State lawmakers don’t have final say on elections

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that state legislatures do not have the ultimate authority to govern federal elections, handing a defeat to North Carolina Republican lawmakers who had tried to check the power of the state’s highest court to throw out its congressional maps.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives states wide authority to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of votes for congressional office.

However, Roberts added, that clause “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”

“The idea that courts may review legislative action was so ‘long and well established’ by the time we decided Marbury [v. Madison] in 1803 that Chief Justice [John] Marshall referred to judicial review as ‘one of the fundamental principles of our society,’” Roberts wrote. “We are asked to decide whether the Elections Clause carves out an exception to this basic principle. We hold that it does not.”

The Tar Heel State GOPers were appealing a decision by North Carolina’s Democratic-majority Supreme Court to toss House district maps approved in 2021 by the Republican-controlled state legislature on the grounds that they violated the state constitution.

Roberts was joined in his opinion by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

This is a developing story