If you think liberal hysteria has reached record
decibels at the national level then you haven’t seen the screeching hair fire that’s
going on in North Carolina. Our state’s
General Assembly has been under attack since republicans gained power in 2010. Regional rags have moved the arms on the
Dooms Day clock to two minutes to midnight.
A recent op-ed emblazoned the following headline, North
Carolina is no longer considered a democracy.
This bit of drama was written by a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. His bio reads thus: Andrew
Reynolds has consulted in over 25 nations on issues of democratic design since
1991. His most recent book is The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and
Reform (Oxford). He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
We all know academia has reached an all new low, but the following rhetoric is beyond the pale. Here is an excerpt from our regional Disturbers:
In 2012 Elklit and I
worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the
cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured
213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method
for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and
place.
When we evolved the
project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina,
would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer
considered to be a fully functioning democracy.
In the just released EIP
report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the
2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies
like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North
Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply
flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed
democracies that constitute much of the developing world.
Is this guy
serious? North Carolina ranks below
Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone? And he
teaches at a respected university? Wow!
First of all, I would
like to inform Professor Reynolds that North Carolina, along with fifty other
states, is a constitutional republic.
The U.S. Constitution specifically dictates and guarantees that. We are not a democracy and thank God for it.
So what has this
professor’s panties in a bunch?
According to this fool, the criteria that ranked us with dictators and failed
states are redistricting, voter registration, a legislature that exercises its prerogatives
and a recent phenomenon: transgender rights.
It’s hard to believe a
professor at UNC-Chapel Hill is unaware of the history of North Carolina’s First
and 12th Congressional Districts.
I can attest to it because I live in it. And I can say without
hesitation that my neighborhood has been in and out of the 12th
since I moved here in 1994. As a matter
of fact, the First and 12th Congressional Districts were drawn by
Democrats in 1991; its legitimacy was contested in 1992 in the United States
District Court. Shaw v Reno went all the
way to the Supreme Court. Here is an
excerpt from A History of African Americans in North Carolina:
The chief justice chided
the state for using race as a “predominant consideration.” The state did not deny the criticism. It created two majority-minority districts to
comply with the VRA and the demands of the Justice Department. Rehnquist objected to the purported premise
of North Carolina’s reapportionment plan, namely, that the General Assembly
could draw a district anywhere in the state to overcome the violations of the
VRA. “We find this position singularly
unpersuasive,” he concluded.
These districts have
been contested since its inception. How
can this be a surprise to a political science professor? His specious arguments don’t end there. Professor Reynolds believes North Carolina
tried to disenfranchise voters by eliminating same-day registration. I would like to inform this academic that
only 16 states have passed this law which 12 have enacted. The real disenfranchisement is leveled
against responsible citizens who registered months in advance of an
election. Many of these SDR ballots are
fraudulent. The Civitas Institute proved
that after the 2008 general election.
This professor should be
ashamed of himself. But we all know
liberals are incapable of self-reflection.
To them, the ends justify the means and the truth is hyperbole.
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