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GOD’S CHIEF JUSTICE  
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Doug Bock Clark
October 30, 2025
ProPublica
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_ Paul Newby, a born-again Christian, has turned his perch atop North
Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power. Over
two decades, he’s driven changes that have reverberated well beyond
the borders of his state. _

Paul Newby at Young America's Foundation Raleigh Freedom Conference,
2019, screen grab

 

In early 2023, Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North
Carolina’s Supreme Court, gave the state and the nation a
demonstration of the stunning and overlooked power of his office. 

The previous year, the court — then majority Democrat — had
outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the swing state. Over Newby’s
vehement dissent
[[link removed]],
it had ordered independent outsiders to redraw electoral maps that the
GOP-controlled legislature had crafted to conservatives’ advantage.

The traditional ways to undo such a decision would have been for the
legislature to pass a new law that made gerrymandering legal or for
Republicans to file a lawsuit. But that would’ve taken months or
years.

Newby cleared a way to get there sooner, well before the crucial 2024
election.

In January — once two newly elected Republican justices were sworn
in, giving the party a 5-2 majority — GOP lawmakers quickly filed a
petition asking the Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case.
Such do-overs are rare. Since 1993, the court had granted only two out
of 214 petitions
[[link removed]] for
rehearings, both to redress narrow errors, not differences in
interpreting North Carolina’s constitution. The lawyers who’d won
the gerrymandering case were incredulous. 

“We were like, they can’t possibly do this,” said Jeff
Loperfido, the chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern
Coalition for Social Justice. “Can they revisit their opinions when
the ink is barely dry?”

Under Newby’s leadership, they did.

Behind the closed doors of the courthouse, he set aside decades of
institutional precedent by not gathering the court’s seven justices
to debate the legislature’s request in person, as chief justices had
historically done for important matters. 

Instead, in early February, Justice Phil Berger Jr., Newby’s
right-hand man and presumed heir on the court, circulated a draft of a
special order agreeing to the rehearing, sources familiar with the
matter said. Berger’s accompanying message made clear there would be
no debate; rather, he instructed his colleagues to vote by email,
giving them just over 24 hours to respond. 

The court’s conservatives approved the order within about an hour.
Its two liberal justices, consigned to irrelevance, worked through the
night with their clerks to complete a dissent by the deadline. 

The pair were allowed little additional input when the justices met
about a month and a half later in their elegant wood-paneled
conference room to reach a decision on the case. After what a court
staffer present that day called a “notably short conference,”
Newby and his allies emerged victorious.

Newby then wrote a majority opinion
[[link removed]] declaring
that partisan gerrymandering was legal and that the Democrat-led court
had unconstitutionally infringed on the legislature’s prerogative to
create electoral maps.

The decision freed GOP lawmakers to toss out electoral maps that had
produced an evenly split North Carolina congressional delegation in
2022, reflecting the state’s balanced electorate. 

In 2024, the state sent 10 Republicans and four Democrats to Congress
— a six-seat swing that enabled the GOP to take control of the U.S.
House of Representatives and handed Republicans, led by President
Donald Trump, control of every branch of the federal government. 

The gerrymandering push isn’t finished. This month, North Carolina
Republican lawmakers passed a redistricting bill
[[link removed]]
designed to give the party an additional congressional seat in the
2026 election.

The Epicenter

Few beyond North Carolina’s borders grasp the outsize role Newby,
70, has played in transforming the state’s top court from a
relatively harmonious judicial backwater to a front-line partisan
battleground since his election in 2004.

Under North Carolina’s constitution, Supreme Court justices are
charged with upholding the independence and impartiality of the
courts, applying laws fairly and ensuring all citizens get treated
equally.

Yet for years, his critics charge, Newby has worked to erode barriers
to politicization.

He pushed to make judicial elections in North Carolina — once a
national leader in minimizing political influence on judges —
explicitly partisan and to get rid of public financing, leaving
candidates more dependent on dark money. Since Newby’s allies in the
legislature shepherded through laws enacting those changes, judicial
campaigns have become vicious, high-dollar gunfights that have
produced an increasingly polarized court dominated by hard-right
conservatives. 

As chief justice, he and courts under him have consistently backed
initiatives by Republican lawmakers to strip power away from North
Carolina’s governor, thwarting the will of voters who have chosen
Democrats to lead the state since 2016. He’s also used his extensive
executive authority to transform the court system according to his
political views, such as by doing away with diversity initiatives
[[link removed]].
Under his leadership, some liberal and LGBTQ+ employees have been
replaced with conservatives. A devout Christian and church leader, he
speaks openly about how his faith has shaped his jurisprudence
[[link removed]] and administration of
the courts [[link removed]].

According to former justices, judges and Republicans seeking to be
judicial candidates, Newby acts more like a political operator than an
independent jurist. He’s packed higher and lower courts with former
clerks and mentees whom he’s cultivated at his Bible study, prayer
breakfasts and similar events. His political muscle is backed by his
family’s: His wife is a major GOP donor, and one of his daughters,
who is head of finance for the state Republican Party, has managed
judicial campaigns.

He’s supported changes to judicial oversight, watering it down and
bringing it under his court’s control, making himself and his fellow
justices less publicly accountable.

The man Newby replaced on North Carolina’s Supreme Court, Bob Orr,
said his successor has become the model for a new, more politically
active kind of judge, who has reshaped the court system according to
his views. 

“Without question, Chief Justice Newby has emerged over the past 20
years as one of the most influential judicial officials” in modern
North Carolina history, said Orr, a former Republican who’s become
an outspoken critic of the party’s changes under Trump. “The
effect has been that the conservative legislative agenda has been
virtually unchecked by the courts, allowing the sweeping
implementation of conservative priorities.” 

Newby declined multiple interview requests from ProPublica and even
had a reporter escorted out of a judicial conference to avoid
questions. He also did not answer detailed written questions. The
court system’s communications director and media team did not
respond to multiple requests for comment or detailed written
questions.

When ProPublica emailed questions to Newby’s daughter, the North
Carolina Republican Party’s communications director, Matt Mercer,
responded, writing that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against
“NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any
comments whatsoever.” 

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump
Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this
matter,” Mercer said in his email. “I would STRONGLY suggest
dropping this story.” 

To tell Newby’s story, ProPublica interviewed over 70 people who
know him professionally or personally, including former North Carolina
justices and judges, lawmakers, longtime friends and family members.
Many requested anonymity, saying they feared that he or his proxies
would retaliate against them through the courts’ oversight system,
the state bar association or the influence he wields more broadly. 

We reviewed court documents, ethics disclosure forms, Newby’s
calendars, Supreme Court minutes, and a portion of his emails obtained
via public records requests.

We also drew on Newby’s own words from dozens of hours of recordings
of speeches he’s made on the campaign trail and to conservative
political groups, as well as interviews he’s given to right-wing and
Christian media outlets. In these venues, he has described his work on
the Supreme Court as apolitical and designed to undo the excesses of
liberal activist judges. He has said repeatedly that he believes God
has called him to lead the court and once described his mission as
delivering “biblical justice, equal justice, for all.”

Some North Carolina conservatives see Newby as something close to a
hero, undoing years of harm inflicted by Democrats when they dominated
the legislature and the courts. 

“I think Chief Justice Newby has been a great justice,” said U.S.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who forged a relationship with Newby as a
leader in the state legislature. “If Democrats are complaining about
… what Justice Newby is doing, they ought to look back at what
happened when they had the votes to change things.” 

