(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where there’s a cane that you swing on your diamond-ring finger.

Over the past decade, we have chronicled all kind of shenanigans in the several states regarding how Republican majorities in the various state legislatures have gamed and gimmicked the system so as to perpetuate their own power. Now, though, it seems that those majorities may well vaporize before Thanksgiving. Consequently, the people making up those majorities are doing all they can to perpetuate the games and gimmicks they have salted through their assorted institutions of government.

We begin our study of this phenomenon in the newly insane state of North Carolina, where the shenanigans have reached manic proportions regarding the state’s supreme court. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has the 411 on some seriously creative fcking of the rat.

The saga of the North Carolina Supreme Court goes back to the 2016 election, in which Democrat Michael R. Morgan trounced a Republican incumbent, giving the court a 4–3 liberal majority. Many GOP legislators concluded that Morgan only won because he was listed first on the ballot, without any party affiliation. So, in advance of the 2018 election—in which another GOP incumbent, Barbara Jackson, is up for election—Republicans changed the rules. They added explicit partisan affiliation to state Supreme Court races, and ensured that the Democratic candidate, Anita Earls, would be listed last. Most importantly, the Legislature abolished judicial primaries—hoping that multiple Democrats would compete against each other in the general election, thereby splitting the progressive vote, while no Republican would dare challenge Jackson.

Judge Mike Morgan judgemikemorgan.com

And now it gets, well, weird.

Their plan didn’t work. Instead, Earls, a civil rights attorney, drew no Democratic challengers. Jackson, though, drew a GOP competitor: Chris Anglin, a Raleigh attorney who was actually a registered Democrat until he filed for the race as a Republican. Anglin’s motivations are unclear; he describes himself as a “constitutional Republican” running to “stand up for the independence of the judiciary.” He has also declared that he is running in protest of the North Carolina GOP’s assault on “the judiciary as a coequal branch of government.” Regardless of his intent, Anglin had every right to run as a Republican in the general election when he filed in June. Republican legislators quickly realized that Anglin’s candidacy effectively foiled their plans to safeguard Jackson’s seat. So, on Tuesday—in the midst of a special session called to deceive voters about six radical GOP ballot measures—the Legislature took aim at Anglin. In just hours, Republicans drafted, introduced, and passed SB 3, which prohibits Supreme Court candidates from running with a party affiliation unless they were registered with that party at least 90 days before filing.

Serious fcking of the rat requires not only length and breadth, but depth, too—the ability to anticipate that there will be rats that need fcking several months down the road. The guy really on the hook here is Anglin, who seems to be legitimately concerned about the wrecking ball that the North Carolina Republicans have taken to separation of powers.

If Anglin fails to preserve his Republican affiliation, however, the 2018 North Carolina ballot will be one of the most jury-rigged in the state’s history. It will ask voters to approve six constitutional amendments that suppress voting rights and shift more power to the gerrymandered GOP Legislature. These amendments will be summarized in highly misleading captions meant to obscure their actual impact. A Republican candidate for state Supreme Court, Anglin will not be identified as a Republican. Meanwhile, the only Democratic candidate for the seat, Earls, will be listed last due to GOP machinations.

A lot of this has to do with the North Carolina legislature’s aggressive campaign to gerrymander Democratic voters—and, especially minority voters—into insignificance. They need the state supreme court to back them up, so they have to finagle those elections, too. (And have I mentioned recently that an elected judiciary is the second-worst idea in American politics?) These preposterously rigged district maps have been laughed out of federal court several times; one of them infamously was described as having targeted African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.”

And speaking of gerrymandering, let’s pop on up to Michigan, where there’s a genuine political bloodbath breaking out on the topic ahead of a state supreme court ruling on a possible ballot initiative this fall that would establish an independent commission to draw the state’s various legislative boundaries. Naturally, the usual suspects are lined up against this idea, including every Republican candidate for statewide office and the state’s Chamber of Commerce.

Anyway, Bridge, the magazine published by the Center For Michigan, got its hands on some emails that were filed in federal court in connection with an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters. The emails show that the gerrymandering went back all the way to 2011, and that the Republicans had no illusions about what they were doing. Don’t fck them rats in the street, they cautioned. It might scare the horses.

The emails were exchanged between GOP aides and consultants in the weeks before the new districts were unveiled in 2011. An early version of the map was drawn to give Republicans a 10-4 advantage in Congress, according to evidence in the lawsuit. Not a good idea, suggested LaBrant, the Michigan Chamber’s longtime senior vice president of political action and general counsel at the time. “We needed for legal and PR purposes a good looking map that did not look like an obvious gerrymander,” LaBrant wrote to Timmer on May 26, 2011, according to court documents.

An aide to then-Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia, suggested tweaking borders in West Bloomfield in Oakland County and in Wayne County to satisfy “the obvious objective — putting dems in a dem district and reps in a gop district" and "increase the black population in the black districts."

“In a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts. Is there anyone on our side who doesn’t recognize that dynamic?” the same aide, Jack Daly, wrote to Timmer in May 2011. Daly did not return a call Tuesday from Bridge. An unnamed GOP aide wrote that the proposed 9th Congressional District in southeast Michigan jutted up “between Mound and Vandyke (sic) down to 15 mile … perfect. it’s giving the finger to sandy levin. I love it.”

