin, North Carolina and Illinois all featured partisan elections for state Supreme Court justices whose political party associations, rather than legal qualifications, were expected to influence decisions as wide ranging as gerrymandering and abortion.

The foreboding ramifications of such a process for selecting judges, especially those in courts of last resort, were vividly displayed on Friday by the North Carolina Supreme Court. Less than two months after the court had confirmed its earlier rejection of a gerrymandered map of political boundaries that gave Republicans overwhelming capacity to control the legislative dynamics of the state, a newly constructed body agreed to rehear the original case and ruled in favor of the gerrymandered maps. The difference, of course, was the party affiliation of the new court, which had shifted to 5-2 Republican from the previous 4-3 Democratic majority.

There are interesting ironies and comparisons to Illinois in the North Carolina ruling. Illinois has also faced state Supreme Court scrutiny of gerrymandering, but whereas the North Carolina court approved the majority-Republican legislature's self-serving maps, the majority-Democratic Illinois high court rejected, in 2018, nonpartisan efforts that would have made it more difficult for the state's majority-Democratic General Assembly to impose equally self-serving political maps. In both cases, the courts applied the positions of their legislature's majority party, not necessarily objective legal analysis of the topic.

In this spirit, the race for two Supreme Court seats in Illinois last November was positioned more as a referendum on abortion than as an effort to identify brilliant jurists who could analyze the law objectively. Circumstances were similarly distorted in Wisconsin, where the state's voters faced - and ultimately supported - the potential to shift Supreme Court control from Republican to Democrat.

Such elections essentially foreclose the chances of deciding a case on its merits, and, as the North Carolina decision dramatically demonstrates, raise the specter of controversial laws that swing back and forth according to the political winds that sweep Republicans or Democrats into or out of seats on a state's highest court.

This is not sound oversight of democratic principles, which ought to be the overriding intent and duty of any court. And, as we have argued recently and recent rulings increasingly demonstrate, the system is at best only marginally improved in the heavily politicized appointment process for U.S. Supreme Court justices.

All these situations emphasize both the integral role our highest courts play in managing our democracy and the deep disruptions that will continue to occur if we don't find better ways to remove politics from the equation.