As much as Newby’s triumphs reflect his own relentless crusade, they
also reflect years of trench warfare by the conservative legal
movement. 

For the last generation, its donors have poured vast amounts of money
into flipping state supreme courts to Republican control, successfully
capturing the majority of them across America
[[link removed]].
While most attention has focused on the right-wing power brokers
shaping [[link removed]] the
U.S. Supreme Court, state courts hear about 95% of the cases in the
country, and they increasingly have become the final word on civil
rights, abortion rights, gay and trans rights and, especially, voting
rights.

North Carolina has been at the forefront of this work. Douglas Keith,
deputy director of the judicial program at the Brennan Center for
Justice at NYU Law, which has criticized the changes made under Newby,
called North Carolina “the epicenter of the multifront effort to
shape state supreme courts by conservatives.”

In recent years, Democrats have countered in a handful of states,
notably Wisconsin, where the party regained a Supreme Court majority
in 2023 after a decade and a half. The Wisconsin court — in contrast
to its counterpart in North Carolina — has thus far rejected efforts
[[link removed]]
aimed at redistricting the state to add Democratic congressional
seats.

At the same time the Newby-led Supreme Court cleared the path for
re-gerrymandered electoral maps, it used identical tactics to reverse
another decision
[[link removed]] made by its
predecessor on voting rights. In that case, the court reinstated a law
requiring that voters show photo ID to cast ballots, writing that
“our state’s courts follow the law, not the political winds of the
day.”

Gene Nichol, a professor of constitutional law at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said Newby had essentially turned the
court into an arm of the Republican Party.

“Newby,” he said, “has become the chief justice who destroyed
the North Carolina Supreme Court as an impartial institution.”

Newby “Nobody”

When Newby announced that he was running for a seat on North
Carolina’s Supreme Court in the 2004 election, it seemed like a
foolhardy choice. 

He’d jumped into an eight-way race
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that featured well-known judges from both parties. Newby, then 49, had
virtually no public profile and no judicial experience, having spent
nearly the previous two decades as a federal prosecutor in North
Carolina’s Eastern District.

“There was no case that he handled that stands out in my memory,”
said Janice McKenzie Cole, who was Newby’s boss from 1994 to 2001
when she was the district’s U.S. attorney. “Nothing made him seem
like he’d be the chief justice of the state.”

Newby believed that God had called him to serve. 

Upset by what he saw as liberal overreach — particularly a federal
appeals court ruling that deemed the Pledge of Allegiance
unconstitutional
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because the words “one nation under God” violated the separation
between church and state — he felt compelled to enter electoral
politics. “I had a sense in my heart that God was saying maybe I
should run,” he recalled in 2024 on the “Think Biblically”
podcast
[[link removed]]. 

Those close to Newby say his faith has fueled his political ambition,
impelling him to defend what he sees as “biblically based
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American systems from secular attacks. 

“He’s a man of deep traditional conservative values,” said Pat
McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina, who’s a childhood
friend of Newby’s and attends a regular Bible study with him.
“He’s not a hypocrite saying one thing and doing another. He lives
what he believes.”

Newby has a deep commitment to charitable works, yet his tendency to
see people as either with him or against God has at times led to
conflicts with political allies, associates and even relatives. That
includes two of his four children, from whom he’s distanced over
issues of politics and sexuality.

Newby was steeped in religion from early childhood. He grew up a poor
“little nobody [[link removed]],” as
he has described it, in Jamestown, a one-traffic-light town in North
Carolina’s agricultural piedmont. His mother was a schoolteacher and
his father operated a linotype when he wasn’t unemployed. One of his
first memories is of them on their knees praying, he said in a speech
[[link removed]] at the National Day of
Prayer in Washington, D.C.

In high school and at Duke University, where he enrolled in 1973, he
was known for being reserved, serious and academically accomplished
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even as a member of a college fraternity that multiple former brothers
described with references to “Animal House
[[link removed]].” 

Newby has said he had a crisis of faith at Duke when a professor
challenged the literal truth of the Bible and he felt unprepared to
defend it. He would later call his years at the college and then the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school a “failed
attempt to indoctrinate me” with liberal and secular beliefs.

Near the end of law school, after well-known evangelist Josh McDowell
directed Newby to read his book “More Than a Carpenter
[[link removed]],”
an argument for the historical reality of Jesus, Newby was born again.
He became more overt about his faith, praying in public and weaving
Bible quotations into speeches. He still gives a copy of the book to
each of his interns and law clerks.

In 1983, he married Toler Macon Tucker
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a woman with a similarly deep investment in Christianity, whom he had
met in law school. The match drastically transformed his fortunes.
Macon was part of a prominent North Carolina family that had become
wealthy in banking and furniture stores
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and was deeply involved in conservative politics
[[link removed]].
Macon, who’d held a prestigious clerkship with the North Carolina
Court of Appeals, did not continue her legal career. (She did not
respond to questions from ProPublica for this article.)

Over the next decade, Newby and his wife adopted three children. In
September 1994, they brought home a fourth child, a baby girl, to
their two-story colonial in Raleigh, its mailbox decorated with a pink
bow, only to be hit with a court order to relinquish her.

The child’s birth mother, Melodie Barnes, had split from her
boyfriend after getting pregnant and, with the help of a Christian
anti-abortion network, moved to Oregon, which then allowed mothers to
put babies up for adoption without their fathers’ consent. Barnes’
ex disputed the adoption, obtaining a restraining order to halt the
process. According to news
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reports
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the Newbys and their lawyer were notified of this before the birth,
but went forward anyway. They took custody just after the baby was
born, christening the little girl Sarah Frances Newby.

To thank Barnes, the Newbys gave her a gold key charm to symbolize
what she says they called her “second virginity,” which they
suggested she save for her future husband. Two weeks later, when a
court ordered the Newbys to return the child to her father, they
instead sought to give the baby to Barnes, someone who shared their
evangelical beliefs. 

They “called me and said you should come get the baby because
you’ll have a better chance of winning a custody battle … than we
will,” Barnes recalled. The Newbys turned the baby over to Barnes in
the parking lot of the Raleigh airport, along with diapers and a car
seat. Soon after, a court order compelled Barnes to give the baby to
her father. (The Newbys and the baby’s father didn’t respond to
questions from ProPublica about the case.) 

Losing the baby was “traumatic,” according to multiple family
members and a person who attended Bible study with Macon. The Newbys
went on to start two adoption agencies, including Amazing Grace
Adoptions
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an agency whose mission was to place children in Christian homes and
save babies from abortion. They eventually adopted another baby girl,
whom they also named Sarah Frances.

When Newby ran for the Supreme Court in 2004, he focused on turning
out church and homeschool communities, voters to whom he had deep
ties. A campaign bio highlighted his work to facilitate Christian
adoptions and other faith-related activities.

Although North Carolina is among the states that elect supreme court
justices
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(elsewhere, they’re appointed
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the time dictated that judicial races were nonpartisan. Newby,
determined to distinguish himself in a crowded field, nonetheless
sought and got the endorsement
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of the state Republican Party, meeting with each member of the
executive committee personally and emphasizing his conservative
beliefs. 

“That was savvy politics,” a Republican former state official
said, suggesting that it helped Newby win what was essentially a
behind-the-scenes “primary” over candidates who had stronger
credentials. 

Because Newby was working as a federal prosecutor at the time, his
critics saw his tactics as more troubling — and possibly illegal
[[link removed]]. Another conservative
candidate in the race, Rachel Hunter, accused him of violating the
Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from being candidates in
partisan elections. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel
[[link removed]], which enforces the Hatch Act, has warned
that seeking an endorsement in a nonpartisan race can make it partisan
[[link removed]].

