WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to let Republican lawmakers in North Carolina intervene on behalf of a voter-ID law now at odds with the state's Democratic leadership.
The 8-1 decision does not end the dispute, addressing jurisdictional matters only and not the merits of the case.
“Permitting the participation of lawfully authorized state agents promotes informed federal-court decisionmaking and avoids the risk of setting aside duly enacted state law based on an incomplete understanding of relevant state interests,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, scoffing at claims that the lawmakers' interests were not already represented.
“The Court’s conclusion that state respondents inadequately represented petitioners’ interests is a fiction that the record does not support,” the Obama appointee wrote. “In addition, the Court’s armchair hypothesizing improperly displaces the District Court’s firsthand experience in managing this litigation.”
Republican lawmakers Philip Berger and Timothy Moore are fighting to defend the law that a panel of state judges struck down as racially biased but is still facing federal court scrutiny.
While North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is technically the defendant in the case, but the Republican lawmakers want to intervene since Cooper not only declined to defend an earlier version of the law but vetoed its current version.
Berger and Moore failed twice to intervene in the federal case. Last June, the Fourth Circuit heard the case en banc and ruled against the lawmakers.
The North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, which says the law illegally impinges the right to vote, contends that Cooper is properly defending the law and told the justices that the state should have only one party defending the law.
During oral arguments in April, Berger and Moore told the justices that their case has support in recent precedent involving a Kentucky abortion case.
In Thursday's opinion, Gorsuch likewise cites Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, a decision from this past March in which the justices allowed Kentucky’s attorney general to defend an abortion law.
The majority called it disrespectful to the state’s sovereign power to disregard the lawmakers' interest in defending the case.
“North Carolina has expressly authorized the legislative leaders to defend the State’s practical interests in litigation of this sort,” Gorsuch wrote.
The ruling continues: “Even beyond these instructions, the State has made plain that it considers the leaders of the General Assembly ‘necessary parties’ to suits like this one.”
In a situation like this where a state’s sovereign authority is divided among different officials, Gorsuch said all have the right to participate in the suit.
“To hold otherwise would risk allowing a private plaintiff to pick its preferred defendants and potentially silence those whom the State deems essential to a fair understanding of its interests,” Gorsuch wrote.
Sotomayor argues that the lawmakers will not even be presenting a different argument than the current defense.
“The Court goes astray by creating a presumption that a State is inadequately represented in federal court unless whomever state law designates as a State’s representative is allowed to intervene, even where the interests that the intervenors seek to represent are identical to those of an existing party,” Sotomayor wrote.
David Thompson, an attorney with Cooper & Kirk representing the lawmakers, and Elisabeth Theodore, an attorney with Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer representing the NAACP, did not respond to requests for comment following the ruling.
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