Republicans aren’t just ignoring the Constitution, they’re betraying NC values

(Editor's note: This column first appeared in The News and Observer, September 30, 2026)

I obsess, I’ll admit, over North Carolina Republicans’ war against democracy. The radical and repeated extreme partisan gerrymandering; the surgically precise moves to disenfranchise Black Tar Heels (continuing with this month’s restrictions on Sunday voting); the hyper-partisan re-make of the elections board; the post-electoral gutting of statewide offices won by Democrats; the breathtaking lawlessness and oath-breaking transgressions of the North Carolina Supreme Court – the broad dismantling of constitutional democracy, and its safeguards, by state government.

I’m a constitutional lawyer. By habit. Like most in my trade, I believed that constitutional compliance was more ingrained, more deeply entwined in the Tar Heel heart, than it turned out to be. I didn’t believe we would so readily break the covenant. It’s unpatriotic. It violates our history. It rejects our national calling and mission. It must be defeated. We owe it to our forbears. And our children.

But as we approach another election, it is important to recall what comes from this un-democratic crusade, what its fruits have been, even beyond the constitutive betrayal. 

Since 2010, we have witnessed and experienced a pervasive, annual, unrelenting legislative campaign to destroy North Carolina’s prized public school system. It has many fronts and components. But its main thrust is to starve the public schools while developing a massive, generously funded, and utterly unaccountable voucher system for private, discriminatory, often religiously-based, institutions. Doing so forgets the southern mantra that the road out of poverty runs through the schoolhouse.

We have recently read much of North Carolina’s regular rankings as being the best for business and the worst for workers among the 50 states. Less often noted is that our lawmakers seem proud of both designations. We have one of the country’s highest percentages of low-wage jobs – where working full-time doesn’t lift an employee out of poverty. Unlike most of our counterparts, we refuse to raise the minimum wage. We’re the only state to have abolished its earned income tax credit. We produced the nation’s steepest cut to an unemployment compensation program. And through an expansion of sales and reduction of income taxes, we’ve favored those at the top and crushed those at the bottom. North Carolina Republicanism feeds the rich and starves the poor.

The Republican General Assembly demands that North Carolina state and local government officials embrace, support, and partner with America’s most brutal, lawless and purposely cruel outfit, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Most Americans, and I’m sure most North Carolinians, deplore ICE’s overtly thuggish, judicial decree-defying, and constitution transgressing operations. We oppose the murder of peaceful folks on our city streets. N.C. lawmakers require that our governments help ICE in its bloody work.

With 1.7 million Tar Heels facing hunger, including over 500,000 of our kids, and about 13% of our population receiving SNAP benefits, Republican lawmakers in Washington have forced dramatic cuts and restrictions on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As the cost of feeding families skyrockets, Republicans have said: “let them eat tax cuts for the wealthy.”

The list, of course, could be much, much longer – the humiliating marginalization of transgender folks and their families, the lavish and unconstitutional government support for religiously based crisis pregnancy centers, the pervasive bullying of local governments, the regressive treatment of environmental, clean energy and climate policies, the destruction of the independence of North Carolina courts, the limitations on public access to the records of legislators and their staffs, censorship provisions for the public schools, and more.

Which is to say, when you crush democracy, you don’t just affect elections and processes, you ensure a government at odds with your values.

 Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at UNC-Chapel Hill.