“It speaks to someone who’s so stupid they don’t know the
rules,” Hunter told ProPublica. “Or someone who’s so malevolent
that they don’t care.”

Newby denied he’d broken the law
[[link removed]]. The U.S. Office of
Special Counsel opened an investigation but took no public action
against Newby. (It’s not clear why.) The office didn’t answer
questions from ProPublica about the case and declined to release the
investigative file, citing privacy laws. 

The controversy didn’t thwart Newby’s otherwise low-budget,
low-tech campaign. He spent a grand total of $170,000, mostly on
direct mailers. Macon bought stamps and made copies
[[link removed]].
Boosted by the Christian right, he won his first eight-year term on
North Carolina’s highest court with about 23% of the vote, finishing
a few percentage points ahead of Hunter and another candidate.  

“I think Paul really believed that God wanted him to fill that
role,” said Bradley Byrne, a Republican former congressman from
Alabama who was Newby’s fraternity brother at Duke and consulted
with him on his political runs. “He figured out what he needed to do
to be successful, and he did it.” 

“Court Intrigue”

Once Newby joined the court, it took years for him to find his footing
and start transforming it into the institution it is today. 

When he first donned black judicial robes, he became the junior member
of a collegial unit that worked hard to find consensus, former
justices said. 

In conferences to decide cases, they’d sometimes pass around
whimsical props like a clothespin to signal members to “hold their
noses” and vote unanimously to project institutional solidarity.
They often ate together at a family-run diner
[[link removed]] near the Capitol,
following the chief justice to their regular table and seating
themselves in order of seniority. (“Like ducklings following their
mother,” the joke went at the legislature.) Newby, as the most
junior member, had to close doors and take minutes for the others.

Six of the court’s seven justices were Republicans, but most were
more moderate than Newby, and he had little influence on their
jurisprudence. He quickly gained a reputation for being uncompromising
— “arm-twisting,” in one former colleague’s words. 

“He would not try to find common ground,” one former justice
complained. Another warned Newby that information about his
confrontational behavior would be leaked to the newspapers if he
didn’t stop.

Newby toned it down and bided his time. 

His 2012 bid for reelection turned into a game changer, a crucial step
both in pushing the court’s conservatives further to the right and
in opening it to more unchecked partisanship. 

Superficially, Newby’s campaign seemed folksy — one of his slogans
was “Scooby-dooby, vote for Newby” — but it was backed by
serious money. 

Not long before, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
[[link removed]]
had cleared the way for so-called dark money groups, which don’t
have to disclose their donors’ identities, to spend uncapped amounts
to influence campaigns. Newby’s opponent — Sam J. Ervin IV, the
son of a federal judge and the grandson of a legendary U.S. senator
[[link removed]] — depended mostly on
$240,000 provided by North Carolina’s pioneering public financing
system. Ervin did not respond to a request for comment.

A few weeks before Election Day, polls showed Ervin ahead. Then, about
$2 million of dark money flooded into the race in the closing stretch,
according to campaign finance records and news reports. Much of it
came from groups connected to the Republican State Leadership
Committee, the arm of the party devoted to state races, and
conservative super-donor Leonardo Leo
[[link removed]],
who has worked to win Republican majorities on state courts
nationwide. 
[[link removed]]

The cash funded waves of ads supporting Newby and blasting Ervin. TVs
across the state blared what became known as the “banjo ad
[[link removed]],” in which a country
singer crooned that Newby would bring “justice tough but fair.” 

Newby won by 4%, helping Republicans keep a 4-3 edge on the court,
having outspent his opponent by more than $3 million.

[link removed]

Ensconced in another eight-year term, Newby began working with
conservatives in the legislature to change judicial elections to
Republicans’ advantage.

In 2010, a red wave had flipped the North Carolina legislature to
Republican control for the first time in more than 100 years, putting
Newby’s allies into positions of power. 

His backchannel conversations with General Assembly members were
“openly known” among court and legislative insiders, one former
lawmaker said. 

“It was like court intrigue,” agreed a former justice. “It was
common knowledge he was down at Jones Street,” home to the
legislature’s offices. 

Tillis, then speaker of the North Carolina House, and Paul “Skip”
Stam, then the General Assembly’s majority leader, confirmed that
Newby’s opinion was taken into account.

“Judge Newby was a part” of a dialogue with key lawmakers, Tillis
said, not dictating changes but advocating effectively. Tillis said he
didn’t think Newby did anything improper.

But justices typically hadn’t engaged in these types of discussions
for fear of tarnishing the judiciary’s independence.

“Most of us refrained, except, of course, Newby,” another
Republican former justice said. “Paul had some strong ideas about
the way things ought to be, and he’d go to the General Assembly and
make sure they knew what he thought.” 

The stealth lobbying campaign proved effective. 

In 2013, the legislature did away with public financing for judicial
candidates, making them reliant on private contributions and dark
money groups. The move had Newby’s support, according to Tillis and
former justices. Research subsequently showed
[[link removed]] that
when North Carolina’s public financing system was in place, rulings
by justices were more moderate and reflected less donor influence.
Prodded by Newby, those constraints fell away.

Legislators also passed another measure Newby favored, according to
lawmakers, former justices, judges and court staffers. It cloaked
investigations by the courts’ internal watchdog, the Judicial
Standards Commission, in secrecy and gave the Supreme Court veto power
on sanctions and whether cases became public. The law was passed over
the objections
[[link removed]]
of commission members
[[link removed]].
Stam said that the changes guarded against judges being “smeared at
the last minute” by people filing public complaints during elections
“for political purposes.”

Newby had drawn the commission’s scrutiny for engaging in activities
that could cause litigants to question his impartiality, including
attending a rally against same-sex marriage
[[link removed]] in his first
year on the bench. A decade after the commission was made into one of
the most secretive in America
[[link removed]],
the court — under Newby’s leadership — would quash disciplinary
actions against two Republican judges. They had admitted to egregious
breaches of the state’s judicial code, including one contributing to
a defendant’s death, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The decisions to quash the discipline remained secret until ProPublica
reported them
[[link removed]].

In 2016, Republican lawmakers handed Newby a third victory when they
began phasing out nonpartisan judicial elections, according to former
justices, court staff and lawmakers. Democrats criticized the changes,
but Republicans pointed out that Supreme Court elections had become
nonpartisan in the mid-1990s because Democrats — then in control of
the legislature — thought that obscuring candidates’ party
affiliations gave Democrats an edge.

“Is it unsavory, some things the party did? Do we wish it was more
gentlemanly? Yes, we do,” said Marshall Hurley, the state Republican
Party’s former general counsel and a childhood friend of Newby.
“But I think once both sides figured out courts can have an outsize
role in issues, they realized they had to fight that fight.”

Newby’s willingness to engage in political sausage-making turned him
into a favorite among some state lawmakers to become the court’s
next chief justice. 

In 2019, the then-chief, Mark Martin, announced he would resign to
become dean of a Virginia law school
[[link removed]].
Martin didn’t respond to emailed questions from ProPublica about why
he left the bench. 

Tradition dictated that the court’s senior associate justice —
Newby — be appointed to complete Martin’s term. Instead,
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper chose a Democrat, Cheri Beasley, who became
the state’s first Black female chief justice. Newby called the
decision “raw, partisan politics
[[link removed]]”
and publicly promised to challenge Beasley in 2020. 

