The Atlantic: “Every American child in public school learns that the U.S. political system is one of checks and balances, in which the judicial, executive, and legislative branches constrain one another to ensure that no one branch of government exercises too much power. One pending case before the Supreme Court asks: What if they didn’t?
In Moore v. Harper, North Carolina Republicans are arguing that no other state body, including the state supreme court, has the power to restrict the legislature’s ability to set voting rules—specifically ones allowing legislators to gerrymander the state, in defiance of a ruling by the state supreme court finding that their plan violated the state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. This belief is based on a crank legal premise called the “independent-state-legislature theory.”
The justification for this theory is that the U.S. Constitution’s text about state legislatures setting election rules refers not simply to passing laws or adopting state-constitutional provisions regarding voting, but to an authority to decide such matters unilaterally. State legislatures themselves pass laws and participate in the process of adopting constitutional amendments; it makes no sense to argue, as the independent-state-legislature theory does, that such bodies are not bound by rules they themselves have set. Nevertheless, this idea is the kind of obtuse, context-free pedantry that malicious lawyers adore.”