North Carolina Republicans Are Trying to Give One of the Country’s Most Partisan Judges a Frightening New Power |
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In the past several years, Republicans in North Carolina have attempted—with varying degrees of success—power grab after power grab over the state’s government and legal systems. Now they’re trying one of their most audacious endeavors yet—an effort to give politicians control of the body that regulates lawyers’ compliance with ethics rules, a move that would provide them the power to sanction or disbar attorneys they don’t like. If this proposal becomes law, the same Republicans who have targeted Democratic justices with bogus ethics charges will control the committee that decides when lawyers violate ethics rules. The state’s politicians would exercise unprecedented command over the legal profession, a vast departure from past practice.
The proposal is the North Carolina GOP’s latest attack on the state bar, a government agency that regulates lawyers. Last year, legislators demanded that the bar disclose the party affiliations and political contributions of its staff and leaders. In 2023 they established a committee to explore changes to how lawyers are governed.
Republicans on the committee have hurled accusations of “cancel culture” at the state bar committee that investigates lawyers, but they have steadfastly refused to provide any examples. They did hear testimony from an anti–death penalty lawyer who was admonished for testing DNA on a water bottle without the person’s permission. And Republican Justice Richard Dietz testified about criticism and pushback that he received for publishing an opinion piece recommending changes to the state’s legal education rules.
In 2024 a former lawmaker on the committee said that he wanted to ensure “that we’re not allowing the public to use the Bar as a weapon against people to cancel, and to otherwise curb and influence rights that we’ve been given under the First Amendment.” Ironic, of course, given that the committee’s “reforms” could obviously be weaponized against Democrats.
Last year, when the committee recommended less transparency in its process of determining changes to the legal profession’s governing body, 15 Democrats in the state House issued a statement noting that the legal disciplinary process was meant “to protect the citizens of North Carolina, not to protect lawyers.”
State Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democrat and former judge, described the Legislature’s interference with the state bar as the latest attempt to undermine the courts. “It’s been a death by a thousand cuts, and this is the last big chomp,” she said. State Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a longtime civil rights lawyer, said the state bar is worried: “If you push back against the General Assembly, what’s the next thing that’s going to happen to you?”
The committee held a hearing last month to discuss the ethics enforcement process. The members heard public comments, most of which opposed the changes. Lawyer Eddie Winstead argued that the “changes proposed … ring more of politics than fairness.”
Former Republican state Rep. Edwin Hardy, a lawyer, spoke in favor of the proposal and claimed that the bar had contacted him in 2012, after he posted about President Barack Obama, to tell him that he faced an audit. The bar found accounting irregularities but no violation of any rule. Hardy’s mic was shut off, and he was forcibly ejected from the hearing after his comments led to a rambling diatribe.
Here’s what the committee is trying to change: In North Carolina, the Disciplinary Hearing Committee of the state bar is currently composed of 26 members, including eight nonlawyers. The bar appoints 12 members, all lawyers. Legislative leaders choose both lawyers and nonlawyers to serve. The governor and chief justice also get appointments. This setup is in line with how other states operate and is intended to keep the process politically neutral.
The committee, working to change that, also heard recommendations from Troy Shelton, who represented Judge Jefferson Griffin when he tried to steal the 2024 election for the North Carolina Supreme Court. Shelton’s proposal would give Republican politicians the power to appoint 19 of the 26 members, taking away all of the state bar’s appointments. The proposal would also eliminate six seats for nonlawyers, though it purports to keep out “former bar insiders,” and it would make the process less transparent. One committee member claimed that the group wants to “politics-proof” the process. But its stated method of doing so is to give politicians more control.
Again, this would be a vast departure from historical practice in North Carolina and other states. A 2004 paper from the American Bar Association said that the highest court in every state has “the inherent and/or constitutional authority to regulate the practice of law,” a principle that is “universally accepted and dates back to the thirteenth century.” The high courts often delegate some authority to the state bar or involve the bar in the process. The ABA paper said that “in the few states where the legislature has some involvement in the regulation of lawyers (typically funding for the lawyer disciplinary agency), the courts retain their authority.”
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Under the proposal adopted last week, the governor and the leaders of the state House and Senate would each pick seven members. Chief Justice Paul Newby would choose the remaining five members, and he would have the power to select the lawyer who “prosecutes” the bar’s case, thanks to an amendment from his colleague, a fellow high-court justice who also serves on the Legislature’s committee.
This is a problem, because Newby is probably the most corrupt chief justice in America. He routinely flouts ethics rules that prevent conflicts of interest, and he fired the head of the Judicial Standards Commission in 2021, after she reminded judges about the rules against political activity. At the public hearing, Winstead warned that the bar “prosecutor” would be “subject to the political whims of the chief justice.”
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A few years ago, Newby worked with Republican legislators to weaponize the state’s judicial ethics enforcement system—eliminating the state bar’s role in appointing the JSC and giving politicians more power over it. Newby and his JSC have targeted Democratic justices with bogus ethics investigations. He was behind an ethics complaint targeting Justice Anita Earls for speaking out about discrimination and bias within the judiciary, and Justice Allison Riggs faced an ethics complaint filed by three GOP lawmakers days before she won the 2024 election. Meanwhile, a ProPublica report revealed that the Newby court literally refused to sanction two GOP judges who admitted that they had violated ethics rules.
Under Shelton’s proposal, Newby would exercise a lot of control over legal ethics enforcement, and Republicans would have the ability to go after lawyers they don’t like. This could include civil rights attorneys that challenge the GOP’s voter-suppression agenda, the kind of work that Earls and Riggs did before they became judges. Last year, the Legislature drastically defunded legal aid offices, an essential resource for poor communities across the state.
North Carolina Republicans don’t want judges or lawyers standing in their way. So many of their power grabs and gerrymandered election districts were struck down in court over the years, including in litigation by Earls and Riggs. Now they’re using trumped-up charges of “cancel culture” to give themselves power to disbar lawyers they don’t like.
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