He ran a bare-knuckle campaign
[[link removed]],
attacking Beasley’s work to start a commission to study racial bias
in the court system and fighting her efforts to remove a portrait that
hung over the chief justice’s chair portraying a former justice who
had owned slaves.

Newby’s family members played key roles in his push to lead the
court. 

He’d persuaded the state Republican Party
[[link removed]] to create a
fundraising committee to boost conservative candidates for court
seats. His daughter Sarah, who had recently graduated from college
with a degree in agriculture, was picked to run it, though Newby’s
disclosure forms
[[link removed]]
described her previous job as “Ministry thru horses.” She “more
or less” ran her father’s 2020 race, a Republican political
consultant said. (Sarah Newby did not respond to requests for
comment.) 

Newby’s wife, Macon, put almost $90,000
[[link removed]]
into Republican campaigns and the state GOP. She also invested in a
right-wing media outlet, the North State Journal, that reported
favorably on her husband without disclosing her ownership stake, the
Raleigh News & Observer reported
[[link removed]].
(The then-publisher of the North State Journal did not respond to The
News & Observer’s request for comment; he referred questions from
ProPublica to the Journal, which did not respond.)

Still, the race was tight. On election night, Newby led by about 4,000
votes
[[link removed]],
but his margin shrank over the following month as officials continued
to cure provisional ballots and conduct recounts. 

Macon wrote to friends, asking for their prayers in helping her
husband win. “Paul, as a believer in Christ Jesus, is clothed in the
righteousness of Christ alone,” her note said. “Because of that,
he has direct access to Almighty God to cry out for wisdom in seeking
for the Court to render justice.”

After around 40 days and 40 nights, which Newby later described as a
biblical sign [[link removed]], Beasley
conceded. The final margin was 401 votes
[[link removed]]
out of around 5.4 million cast.

Justice League

When Newby was sworn in just after midnight on New Year’s Day, he
became chief justice of a court with a 4-3 Democratic majority,
limiting his ability to shape laws in the courtroom.

Still, as chief justice, he possessed considerable executive authority
to unilaterally reshape the 7,600-person court system and moved
swiftly to use it in ways that had no precedent, multiple former
justices and court staffers said. 

Chief justices have considerable hiring and firing power, though
Newby’s predecessors had used it sparingly, typically replacing only
a few top-level appointees. In Newby’s case, his senior-level hires
cleared out additional people in the courts’ central administrative
hub, including at least 10 managers and lower-level employees, many of
whom were outspoken liberals or openly LGBTQ+, current and former
employees told ProPublica. 

They were replaced by people with conservative political connections,
such as a former clerk of Newby’s and attendees of his prayer
groups, court staffers said. Court officials didn’t respond to
questions from ProPublica about these steps. At the time, a court
spokesperson said
[[link removed]]
that Newby was bringing in an executive “leadership team consistent
with his vision, as other state leaders have routinely done in the
past.”

Newby also could promote or demote judges on lower courts, deciding
who served as their chiefs and held prestigious committee posts. These
appointments affect crucial elements of the legal system, from the
composition of court panels to policies on bail. In the past,
seniority had dictated most of these choices. Newby, however, demoted
or forced into retirement as many as nine senior judges with little
public explanation, according to sources familiar with the matter; all
were Democrats
[[link removed]]
or moderate Republicans
[[link removed]],
or had clashed personally with Newby or his allies.

Among the most notable was Donna Stroud, the Republican chief judge
[[link removed]]
of the Court of Appeals, whom Newby removed after she was reported to
have
[[link removed]]
hired a clerk favored by Democrats over one favored by a Republican
justice. Stroud didn’t respond to a request for comment from
ProPublica; at the time, she told WRAL News that Newby had given her
little explanation
[[link removed]]
for her demotion. 

Newby replaced Stroud with a close ally, Chris Dillon. (Dillon did not
respond to questions from ProPublica.) 

Dillon had been appointed chair of the Judicial Standards Commission
just before Newby took over as chief justice. Newby kept him in the
role, filling one of six seats he controlled on the 14-member panel;
through those appointees, Newby has exercised considerable control
over the commission.

In 2022, after the commission’s longtime director clashed with
Dillon about limiting judges’ political activity
[[link removed]], she was
ousted. Her replacement, Brittany Pinkham, swiftly led two
investigations into alleged misconduct by Democratic Supreme Court
Justice Anita Earls, who had spoken publicly
[[link removed]]
about Newby’s actions to end initiatives to address a lack of
diversity in the court system. 

Newby personally encouraged
[[link removed]]
at least one of the investigations, ProPublica reported. Pinkham and
the commission’s current chair, Court of Appeals Judge Jeffery
Carpenter, didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the
cases in person or via email. Earls declined to comment on Newby’s
role in the commission’s investigations into her conduct. 

Neither investigation resulted in sanctions
[[link removed]],
but judges said that, in combination with the firings and demotions,
the probes conveyed a chilling message that Newby would punish those
who crossed him. Several judges said they were intimidated to the
point that it shaped how they did their jobs. Some said they or others
had felt pressured to participate in prayers Newby conducted at
courthouses or conferences. 

Judges and court staffers “are afraid of speaking out,” said Mary
Ann Tally, a judge who retired near the beginning of Newby’s tenure
as chief justice when she hit the statutory retirement age. Tally, a
Democrat, said other judges had told her they were “afraid of Newby
retaliating against them or that they would end up in front of the
Judicial Standards Commission.” ProPublica spoke to more than 20
current or former judges who expressed fear that Newby or his allies
might seek to harm their judicial or legal careers.

Newby didn’t respond to questions about whether his actions had
created a climate of fear. 

Newby’s appointments affected aspects of life in North Carolina well
beyond its courthouses. The state’s administrative law office
decides whether rules and regulations written by North Carolina
agencies are in keeping with state law. Newby replaced the office’s
longtime head
[[link removed]]
with Donald van der Vaart, a climate change skeptic and fracking
proponent who served in the first Trump administration. During van der
Vaart’s tenure as chief administrative judge, which ended in July,
he ruled against limits
[[link removed]]
on potentially dangerous chemicals in drinking water set by the
state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Van der Vaart declined
to answer questions from ProPublica about these decisions, saying he
could no longer comment on the court system now that he’s left.

The 2022 election offered Newby a chance to expand his powers beyond
personnel. Two Supreme Court seats held by Democrats were up for
grabs, enough to allow Republicans to regain the majority.

The races drew $10.4 million in outside dark money that favored
Republicans over Democrats by about 2-1, according to an analysis by
the Brennan Center
[[link removed]].
It was well known within the party, former justices and other judges
said, that Newby hand-picked Republican judicial candidates, demanding
that those vying for seats be “in lockstep” with his views, as one
described it. In one Supreme Court race, he championed a former clerk
[[link removed]]
whose career he’d nurtured since 2005.

During Newby’s tenure as chief justice, a cartoon
[[link removed]] has
hung in the Supreme Court depicting him as Superman, surrounded by a
coterie of conservative appellate justices caricatured as other
members of DC Comics’ Justice League.

It’s a gag, but one that hints at his dead-serious ambition to build
a lasting judicial dynasty. Berger, the son of North Carolina’s
Republican Senate president, who’s described himself as Newby’s
“wingman,” [[link removed]]
appears as Batman. Dillon, Newby’s pick to head the Court of
Appeals, is Aquaman.  

In November 2022, Newby took a giant leap toward realizing this
vision. North Carolina Democrats gained seats in Congress that year,
but Newby’s candidates ran sophisticated, well-financed campaigns
and crushed their Democratic opponents. 