Dedication to the integrity of the democratic process seems to be somewhat lacking in this discussion. I have no illusions that gerrymandering isn’t a bipartisan technique. But over the past decade, gerrymandering in states like North Carolina and Michigan has broken through the boundaries of acceptable political chicanery. Those rats aren’t going to fck themselves.

Meanwhile, down in Alabama, that spectacular corruption trial finally came to verdict, and it was bad news for the people who tried to bury a SuperFund site in north Birmingham. From AL.com:

Balch partner Joel Gilbert and Drummond VP David Roberson were convicted on all six criminal charges: conspiracy, bribery, three counts of honest services wire fraud, and money laundering. They were on trial together, but jurors were told to consider their actions and cases separately. Prosecutors said the two men bribed former state Rep. Oliver Robinson to oppose the Environmental Protection Agency's expansion of a Superfund site, and also to oppose prioritizing the site's expensive cleanup…Stan Blanton, Managing Partner, Balch & Bingham LLP, also issued a statement that says Gilbert is no longer with the firm. "We respect the trial process and the jury's verdict. The jury determined that Joel Gilbert engaged in conduct that is contrary to the standards to which each of us at Balch & Bingham is committed and expected to uphold," he stated…"We all greatly value the trust our clients place in us and have redoubled our efforts to earn that trust. Mr. Gilbert is no longer a partner with or employed by Balch & Bingham."

Over the side, Joel. We’ll miss you at the company picnic this year.

In case you were wondering, these criminal maneuverings were undertaken to slow-walk the EPA clean-up of a pretty awful environmental hellspout. Again, from AL.com:

EPA Region 4 spokesman James Pinkney said more than 50,168 tons of soil have been excavated from properties in the residential neighborhoods Collegeville, Fairmont and Harriman Park neighborhoods of north Birmingham because tests showed they contained unsafe levels of potentially harmful substances like arsenic, lead or benzo[a]pyrene. Pinkney said soil has been removed from 389 properties in the area, while 138 additional properties have tested above the EPA's removal limits for those substances. It will take at least two more years to finish removing the tainted soil from properties that have already been tested, Pinkney said.

Skyhobo Getty Images

And the people who live there lost their illusions long ago.



Just take a drive down 35th Avenue North in the Harriman Park neighborhood early in the morning and late at night, where resident Keisha Brown said a chemical smell hangs in the air. She describes the scent as smoke mixed with sewage and it’s one of the aspects of living on a Superfund site, the name given to areas that are being investigated and cleaned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency due to high levels of pollution. Along with Harriman Park, parts of the Collegeville and Fairmont neighborhoods make up the site. Brown cites the smell to the two coke plants near her home. The closest one to her, ERP Compliant Coke (often called by its former name Walter Coke) is one of the oldest industries in the city. Heavy rail lines separate ERP from another plant, ABC Coke, in the neighboring town of Tarrant.

EPA testing showed the soil was laced with arsenic, lead and benzo(a)pyrene, which is classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The EPA listed ABC Coke, owned by Drummond Company, as one of the five industries deemed potentially responsible to pay for the estimated $23 million pollution cleanup… “I am hurt and my community is hurt. We are the ones suffering every day,” Brown said. “That was the main thing before that situation happened. Even when the trial is over, we will still have the same issues.”

Victimless crime, my left elbow.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Sowbelly Tester Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of the Meat Man, Laverne Berryhill, and his fight for justice. From The Frontier:

He was 33 in 1990 when an Oklahoma County judge sentenced him to 40 years for shoplifting. The sentence might as well have been life without parole — Berryhill died while still incarcerated in 2017. He was 60 years old. In the intervening 27 years, Berryhill never gave up fighting for his freedom. He claimed his incarceration was the product of a massive state conspiracy and filed more than 200 handwritten lawsuits and appeals challenging the validity of his prison sentence. He also mailed letters containing fake anthrax to the federal government and threatened to kill at least two sitting U.S. presidents. None of this probably helped his case.

Not the tactic I would have employed, true.

He would wear pants that were several sizes too big and stuff them full of hams, pot roasts and steaks from the meat section at local grocery stores. Berryhill sold the meat to support his voracious addiction to crack cocaine. He was always careful to steal less than $50 worth of merchandise, because that was the dividing line between a misdemeanor and a felony charge at the time. Assistant Oklahoma County Public Defender Jim Rowan represented Berryhill in several meat theft cases over the years and got him acquitted more than once. One time, Berryhill and an accomplice were driving with a carload of ill-gotten meat in Oklahoma City when a police cruiser began following them, Rowan recalled. When they drove over a bridge, Berryhill tossed just enough meat out the window that the police only caught him with $49.50 cents worth of stolen merchandise — still a misdemeanor.

The story is much sadder than it sounds. Laverne Berryhill never had much of a chance.

Faulk was still sympathetic, even after I told him about the fake anthrax letters. “I don’t blame him,” he said. “He shouldn’t have gotten 40 years for stealing meat — 20 to life is ridiculous.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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