Republican legislators across the U.S. are taking aim at state courts: gerrymandering judges, partisan elections, and court packing. It's a page from the North Carolina legislature's playbook. But in North Carolina, voters protected the courts that stopped voter suppression. They thwarted the GOP’s worst power grabs from 2016 to 2018, even though Republicans had complete control over the legislative process. The story begins when the GOP took over the state legislature in 2010 and gerrymandered election districts to help their party's candidates. The all-white GOP majority also passed a law designed to keep Black people from voting. And their majority grew larger, enough votes to override the governor's veto. The only threat to Republicans' power was the courts. Civil rights lawyer Anita Earls took the legislature to court and laid out the undeniable evidence of racial discrimination. Attorney Thomas Farr repeatedly tried to justify the legislature’s actions as attempts to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). The courts ruled against the legislature and ordered new election districts that didn't discriminate against Black voters. To keep the courts out of the way, legislators tried to control the judiciary. They lashed out at courts and fundamentally changed judicial elections—all with a goal of getting judges on the bench who would rubber stamp the GOP's voter suppression. Lawmakers took the advice of a consultant who had written a memo in 2013 titled, “How the North Carolina Republican Party can maintain political power for 114 years.” After voters elected a progressive majority to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2016, some Republicans wanted to pack the court by adding two new seats for the lame-duck GOP governor to fill. This scheme would've blatantly overturned the voters' decision to elect a progressive majority. Republicans didn't pack the court. But they did cancel judicial elections, "unpack" the Court of Appeals, gerrymander local judges, and threaten impeachment for judges who ruled against them. Legislators changed ballots and manipulated election districts to help Republican judicial candidates. The power grabs led to raging protests in the streets outside the capitol. The powerful "Moral Monday" movement, headed by Rev. William Barber, made sure that voters would still be heard in the gerrymandered legislature. Editorial boards across North Carolina and across the country condemned the power grabs, as did judges from both parties. Organizers toured the state to educate voters on the importance of independent courts. Barber also condemned the 2017 nomination of Thomas Farr, the GOP’s lawyer, to a federal court in Eastern North Carolina. Activists around the country raised concerns about Farr’s history of defending discrimination and his ties to a white-supremacist lawyer. The GOP legislature's quest to control the courts culminated in 2018, the same year that Anita Earls, the lawyer who fought voter suppression, ran for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. The campaign was a challenge for a quiet, reserved lawyer who was more at home in the courtroom than on the campaign trail. If Earls won, she would serve on a court with the power to block unconstitutional state laws. She campaigned on a platform of judicial independence, as the legislature passed laws intended to hurt her campaign. Legislators also put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2018 that would've opened the door to another court packing scheme. If Earls lost and the amendment passed, Republicans would have the power to create a conservative majority on the high court. North Carolina’s democracy was in the hands of voters....