Those who ignore recent history are doomed to look silly

The most outlandish voices on North Carolina’s political left have latched onto the notion that actions taken by the Republican-led General Assembly in recent years are illegitimate.

Taken to its extreme, the argument calls for courts to block legislators from taking any further action until voters have elected a new General Assembly.

To accept this argument, one must exercise a severe case of political amnesia. The facts of recent political history challenge the illegitimacy argument in several ways.

Claims of illegitimacy hinge on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling throwing out 28 legislative districts as examples of illegal racial gerrymandering. Without comment, the high court affirmed a trial court’s ruling in the case.

Here is where history pokes its first hole in the illegitimacy narrative. Yes, Republicans have won control of both the N.C. House and Senate under all three sets of legislative elections conducted under the disputed maps.

Conveniently omitted from the narrative is the fact that Republicans also won the prior election in 2010. That was an election conducted under election maps drawn by legislative Democrats to help preserve the power of legislative Democrats.

So overwhelming was the shift in political allegiance in that 2010 election that both the House and Senate essentially flipped from chambers dominated by Democrats to chambers dominated by Republicans. The GOP gained a supermajority in the Senate and fell just four seats short of a supermajority in the House.

That first Republican-led General Assembly set out priorities in 2011 that have remained fairly consistent for seven years. It reined in the rate of government spending growth, even when then-Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue wanted to spend more. It avoided broad-based tax increases, even when Perdue vetoed two budgets because legislators wouldn’t endorse her higher sales tax proposals. And it targeted a collection of regulatory reforms each year.

It’s also worth noting another piece of history: House Republicans needed help from a handful of Democrats to overcome Perdue’s opposition. Most legislation approved in 2011-12 attracted at least some degree of bipartisan support.

Many key figures from that General Assembly continued to play important roles in 2013 and afterward. To the extent that the left-of-center cries of illegitimacy focus on Republican-led policy priorities, critics are ignoring the fact that North Carolina voters enabled those policy priorities one full election cycle prior to the disputed election maps.

Even the illegitimacy arguments that are confined to actions taken since 2013 face the challenge of overcoming several other important elements of recent state political history.

First, no one knew the final outcome of legal challenges to the disputed legislative districts until June 5 this year. Yes, critics raised objections about the election maps as soon as legislators approved them in 2011. But both the Obama administration’s Justice Department and the courts had allowed elections to proceed under those maps for three election cycles.

Not until a May 22 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a congressional redistricting dispute did state lawmakers, or anyone else, know that the nation’s highest court would not accept legislators’ interpretation of the role race could play in drawing election maps.

Even some members of the nation’s highest court didn’t realize the congressional case would turn out the way it did this spring. A three-judge minority chastised colleagues for throwing out a previous court precedent that might have upheld North Carolina congressional maps used in 2012 and 2014.

When the high court followed up that congressional map ruling two weeks later with the ruling on legislative maps, justices wrote nothing about illegitimacy of the current General Assembly. In fact, to the extent the unanimous Supreme Court said anything at all, it chastised the trial court. The Supreme Court agreed that the trial court had ordered special 2017 elections without conducting any serious examination of whether the benefits of these special elections would outweigh the costs of creating new off-year electoral chaos.

If the Supreme Court worried about illegally drawn maps creating an illegitimate state legislature, it did not express that concern in its ruling.

Beyond the timing of the final resolution in the legislative redistricting dispute, there’s another inconvenient historical fact for backers of the illegitimacy argument: Voters have consistently supported Republican legislative candidates in every election since 2010.

In fact, the pattern dates back even earlier. In the statewide tally of votes for N.C. House seats, Republicans have won in every two-year cycle since 2002, with the single exception of 2008. On the Senate side, Democrats also picked up the majority of votes in 2006. Otherwise, Republicans have won more votes than Democrats in legislative elections in 2002, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016.

If those espousing the illegitimacy argument mean to suggest that Democrats could have won control of the General Assembly in any of the past three election cycles, they would have to account for the fact that more North Carolinians voted for Republicans in those elections than voted for Democrats.

A more subtle argument would admit that Republicans were likely to have won control of the N.C. House and Senate in every election since 2012, but the GOP would have won smaller majorities. They would not have had the supermajorities to withstand a gubernatorial veto. Much of their agenda would have been stymied.

That scenario runs into another recent historical fact. North Carolina voters elected a Republican governor in 2012. For the past four years, Republican legislators rarely needed to try to override a gubernatorial veto.

It’s easy to argue that then-Gov. Pat McCrory might have been able to steer more pieces of legislation toward his priorities had he believed that legislative leaders would be unlikely to ignore his veto threats. But it’s implausible to argue that major pieces of the conservative agenda over the past four years — tax reform, expanded educational choice, limited government spending increases, transportation funding transformation — would not have happened if Republicans had held fewer legislative seats.

McCrory supported each of these ideas. He would have welcomed a chance to sign bills addressing these goals, even if they had been approved with smaller vote margins in the legislative chambers.

In other words, it’s safe to say that much of the legislative agenda from 2013 through 2016 would have been passed under any set of election maps — other than those drawn by Democrats to benefit Democrats. Any fair set of maps would have given Republicans a shot to turn their advantage in the statewide legislative vote totals into a corresponding working majority in the House and Senate.

That leaves 2017 as the only year in which now-illegal election maps might have played a role in thwarting a Democratic governor from blocking key pillars of the Republicans’ legislative agenda. Even then, the story is not as clear-cut as the critics suggest. Republicans often have attracted votes from across the aisle to support initiatives that enrage the illegitimacy crowd.

To recap: Republicans took control of the General Assembly in elections conducted under Democratic maps. Since their earliest days in power, Republican legislative leaders have benefited from the support of like-minded Democrats. Legislative maps adopted by Republicans have remained in effect until June this year. While rejecting those maps in June, the nation’s highest court ruled unanimously that a lower court had failed to make an effective argument for speedy replacement of those maps. North Carolina voters have backed Republican legislative candidates consistently since 2010. They also paired those GOP lawmakers with a GOP governor from 2013 to 2016.

Newcomers to North Carolina and those who have started paying attention only recently can be forgiven for not knowing these facts.

But most of those who call the current legislature illegitimate should know better. Their failure to account for the facts makes them look silly.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.