Source: The News & Observer
According to The News & Observer, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. will not be recused from two high-profile cases involving his father, the Republican Senate leader, Phil Berger.
In a vote along party lines, the court voted to reject a request by Gov. Roy Cooper that Justice Berger recuse himself in two cases that involve his father.
One of the most significant cases is a blatant power grab that would strip the governor from controlling the administration of elections. Ultimately, the governor’s appointment powers for state and local boards of elections would be given to Republican legislative leaders, including Sen. Berger.
In March, a bipartisan panel of Superior Court judges found the law unconstitutional and called it, “the most stark and blatant removal of appointment power” in years. The court’s ruling blocked the law from taking effect. The N&O reports that early last month, Gov. Cooper urged the state Supreme Court to deny Republicans’ request to bypass the Court of Appeals.
The Republican-controlled state Supreme Court’s recent ruling calls into question whether the justices are doing the bidding of Republican legislative leaders, and have broken basic ethics.
According to The N&O, the court’s two Democrats noted in a dissenting opinion, that the Code of Judicial Conduct makes no distinction between family members acting in their official capacity and personal capacity in its rules around recusal.
“To achieve the desired outcome in this case, members of this Court who typically ascribe to a strict textualist philosophy are eager to add words to the Code of Judicial Conduct,” Justice Allison Riggs wrote in the dissenting opinion. “… I suspect the reason we have not changed these rules is simple — the optics of overhauling existing ethics standards to accommodate Justice Berger and Senator Berger are problematic, to put it mildly.”
North Carolinians’ trust in the courts is at a low. A recent statewide survey found just 28% of registered voters offered a favorable assessment of the job done by the state Supreme Court, while 30% offered an unfavorable rating.
“A justice sitting in judgment of his father – no matter how the facts are twisted – does not pass even the most basic assessment of common sense,” an editorial from WRAL states. “For the sake of justice, Berger Jr. on his own should recuse himself from all cases where his father is a named plaintiff or defendant. It is time to set aside ego and make the stature of the state’s high court and building public confidence in the judicial system his first priority.”