With Newby leading the way, Republicans had swept the last 14
appellate judicial elections, cementing their dominance of the Court
of Appeals and the Supreme Court. 

The Long Run

In late January 2023, the day after the legislature petitioned the
Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case, Newby and three of
his colleagues, all Republicans, flew to Honolulu.

They made the trip to attend a conference
[[link removed]]
organized by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School,
which megadonors like Leo have turned into a crucial pipeline and
convener for the conservative legal movement
[[link removed]].

Newby’s presence at the weeklong gathering — held at The Royal
Hawaiian Resort, a pricey beachfront hotel known as the “Pink Palace
of the Pacific [[link removed]]”
— reflected his growing national stature. 

According to emails ProPublica obtained through a public records
request, he’d been personally invited to participate in school
events by Donald Kochan, the director of the school’s Law &
Economics Center. They’d met the previous August at a summit for the
Federalist Society
[[link removed]],
the influential conservative legal group.

Records from Scalia Law show the school spent about $14,000 to cover
expenses for Newby and the others. They went to lectures
[[link removed]]
on conservative legal principles in the mornings, then enjoyed local
attractions, from hot-tubbing to hiking, the rest of the day,
according to a ProPublica reporter who was at the event. On the final
evening, they attended an outdoor banquet lit by tiki torches that
featured a whole roasted luau pig. 

Only one of the four — Berger — disclosed the trip in their annual
judicial ethics forms
[[link removed]],
though the form directs judges to report gifts of over $500. Berger
did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.

Experts said that only the Judicial Standards Commission could
definitively determine if Newby had violated disclosure rules in this
instance. The commission declined to answer detailed questions from
ProPublica beyond directing a reporter to the Code of Judicial Conduct
and information on its website.

Newby didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the trip or
why he didn’t report it.

Ethics experts said Newby has made a habit of flouting North
Carolina’s rules on judicial conduct, a pattern startling in the
state’s highest-ranking jurist. 

The rules state judges “may not personally make financial
contributions” to candidates seeking elected office, but campaign
finance data shows
[[link removed]]
Newby is among more than a dozen judges and judicial candidates who
have ignored this prohibition
[[link removed]].
He’s made four such donations since 2008, including one in 2022
[[link removed]], when
he was chief justice.

Billy Corriher, the state court manager for the People’s Parity
Project, which advocates for what it calls progressive judicial
reform, alerted ProPublica to Newby’s contributions and described
them as “crystal clear” violations. Newby didn’t answer
questions about his political contributions.

North Carolina judges hold sole authority over whether to recuse
themselves from cases, but its judicial code advises them to do so
when their impartiality “may reasonably be questioned,” including
if they have “a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party.”

Yet, in late 2021, Newby wrote an opinion
[[link removed]] in an
adoption case without disclosing his connection to one of the parties:
Amazing Grace Adoptions, the anti-abortion adoption agency he’d
founded
[[link removed]]
in 1999. He’d gone on to serve on the agency’s board of directors
[[link removed]]
and touted his connection to it during his 2004 Supreme Court
campaign. 

His ties to the agency ended then, but experts in judicial ethics
expressed surprise that Newby hadn’t at least disclosed the
relationship even if he thought he could rule impartially on the case,
which he decided in Amazing Grace’s favor. 

“Disclosing can mitigate the appearance of impropriety,” said
Jeremy Fogel, the executive director of the University of California,
Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge. “I think
people ought to disclose. That’s what I would have done.”

The case involving the adoption agency wasn’t the first Newby had
decided despite having a potential conflict, according to experts and
media reports. According to the Center for Public Integrity, he ruled
at least six times
[[link removed]]
in cases involving Duke Energy or its subsidiaries while he and his
wife held stock in the company, always siding with it. During that
eight-year period, Newby and his wife’s shares were worth at least
$10,000 each year, according to
[[link removed]]
his disclosure forms
[[link removed]].
He also authored two opinions
[[link removed]]
on a federal agricultural program from which he, as a farm owner, had
earned income, while disclosing his participation in the program in
court.

As Newby finishes his third term, his cumulative effect on democracy
and justice in North Carolina stands out in bold relief. 

He’s played a decisive role in the ongoing power struggle between
the state’s governor and General Assembly, which has intensified as
Democrats have won the last three races for the governor’s
mansion. 

That’s because, as lawmakers have passed measure after measure
transferring powers traditionally held by the governor to other parts
of government controlled by Republicans, the governor has sought
relief in the courts. 

But the chief justice picks the three-judge panels who hear these
cases. Since 2023, when Newby gained more power over this process, his
picks have repeatedly upheld laws shrinking gubernatorial powers, as
have Newby’s conservative allies on the Court of Appeals.

Collectively, these decisions have reduced the governor’s control
over a broad array of entities, including those responsible for
regulating utilities, the environment and building standards. 

This year, Newby helped Republicans wrest away control over what many
saw as the most valuable prize: the state election board. 

The board had long been controlled by the governor, who appointed its
members. After years of failed attempts to change this, in late 2024,
the legislature passed a law giving the state auditor, a Republican,
the power to make election board appointments
[[link removed]].
The governor filed a legal challenge, but Newby’s court had the last
word, affirming the Court of Appeals’ decision permitting the
takeover.

The legislature has raised the mandatory retirement age for judges
from 72 to 76, allowing Newby to complete his current term, but he’s
not expected to run again in four years. He will leave behind an
intensely partisan, politicized court system in which elections are
brutal slugfests.

The most recent Supreme Court race ended after a six-month legal
battle
[[link removed]]
that the Republican challenger, a Newby mentee
[[link removed]],
conceded only when a federal court — a venue beyond Newby’s
control — rejected his bid to toss out 65,000 ballots. 

Even with that loss, conservatives hold a durable advantage in North
Carolina’s judiciary. On the Supreme Court, they’ll be in the
majority until at least 2028 even if Democrats win every election
between now and then — and much longer if they don’t. 

Newby no longer bothers to have the members of the court deliberate
together on important cases with political implications, according to
sources familiar with the matter. Instead, the conservative majority
just provides drafts of its decisions to the two Democratic justices;
if conservative justices oppose Newby, sometimes they are cut out,
too. 

The changes Newby has driven have turned North Carolina into a model
for other states, providing a road map conservatives elsewhere have
used to consolidate control over court systems. 

Ohio has followed North Carolina’s lead and switched to partisan
judicial elections, a move that’s tilted courts in Republicans’
favor
[[link removed]].
In Arizona and Georgia — where justices are appointed, not elected
— lawmakers have expanded state Supreme Courts
[[link removed]]
to allow Republican governors to add more conservatives. 

Big-money judicial races increasingly have become the norm in other
states as they have in North Carolina. Wisconsin saw the first $100
million state supreme court race
[[link removed]]
in U.S. history in 2025, with Elon Musk alone spending $20 million on
an unsuccessful attempt to swing the court back to Republican control.

The fierce politicking has eroded Americans’ confidence in the
judiciary. According to a Gallup poll released in December, only 35%
of respondents
[[link removed]],
a record low, said they trusted courts, down from almost 60% in 2006.

Some North Carolina Republicans — including Tillis, who sees
Newby’s efforts largely as rebalancing scales tilted by Democratic
lawmakers a generation ago — acknowledge that the tactics that have
put them in the political driver’s seat may be destructive over the
long haul.  

Tillis called partisan judicial elections “a bad idea on a long-term
basis.” He’s not running for reelection in 2026, after clashing
with Trump over health care cuts and concluding the current
divisiveness had made it impossible to serve all of his constituents.

