The scheme is set

Bravo, Judge Richard Myers, bravo!

Myers is the conservative Trump-appointed federal judge who put a sorely-needed end to the electoral foolishness of fellow Republican, NC Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, in his quest to unseat Democratic NC Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by disallowing over 60,000 votes from the 5.5 million that had been cast in their November 2024 election contest.

In his 68-page ruling, Myers didn’t mince words: 

“This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible.”

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read an intelligent and worthy court decision, based on the rule of  law, from a federal judge who will always have the moniker ‘Trump-appointed ” attached to his name and title for the rest of his professional life.

If only more Republicans could be as serious about righting wrongs as Judge Myers seems to be, especially if a Democrat like Justice Riggs, who was sworn-in Tuesday, is going to benefit.

For starters, Myers made it clear that he’s not into stealing elections from anyone after all of the votes have been counted. We’ve lived in a country where once an election concluded and had gone through the required recounts to ratify what the final count was, that was it, the election was over, we had a winner.

But not anymore. Griffin was the rhetorical toe in the proverbial water to test what the GOP is planning to pull next.

        Political observers became increasingly appalled with the Republican judges who ruled in Griffin’s favor.

“The damage to future North Carolina elections has already been done,” wrote reporter Bryan Anderson on Substack, who added that there’s “…little incentive for candidates to concede defeat in close elections going forward.”

“There’s now also precedent for wrongly challenging voters who followed all rules in place at the time of an election and leaving them without any means to address concerns with their ballots.” 

“We have a state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals willing to consider anti-democratic measures to alter the outcome of elections after the fact,” opined Politics NC commentator Thomas Mills. “North Carolina will almost certainly see challenges in the future that undermine democracy. With Republicans now in control of the Board of Elections in North Carolina, the concept of free and fair elections is at dire risk.”

Thanks to a state court ruling, Republicans now have control of the state Board of Elections, meaning that how we conduct elections in North Carolina will now drastically change to ensure the more slimy members of the GOP are ushered into office, and citizens whose voting rights are weak to start with, will find themselves legally more locked out of the process.

I asked my esteemed friend, North Carolina Central University School of Law Professor Irving Joyner, what dangers he sees coming from both the aftermath of the Riggs-Griffin fiasco, and the Republican takeover of the state Board of Elections, for people who look just like him and me.

Irv’s answer was a mouthful:

“How can the new Republican control of voting impact African Americans? Let me count the ways.” 

“I expect the new Board of Elections to make it easier to challenge acceptable IDs at polling sites, change rules relating to the registration process, restrict who can be poll workers and the assistance that those individuals can provide at polling sites, eliminate “Souls to the Polls,” increase scrutiny of college student registration, change the locations of Early Voting and general voting sites, increase the difficulty for absentee, mail-in and disability voting, increasing voter purges and engage in a number of other ways to make the voting process more onerous. They can also alter the burden of voting challenges, the type of evidence which might be presented and how open the challenge process will be. They will certainly change the make-up of the staff, the membership of county boards of election, how voter and candidate challenges will be conducted and determined at the county level. Going forward, we will have to be more aggressive in monitoring and challenging what happens in the voting process and will need much more citizen participation in overseeing what those boards are doing.”

So let me get this straight - Riggs-Griffin showed us the scheme and playbook that will be employed from now on anytime there’s an important close election, and once it is, the Republicans who lead the Legislature, the state Board of Elections, the state Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court will always be standing at the ready to make sure that their side gets the total benefit of any decision.

That’s now the new American way during the age of King Trump.  There is no rule of law like federal Judge Richard Myers insists on. But there is the rule of Trump - if an election can be stolen, then why are you wasting time even acting like it’s going to be fair?

And what happens when the Democrat wins decisively against a favored Republican? You have the mechanism in place to discount the votes after the fact, and it will all be “legal,” whatever “legal” means from now on because in North Carolina, Republicans hold virtually all the reins of power.

This is what happens when Republicans get too much power. They falsely assume they should get away with anything, and everything.

And make no mistake, given this scheme, this political playbook, the days of North Carolina and America being democracies are over. As long as Republicans hold majorities in major statewide and national offices, the people are going to see tyranny like they’ve never seen it before.

No, I’m not saying any of this to be partisan. I’m saying it because without the democracy we so desperately need, there is little hope for civil rights or social justice for those who refuse to bend to the will of the ruling republic.

That is not the America our brave young men and women fight and die to protect and preserve. Now, what the rich want, the rich get, and they will be at the controls of all government policy from this point on, because that’s who the Republicans answer to..

The antics of Elon Musk were just a dry run. We’re going to be raining new laws and rules from the whims of rich people from now on.

In a few months, America is going to look, sound and feel like a whole different place. In fact, why are we wasting time - why not just let King Trump rename our country like he’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico and other places he wants to exert his treacherous will over.

The scheme is set, my fellow citizens. No sense pretending. Riggs-Griffin has opened a can of worms, and provided a recipe for a dangerous power grab from which we may never recover.

I desperately pray that I am wrong.

I really, truly do.