Tag: Wheel

Senate Republicans nuked that power with a simple majority — observing that when the shoes were on the other feet, the Democrats then controlling the U.S. Senate had already nuked any filibusters of President Obama’s appellate judges and Cabinet secretaries in 2013. But the wheel of politics can turn even faster than that. Consider the case of North Carolina judicial elections. For the 2016 election cycle, the Republican majority in the General Assembly decided to make elections to the court of appeals explicitly partisan but to keep party labels off the single Supreme Court race that year, the one pitting (Republican) incumbent Bob Edmunds against (Democratic) challenger Mike Morgan. By luck of the draw, Morgan’s name ended up being listed first on the ballot, the same position that Republicans held in the partisan races. Not coincidentally, Republicans won all the appeals-court seats while Morgan defeated Edmunds. If you look at the county-by-county results, you can see clearly that many Republican-leaning North Carolinians voted for Morgan because they thought he was the GOP candidate. All judicial races are now partisan, which is consistent, but Republican lawmakers decided not to hold party primaries. That meant that more than one candidate of the same party could be on the fall ballot. There are two listed Republican candidates and only one listed Democrat for the Supreme Court and for one of the three appeals-court slots.