In North Carolina, defeated lame-duck Republican Gov. Patrick McCrory has called a special session of the heavily Republican legislature. Democrats spread false rumors that Republicans would try to pack the state Supreme Court, but what they actually began doing was to pass laws that will limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor in what is already a very weak-governor state.

Republicans there argue that their reforms are not radical, and that there is also ample precedent for what they are doing. And they are right — Democrats who held the legislative in the 1980s did the same thing upon the election of a Republican governor, limiting the governor’s power and later the lieutenant governor’s as well when a Republican was elected to that post.