The wild Republican legal theory positing that state legislatures can do whatever they want to do in the management of elections without judicial oversight was unceremoniously shot down by the Trump Supreme Court on Tuesday.
“The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in Moore v. Harper, which involved the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” in which Republican legal theorists made the argument that state courts do not have the power to review actions of state legislatures relating to federal elections.
The specific case in front of the court had to do with partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the partisan maps drawn by the Republican-majority state legislature were unconstitutional, but the state Supreme Court itself changed in composition after the November 2022 state elections, and the new Supreme Court reversed the earlier high-court ruling in April.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent, used the state Supreme Court reversal to argue that the case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court was “indisputably moot,” then argued that the majority opinion could give too much power over state elections to federal courts.
“I fear that this framework will have the effect of investing potentially large swaths of state constitutional law with the character of a federal question not amenable to meaningful or principled adjudication by federal courts,” Thomas wrote.
Roberts, in the majority opinion, wrote that decades of court precedent “rejected the contention that the Elections Clause vests state legislatures with exclusive and independent authority when setting the rules governing federal elections,” though he stopped short of endorsing the idea that state courts should be able to claim an authoritative final say on election matters.
“In interpreting state law in this area, state courts may not so exceed the bounds of ordinary judicial review as to unconstitutionally intrude upon the role specifically reserved to state legislatures,” Roberts wrote.
Roberts was joined in the majority by liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and by Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, who backed Roberts’ reasoning in a concurring opinion, writing that “federal court review of a state court’s interpretation of state law in a federal election case should be deferential, but deference is not abdication.”
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Chris Graham