Experts fear what will happen nationally if there is no reversal of
course and the approach that Newby has pioneered becomes the norm.

“The distinct line between the judiciary, the legislature and
politics is blurring,” said Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana
University Bloomington who specializes in judicial ethics. “And if
we don’t preserve that, it’ll be naked power all the way down.”

In early 2023, Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North
Carolina’s Supreme Court, gave the state and the nation a
demonstration of the stunning and overlooked power of his office. 

The previous year, the court — then majority Democrat — had
outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the swing state. Over Newby’s
vehement dissent
[[link removed]],
it had ordered independent outsiders to redraw electoral maps that the
GOP-controlled legislature had crafted to conservatives’ advantage.

The traditional ways to undo such a decision would have been for the
legislature to pass a new law that made gerrymandering legal or for
Republicans to file a lawsuit. But that would’ve taken months or
years.

Newby cleared a way to get there sooner, well before the crucial 2024
election.

In January — once two newly elected Republican justices were sworn
in, giving the party a 5-2 majority — GOP lawmakers quickly filed a
petition asking the Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case.
Such do-overs are rare. Since 1993, the court had granted only two out
of 214 petitions
[[link removed]] for
rehearings, both to redress narrow errors, not differences in
interpreting North Carolina’s constitution. The lawyers who’d won
the gerrymandering case were incredulous. 

“We were like, they can’t possibly do this,” said Jeff
Loperfido, the chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern
Coalition for Social Justice. “Can they revisit their opinions when
the ink is barely dry?”

Under Newby’s leadership, they did.

Behind the closed doors of the courthouse, he set aside decades of
institutional precedent by not gathering the court’s seven justices
to debate the legislature’s request in person, as chief justices had
historically done for important matters. 

Instead, in early February, Justice Phil Berger Jr., Newby’s
right-hand man and presumed heir on the court, circulated a draft of a
special order agreeing to the rehearing, sources familiar with the
matter said. Berger’s accompanying message made clear there would be
no debate; rather, he instructed his colleagues to vote by email,
giving them just over 24 hours to respond. 

The court’s conservatives approved the order within about an hour.
Its two liberal justices, consigned to irrelevance, worked through the
night with their clerks to complete a dissent by the deadline. 

The pair were allowed little additional input when the justices met
about a month and a half later in their elegant wood-paneled
conference room to reach a decision on the case. After what a court
staffer present that day called a “notably short conference,”
Newby and his allies emerged victorious.

Newby then wrote a majority opinion
[[link removed]] declaring
that partisan gerrymandering was legal and that the Democrat-led court
had unconstitutionally infringed on the legislature’s prerogative to
create electoral maps.

The decision freed GOP lawmakers to toss out electoral maps that had
produced an evenly split North Carolina congressional delegation in
2022, reflecting the state’s balanced electorate. 

In 2024, the state sent 10 Republicans and four Democrats to Congress
— a six-seat swing that enabled the GOP to take control of the U.S.
House of Representatives and handed Republicans, led by President
Donald Trump, control of every branch of the federal government. 

The gerrymandering push isn’t finished. This month, North Carolina
Republican lawmakers passed a redistricting bill
[[link removed]]
designed to give the party an additional congressional seat in the
2026 election.

The Epicenter

Few beyond North Carolina’s borders grasp the outsize role Newby,
70, has played in transforming the state’s top court from a
relatively harmonious judicial backwater to a front-line partisan
battleground since his election in 2004.

Under North Carolina’s constitution, Supreme Court justices are
charged with upholding the independence and impartiality of the
courts, applying laws fairly and ensuring all citizens get treated
equally.

Yet for years, his critics charge, Newby has worked to erode barriers
to politicization.

He pushed to make judicial elections in North Carolina — once a
national leader in minimizing political influence on judges —
explicitly partisan and to get rid of public financing, leaving
candidates more dependent on dark money. Since Newby’s allies in the
legislature shepherded through laws enacting those changes, judicial
campaigns have become vicious, high-dollar gunfights that have
produced an increasingly polarized court dominated by hard-right
conservatives. 

As chief justice, he and courts under him have consistently backed
initiatives by Republican lawmakers to strip power away from North
Carolina’s governor, thwarting the will of voters who have chosen
Democrats to lead the state since 2016. He’s also used his extensive
executive authority to transform the court system according to his
political views, such as by doing away with diversity initiatives
[[link removed]].
Under his leadership, some liberal and LGBTQ+ employees have been
replaced with conservatives. A devout Christian and church leader, he
speaks openly about how his faith has shaped his jurisprudence
[[link removed]] and administration of
the courts [[link removed]].

According to former justices, judges and Republicans seeking to be
judicial candidates, Newby acts more like a political operator than an
independent jurist. He’s packed higher and lower courts with former
clerks and mentees whom he’s cultivated at his Bible study, prayer
breakfasts and similar events. His political muscle is backed by his
family’s: His wife is a major GOP donor, and one of his daughters,
who is head of finance for the state Republican Party, has managed
judicial campaigns.

He’s supported changes to judicial oversight, watering it down and
bringing it under his court’s control, making himself and his fellow
justices less publicly accountable.

The man Newby replaced on North Carolina’s Supreme Court, Bob Orr,
said his successor has become the model for a new, more politically
active kind of judge, who has reshaped the court system according to
his views. 

“Without question, Chief Justice Newby has emerged over the past 20
years as one of the most influential judicial officials” in modern
North Carolina history, said Orr, a former Republican who’s become
an outspoken critic of the party’s changes under Trump. “The
effect has been that the conservative legislative agenda has been
virtually unchecked by the courts, allowing the sweeping
implementation of conservative priorities.” 

Newby declined multiple interview requests from ProPublica and even
had a reporter escorted out of a judicial conference to avoid
questions. He also did not answer detailed written questions. The
court system’s communications director and media team did not
respond to multiple requests for comment or detailed written
questions.

When ProPublica emailed questions to Newby’s daughter, the North
Carolina Republican Party’s communications director, Matt Mercer,
responded, writing that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against
“NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any
comments whatsoever.” 

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump
Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this
matter,” Mercer said in his email. “I would STRONGLY suggest
dropping this story.” 

To tell Newby’s story, ProPublica interviewed over 70 people who
know him professionally or personally, including former North Carolina
justices and judges, lawmakers, longtime friends and family members.
Many requested anonymity, saying they feared that he or his proxies
would retaliate against them through the courts’ oversight system,
the state bar association or the influence he wields more broadly. 

We reviewed court documents, ethics disclosure forms, Newby’s
calendars, Supreme Court minutes, and a portion of his emails obtained
via public records requests.

We also drew on Newby’s own words from dozens of hours of recordings
of speeches he’s made on the campaign trail and to conservative
political groups, as well as interviews he’s given to right-wing and
Christian media outlets. In these venues, he has described his work on
the Supreme Court as apolitical and designed to undo the excesses of
liberal activist judges. He has said repeatedly that he believes God
has called him to lead the court and once described his mission as
delivering “biblical justice, equal justice, for all.”

Some North Carolina conservatives see Newby as something close to a
hero, undoing years of harm inflicted by Democrats when they dominated
the legislature and the courts. 

“I think Chief Justice Newby has been a great justice,” said U.S.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who forged a relationship with Newby as a
leader in the state legislature. “If Democrats are complaining about
… what Justice Newby is doing, they ought to look back at what
happened when they had the votes to change things.” 

