The first Moral Monday since court struck down the North Carolina General Assembly's new rules — interpreted by many as measures designed to silence the Moral Monday Forward Together movement — singing, praying, chanting, and civil disobedience arrests looked a lot like what we saw from Moral Monday in 2013.
The Raleigh News and Observer reports:
Days after persuading a Superior Court judge to suspend some new rules for the N.C. Legislative Building, protesters were back on Monday, raising their voices by many decibels against a state budget and Republican-controlled agenda they describe as "extremist."
As the demonstrators tested the breadth of the order signed Monday by Judge Carl Fox about the overly broad definition of "disturbing behavior," General Assembly police checked with their attorneys on the depth of their authority to remove the noisemakers from the state building.
About 20 minutes after the N.C. Senate went into session, law enforcement officers began wrapping plastic cuffs around the wrists of 20 demonstrators who had continued singing, chanting and speechmaking after being asked to quietly leave the rotunda area outside the General Assembly chambers.
The scene was reminiscent of last summer, when more than 900 demonstrators were arrested for similar actions.
Read more here.
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The same day weekly mass protests began again at the North Carolina legislature, civil rights groups filed a legal motion to block a restrictive new voting law from being enforced for this year's election.
"I don't want to reach for melodrama here, but on some level there's the question of whether we have a federal government or a Confederacy," Chilton tells Facing South. "Does North Carolina get to nullify part of the Constitution it doesn't like? I thought we settled that question."
Big money groups like Justice for All NC could reshape how justice is carried out in North Carolina. This year, seven top state judicial seats are up for election, including four on the seven-member NC Supreme Court, which is now ruled by a narrow 4-3 conservative majority.
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