Longtime friend, colleague, and Republican lawyer Dale Oldham wrote this inspiring tribute to North Carolina election law attorney Thomas Farr who passed on April 1, following a series of heart problems.

Like Horatius at the bridge, Tom Farr spent his adult life fighting until his last breath in the defense of the Republic. I first met Tom Farr nearly 35 years ago when a team of unlikely Republican attorneys set out to slay the most enormous, obnoxious, and persistent gerrymander that has ever existed in history. It had first been put in place by the Democratic Party in the wake of their enormous electoral success during the Great Depression and it was intended to make their grip on political power in the United States permanent. It was incredibly successful, far exceeding any gerrymander which preceded or succeeded it. As a result of this gerrymander, in 1992 the Democratic Party had controlled the House of Representatives for 40 years and controlled an overwhelming number of the state legislatures. Analysis of the various maps showed that it would take a nationwide vote in excess of 60% to win a majority of the seats in Congress and the state legislatures under such a gerrymandered map. It paradoxically relied upon the gerrymandering of African American voters, but its real target was always to prevent Republican electoral success. A number of us had decided to strike at the heart of that paradox and by ending the gerrymander against African American voters, we could likewise end the gerrymander of ourselves.

Earlier this week, the North Carolina Supreme Court heard two high-profile election law cases. The catch? These cases were already decided last year.

In February, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to rehear these cases—which is permissible under North Carolina law.

On Friday, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the state's voter ID law with a partisan ruling during a lame duck session. The Carolina Journal explained:

Two weeks before they’re set to lose their majority, N.C. Supreme Court Democrats issued rulings Friday striking down the state’s photo voter identification law and the election map used for state Senate races.

This morning, the United States Supreme Court heard three hours of oral argument in Moore v. Harper, a highly-charged redistricting case out of North Carolina.

How highly charged? Well, mainstream media and voting rights groups have called it the case that "threatens" to "upend democracy." But a quick look at today's arguments shows a different story.

I'll be following today's oral argument in #MooreVHarper and will do tweet thread here. For overview of issues, see my three posts: https://t.co/7dW0ukyXO9https://t.co/ln1GLw7LGjhttps://t.co/H9vISnCSBX

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) December 7, 2022

One of the biggest wins for Republicans on Election Day was gaining the majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court (North Carolina elects its state supreme court justices in partisan races.):

[T]he biggest and longest-lasting impacts of Tuesday’s elections will be felt at the state Supreme Court, where Republicans flipped two Democratic-held seats to earn a 5-2 majority that will last until at least 2028.

State lawmakers and U.S. House members elected Tuesday will have to face voters two more times before Democrats even get a chance to retake the state’s highest court. In that time, conservative justices will have a chance to weigh in on a multitude of issues, including redistricting, voting rights, the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches and social issues, including, potentially, abortion rights.

A coalition of national and local Republican parties represented by attorney Phil Strach has successfully blocked one of the North Carolina State Board of Elections' ("NCSBE") latest attempts at unlawful rulemaking. (The complaint in Deas v. NCSBE can be found here). NCSBE had interpreted its rules to restrict the coming and going of at-large election observers, stating that, if an at-large observer stayed less than four hours at a particular site, their political party could not send another person to replace them. On Thursday, Wake County Superior Court Judge Vince Rozier decided that the rules governing election place observers should be relaxed. 

There are two kinds of election observers in North Carolina: those who must stay at one polling place and at large-observers who can move among polling places. Political parties have long been allowed to send observers to watch voters and election administrators at polling locations to ensure that the electoral process is followed appropriately. NCSBE's guidance would have unfairly impacted election integrity operations since it would have prevented the substitution of regular observers with party lawyers, who could then investigate any irregularities witnessed by non-lawyer observers. As Strach observed: "We wouldn't be able to replace the layperson observer with the lawyer observer .... We would just be screwed." 

Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court blatantly ignored the will of voters to hand down an unprecedented decision that opens the door for two state constitutional amendments to potentially be struck down. The court did this by arguing that because many of the legislators that referred the amendments to the ballot were elected from maps that were adjudicated gerrymandered, the amendments were likely invalid. Never mind the fact that a majority of North Carolina voters statewide voted to approve the amendments. RedState reported: 

In what can only be described as a full-scale judicial coup, the Democrat-controlled body has ruled that the North Carolina General Assembly is illegitimate and can not enact amendments to the state’s constitution. Their reasoning? That the state’s legislature is “gerrymandered.”

State supreme court elections often fall under the radar, but issues like redistricting and the overturning of Roe v. Wade are raising their profile as we approach the 2022 midterm elections. As Politico explained:

Thirty states have or will hold state Supreme Court elections this year, in a combination of traditional elections or a retention vote — an up-or-down vote to decide if a judge should stay on the bench. And some of the biggest state Supreme Court contests this year map alongside traditional battlegrounds, like Michigan and North Carolina, while others creep into redder or bluer territory. . .

The past week has been a busy one for redistricting. Unsurprisingly, most of the scrutiny has been on Republican-drawn districts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order reinstating Alabama's congressional map that a lower court struck down.

Alabama's new congressional map is a status quo map based on the previous one precleared by Eric Holder’s Justice Department 10 years ago. The Supreme Court rightly stayed the lower court's egregious misapplication of Section 2. https://t.co/JopP8piI0c

— National Republican Redistricting PAC (@GOPRedistrict) February 7, 2022

The continued efforts by liberals and Democrats to intimidate and politicize the courts has reached a new low. In an unprecedented move, the NAACP is seeking to force the recusal of two North Carolina Supreme Court justices from a case concerning the state's voter ID law. The Carolina Journal explains:

The NAACP seeks to formally remove two GOP Supreme Court justices from a critical constitutional amendments case. Its attorneys presented a detailed argument to the Supreme Court on why the court as a whole should disqualify the two justices, an action never before taken in North Carolina, because of alleged conflicts of interest.