As much as Newby’s triumphs reflect his own relentless crusade, they
also reflect years of trench warfare by the conservative legal
movement. 

For the last generation, its donors have poured vast amounts of money
into flipping state supreme courts to Republican control, successfully
capturing the majority of them across America
[[link removed]].
While most attention has focused on the right-wing power brokers
shaping [[link removed]] the
U.S. Supreme Court, state courts hear about 95% of the cases in the
country, and they increasingly have become the final word on civil
rights, abortion rights, gay and trans rights and, especially, voting
rights.

North Carolina has been at the forefront of this work. Douglas Keith,
deputy director of the judicial program at the Brennan Center for
Justice at NYU Law, which has criticized the changes made under Newby,
called North Carolina “the epicenter of the multifront effort to
shape state supreme courts by conservatives.”

In recent years, Democrats have countered in a handful of states,
notably Wisconsin, where the party regained a Supreme Court majority
in 2023 after a decade and a half. The Wisconsin court — in contrast
to its counterpart in North Carolina — has thus far rejected efforts
[[link removed]]
aimed at redistricting the state to add Democratic congressional
seats.

At the same time the Newby-led Supreme Court cleared the path for
re-gerrymandered electoral maps, it used identical tactics to reverse
another decision
[[link removed]] made by its
predecessor on voting rights. In that case, the court reinstated a law
requiring that voters show photo ID to cast ballots, writing that
“our state’s courts follow the law, not the political winds of the
day.”

Gene Nichol, a professor of constitutional law at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said Newby had essentially turned the
court into an arm of the Republican Party.

“Newby,” he said, “has become the chief justice who destroyed
the North Carolina Supreme Court as an impartial institution.”

Newby “Nobody”

When Newby announced that he was running for a seat on North
Carolina’s Supreme Court in the 2004 election, it seemed like a
foolhardy choice. 

He’d jumped into an eight-way race
[[link removed]]
that featured well-known judges from both parties. Newby, then 49, had
virtually no public profile and no judicial experience, having spent
nearly the previous two decades as a federal prosecutor in North
Carolina’s Eastern District.

“There was no case that he handled that stands out in my memory,”
said Janice McKenzie Cole, who was Newby’s boss from 1994 to 2001
when she was the district’s U.S. attorney. “Nothing made him seem
like he’d be the chief justice of the state.”

Newby believed that God had called him to serve. 

Upset by what he saw as liberal overreach — particularly a federal
appeals court ruling that deemed the Pledge of Allegiance
unconstitutional
[[link removed]]
because the words “one nation under God” violated the separation
between church and state — he felt compelled to enter electoral
politics. “I had a sense in my heart that God was saying maybe I
should run,” he recalled in 2024 on the “Think Biblically”
podcast
[[link removed]]. 

Those close to Newby say his faith has fueled his political ambition,
impelling him to defend what he sees as “biblically based
[[link removed]]”
American systems from secular attacks. 

“He’s a man of deep traditional conservative values,” said Pat
McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina, who’s a childhood
friend of Newby’s and attends a regular Bible study with him.
“He’s not a hypocrite saying one thing and doing another. He lives
what he believes.”

Newby has a deep commitment to charitable works, yet his tendency to
see people as either with him or against God has at times led to
conflicts with political allies, associates and even relatives. That
includes two of his four children, from whom he’s distanced over
issues of politics and sexuality.

Newby was steeped in religion from early childhood. He grew up a poor
“little nobody [[link removed]],” as
he has described it, in Jamestown, a one-traffic-light town in North
Carolina’s agricultural piedmont. His mother was a schoolteacher and
his father operated a linotype when he wasn’t unemployed. One of his
first memories is of them on their knees praying, he said in a speech
[[link removed]] at the National Day of
Prayer in Washington, D.C.

In high school and at Duke University, where he enrolled in 1973, he
was known for being reserved, serious and academically accomplished
[[link removed]],
even as a member of a college fraternity that multiple former brothers
described with references to “Animal House
[[link removed]].” 

Newby has said he had a crisis of faith at Duke when a professor
challenged the literal truth of the Bible and he felt unprepared to
defend it. He would later call his years at the college and then the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school a “failed
attempt to indoctrinate me” with liberal and secular beliefs.

Near the end of law school, after well-known evangelist Josh McDowell
directed Newby to read his book “More Than a Carpenter
[[link removed]],”
an argument for the historical reality of Jesus, Newby was born again.
He became more overt about his faith, praying in public and weaving
Bible quotations into speeches. He still gives a copy of the book to
each of his interns and law clerks.

In 1983, he married Toler Macon Tucker
[[link removed]],
a woman with a similarly deep investment in Christianity, whom he had
met in law school. The match drastically transformed his fortunes.
Macon was part of a prominent North Carolina family that had become
wealthy in banking and furniture stores
[[link removed]]
and was deeply involved in conservative politics
[[link removed]].
Macon, who’d held a prestigious clerkship with the North Carolina
Court of Appeals, did not continue her legal career. (She did not
respond to questions from ProPublica for this article.)

Over the next decade, Newby and his wife adopted three children. In
September 1994, they brought home a fourth child, a baby girl, to
their two-story colonial in Raleigh, its mailbox decorated with a pink
bow, only to be hit with a court order to relinquish her.

The child’s birth mother, Melodie Barnes, had split from her
boyfriend after getting pregnant and, with the help of a Christian
anti-abortion network, moved to Oregon, which then allowed mothers to
put babies up for adoption without their fathers’ consent. Barnes’
ex disputed the adoption, obtaining a restraining order to halt the
process. According to news
[[link removed]]
reports
[[link removed]],
the Newbys and their lawyer were notified of this before the birth,
but went forward anyway. They took custody just after the baby was
born, christening the little girl Sarah Frances Newby.

To thank Barnes, the Newbys gave her a gold key charm to symbolize
what she says they called her “second virginity,” which they
suggested she save for her future husband. Two weeks later, when a
court ordered the Newbys to return the child to her father, they
instead sought to give the baby to Barnes, someone who shared their
evangelical beliefs. 

They “called me and said you should come get the baby because
you’ll have a better chance of winning a custody battle … than we
will,” Barnes recalled. The Newbys turned the baby over to Barnes in
the parking lot of the Raleigh airport, along with diapers and a car
seat. Soon after, a court order compelled Barnes to give the baby to
her father. (The Newbys and the baby’s father didn’t respond to
questions from ProPublica about the case.) 

Losing the baby was “traumatic,” according to multiple family
members and a person who attended Bible study with Macon. The Newbys
went on to start two adoption agencies, including Amazing Grace
Adoptions
[[link removed]],
an agency whose mission was to place children in Christian homes and
save babies from abortion. They eventually adopted another baby girl,
whom they also named Sarah Frances.

When Newby ran for the Supreme Court in 2004, he focused on turning
out church and homeschool communities, voters to whom he had deep
ties. A campaign bio highlighted his work to facilitate Christian
adoptions and other faith-related activities.

Although North Carolina is among the states that elect supreme court
justices
[[link removed]]
(elsewhere, they’re appointed
[[link removed]]), state law at
the time dictated that judicial races were nonpartisan. Newby,
determined to distinguish himself in a crowded field, nonetheless
sought and got the endorsement
[[link removed]]
of the state Republican Party, meeting with each member of the
executive committee personally and emphasizing his conservative
beliefs. 

“That was savvy politics,” a Republican former state official
said, suggesting that it helped Newby win what was essentially a
behind-the-scenes “primary” over candidates who had stronger
credentials. 

