“Liberal judges hijack redistricting to abet a Democratic House,” writes WSJ Board

Raleigh, N.C. – The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece on Friday decrying an activist federal court’s attempt to “enshrine a Democratic Congressional majority” by using “partisan judges to make political decisions instead of lawmakers elected by ‘the People’” of North Carolina.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit forecast cancelling North Carolina’s Congressional elections this week until it can impose its own district map drawn by a “special master” to benefit Democrat candidates on the ballot.

Notable excerpts from the editorial emphasize that the panel’s Judge James Wynn “has a history of imposing his liberalism from the bench and twice lost elections to the state supreme court before President Obama chose him for the Fourth Circuit.”

The editorial board criticized Judge Wynn for overstepping – and sidestepping – key holdings of the U.S. Supreme Court:

“The Supreme Court has long held that political considerations are permissible and even intrinsic to legislative redistricting,” the board writes. “The question the Court has been grappling with over the last three decades is how much partisanship is too much.”

“Judge Wynn joined by liberal colleague Earl Britt side-stepped this question and ruled that any political considerations are unconstitutional if judges say so.”

According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “the judges conflate partisanship, past voting, and political views,” in a decision that is “long on case history and short on legal analysis.”

The ruling is an attempt to “create election confusion in the extreme” by allowing “liberal judges to pose as legislators,” the editorial board concludes, “and they are doing so.”