Linda Greenhouse, a senior fellow at Yale Law School who spent 30 years as a Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times before becoming a columnist for the newspaper, argued on Thursday that the death of Justice Antonin Scalia saved democracy in North Carolina.
Greenhouse wrote in a column Thursday that a recent Supreme Court ruling keeping in place a federal court’s decision striking down a voter I.D. law in North Carolina would have been threatened, had Scalia still been alive.
“Would it be unseemly to suggest that only Justice Scalia’s death has preserved democracy in North Carolina?” she wrote. “There, I just did.”
Scalia, one of the more conservative-leaning justices, unexpectedly died in February, leaving the Court stalemated on many federal issues.
The Republican-led Congress has declined to take up any considerations for new appointments to the court until after the election.
