Namesake of Moore v. Harper election case urges Supreme Court to take bold action

Tim Moore, a Republican state House Speaker from North Carolina and the plaintiff in the high-profile Moore v. Harper case, hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will not shy away from undertaking a lawsuit that could considerably impact national elections.

The state Supreme Court of North Carolina, which now enjoys a Republican majority, considered whether to overrule a decision about Republican-drawn voting maps that a partisan gerrymander had invalidated on Tuesday. The Court heard the case in December, and the rehearing on Tuesday was only the third time the court has granted rehearing over the past thirty years.

NORTH CAROLINA SUPREME COURT REHEARS REDISTRICTING CASE VITAL TO MOORE V. HARPER

The Court held a rehearing to discuss the earlier Democratic majority’s decision of 4-3 against the GOP’s maps that effectively replaced them with new maps drawn by neutral parties for the 2022 elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court is yet to determine the Moore case and had asked for the opinions of the parties involved in the case on the effect of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision to rehear the lower court case, Harper v. Hall, on the Moore decision. Some legal experts have suggested that if the lower court rules on Hall before the Moore decision, the U.S. Supreme Court’s final opinion on the matter could become moot.

“I would hope that the state Supreme Court would wait because I do think there is a significant precedential value at the federal level with this case, having made it that far before SCOTUS,” Moore said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Friday. He thinks that the North Carolina Supreme Court should allow the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its opinion before offering its verdict.

The North Carolina Republicans seek to reinstate the General Assembly-drawn voting maps that could potentially guarantee 10 Congressman from the state to the GOP out of the state’s 14 congressional districts.

An attorney for the GOP lawmakers, Phillip Scratch, argued on Tuesday that the state courts lack the necessary tools to adjudicate partisan gerrymanders, and that the job of drawing the maps should be left to the state lawmakers.

Conservative outside groups that support the state GOP’s petition have also warned that an unfavorable ruling would “leave the door wide open to the Left’s anti-democracy campaign, which has saturated the courts with politicized lawsuits and introduced chaos to our elections,” Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project previously told the Washington Examiner.

Some Republican state lawmakers have also pushed the court to adopt a legal doctrine known as the independent state legislature theory, which asserts that the federal Constitution prohibits state courts and constitutions from limiting the power of legislatures to regulate federal elections.

However, Moore disagrees with the theory.

Proponents of the theory, often associated with conservatives, base it on the strict interpretation of the Constitution’s elections clause, which states, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

Moore and the Senate President, Phil Berger, argue that the clause does not give the state courts, or any other parts of the state government, the authority to question the legislature’s decisions.

Moore also thinks that the previous Democratic majority in the state Supreme Court “overstepped their bounds and just created new law out of whole cloth on redistricting.”

With the 5-2 majority on the North Carolina bench, Moore hopes that the justices will “rectify this and reverse those hearings.”

Although technically, the state Supreme Court reheard only the second decision in the case, Harper II, which involves the maps that replaced the invalidated ones, the GOP legislators want the court to overrule its previous decision, referred to as “Harper I,” that originally struck down the legislature’s maps last February. ELG counsel Lali Madduri, an attorney for the Elias Law Group, which challenged the North Carolina GOP-drawn maps previously, told the Washington Examiner that the earlier maps “dilute” some constituents’ votes, while the replacement maps require that “all voters have substantially equal voting power.”

“Now, Legislative Defendants play a cynical game, hoping that this newly constituted court will reverse course, and abdicate its fundamental duty of judicial review,” Madduri said.

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When asked whether he thinks the state Supreme Court will overturn the previous decision, Moore said, “I believe they will just based on their precedent.”

“And the thing in North Carolina was that what happened in that litigation was just such an aberration from anything that has ever happened before,” Moore added, contending that the previous liberal-led court “literally made up a new law.”