Because Newby was working as a federal prosecutor at the time, his
critics saw his tactics as more troubling — and possibly illegal
[[link removed]]. Another conservative
candidate in the race, Rachel Hunter, accused him of violating the
Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from being candidates in
partisan elections. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel
[[link removed]], which enforces the Hatch Act, has warned
that seeking an endorsement in a nonpartisan race can make it partisan
[[link removed]].

“It speaks to someone who’s so stupid they don’t know the
rules,” Hunter told ProPublica. “Or someone who’s so malevolent
that they don’t care.”

Newby denied he’d broken the law
[[link removed]]. The U.S. Office of
Special Counsel opened an investigation but took no public action
against Newby. (It’s not clear why.) The office didn’t answer
questions from ProPublica about the case and declined to release the
investigative file, citing privacy laws. 

The controversy didn’t thwart Newby’s otherwise low-budget,
low-tech campaign. He spent a grand total of $170,000, mostly on
direct mailers. Macon bought stamps and made copies
[[link removed]].
Boosted by the Christian right, he won his first eight-year term on
North Carolina’s highest court with about 23% of the vote, finishing
a few percentage points ahead of Hunter and another candidate.  

“I think Paul really believed that God wanted him to fill that
role,” said Bradley Byrne, a Republican former congressman from
Alabama who was Newby’s fraternity brother at Duke and consulted
with him on his political runs. “He figured out what he needed to do
to be successful, and he did it.” 

“Court Intrigue”

Once Newby joined the court, it took years for him to find his footing
and start transforming it into the institution it is today. 

When he first donned black judicial robes, he became the junior member
of a collegial unit that worked hard to find consensus, former
justices said. 

In conferences to decide cases, they’d sometimes pass around
whimsical props like a clothespin to signal members to “hold their
noses” and vote unanimously to project institutional solidarity.
They often ate together at a family-run diner
[[link removed]] near the Capitol,
following the chief justice to their regular table and seating
themselves in order of seniority. (“Like ducklings following their
mother,” the joke went at the legislature.) Newby, as the most
junior member, had to close doors and take minutes for the others.

Six of the court’s seven justices were Republicans, but most were
more moderate than Newby, and he had little influence on their
jurisprudence. He quickly gained a reputation for being uncompromising
— “arm-twisting,” in one former colleague’s words. 

“He would not try to find common ground,” one former justice
complained. Another warned Newby that information about his
confrontational behavior would be leaked to the newspapers if he
didn’t stop.

Newby toned it down and bided his time. 

His 2012 bid for reelection turned into a game changer, a crucial step
both in pushing the court’s conservatives further to the right and
in opening it to more unchecked partisanship. 

Superficially, Newby’s campaign seemed folksy — one of his slogans
was “Scooby-dooby, vote for Newby” — but it was backed by
serious money. 

Not long before, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
[[link removed]]
had cleared the way for so-called dark money groups, which don’t
have to disclose their donors’ identities, to spend uncapped amounts
to influence campaigns. Newby’s opponent — Sam J. Ervin IV, the
son of a federal judge and the grandson of a legendary U.S. senator
[[link removed]] — depended mostly on
$240,000 provided by North Carolina’s pioneering public financing
system. Ervin did not respond to a request for comment.

A few weeks before Election Day, polls showed Ervin ahead. Then, about
$2 million of dark money flooded into the race in the closing stretch,
according to campaign finance records and news reports. Much of it
came from groups connected to the Republican State Leadership
Committee, the arm of the party devoted to state races, and
conservative super-donor Leonardo Leo
[[link removed]],
who has worked to win Republican majorities on state courts
nationwide. 
[[link removed]]

The cash funded waves of ads supporting Newby and blasting Ervin. TVs
across the state blared what became known as the “banjo ad
[[link removed]],” in which a country
singer crooned that Newby would bring “justice tough but fair.” 

Newby won by 4%, helping Republicans keep a 4-3 edge on the court,
having outspent his opponent by more than $3 million.

[link removed]

Ensconced in another eight-year term, Newby began working with
conservatives in the legislature to change judicial elections to
Republicans’ advantage.

In 2010, a red wave had flipped the North Carolina legislature to
Republican control for the first time in more than 100 years, putting
Newby’s allies into positions of power. 

His backchannel conversations with General Assembly members were
“openly known” among court and legislative insiders, one former
lawmaker said. 

“It was like court intrigue,” agreed a former justice. “It was
common knowledge he was down at Jones Street,” home to the
legislature’s offices. 

Tillis, then speaker of the North Carolina House, and Paul “Skip”
Stam, then the General Assembly’s majority leader, confirmed that
Newby’s opinion was taken into account.

“Judge Newby was a part” of a dialogue with key lawmakers, Tillis
said, not dictating changes but advocating effectively. Tillis said he
didn’t think Newby did anything improper.

But justices typically hadn’t engaged in these types of discussions
for fear of tarnishing the judiciary’s independence.

“Most of us refrained, except, of course, Newby,” another
Republican former justice said. “Paul had some strong ideas about
the way things ought to be, and he’d go to the General Assembly and
make sure they knew what he thought.” 

The stealth lobbying campaign proved effective. 

In 2013, the legislature did away with public financing for judicial
candidates, making them reliant on private contributions and dark
money groups. The move had Newby’s support, according to Tillis and
former justices. Research subsequently showed
[[link removed]] that
when North Carolina’s public financing system was in place, rulings
by justices were more moderate and reflected less donor influence.
Prodded by Newby, those constraints fell away.

Legislators also passed another measure Newby favored, according to
lawmakers, former justices, judges and court staffers. It cloaked
investigations by the courts’ internal watchdog, the Judicial
Standards Commission, in secrecy and gave the Supreme Court veto power
on sanctions and whether cases became public. The law was passed over
the objections
[[link removed]]
of commission members
[[link removed]].
Stam said that the changes guarded against judges being “smeared at
the last minute” by people filing public complaints during elections
“for political purposes.”

Newby had drawn the commission’s scrutiny for engaging in activities
that could cause litigants to question his impartiality, including
attending a rally against same-sex marriage
[[link removed]] in his first
year on the bench. A decade after the commission was made into one of
the most secretive in America
[[link removed]],
the court — under Newby’s leadership — would quash disciplinary
actions against two Republican judges. They had admitted to egregious
breaches of the state’s judicial code, including one contributing to
a defendant’s death, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The decisions to quash the discipline remained secret until ProPublica
reported them
[[link removed]].

In 2016, Republican lawmakers handed Newby a third victory when they
began phasing out nonpartisan judicial elections, according to former
justices, court staff and lawmakers. Democrats criticized the changes,
but Republicans pointed out that Supreme Court elections had become
nonpartisan in the mid-1990s because Democrats — then in control of
the legislature — thought that obscuring candidates’ party
affiliations gave Democrats an edge.

“Is it unsavory, some things the party did? Do we wish it was more
gentlemanly? Yes, we do,” said Marshall Hurley, the state Republican
Party’s former general counsel and a childhood friend of Newby.
“But I think once both sides figured out courts can have an outsize
role in issues, they realized they had to fight that fight.”

Newby’s willingness to engage in political sausage-making turned him
into a favorite among some state lawmakers to become the court’s
next chief justice. 

In 2019, the then-chief, Mark Martin, announced he would resign to
become dean of a Virginia law school
[[link removed]].
Martin didn’t respond to emailed questions from ProPublica about why
he left the bench. 

Tradition dictated that the court’s senior associate justice —
Newby — be appointed to complete Martin’s term. Instead,
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper chose a Democrat, Cheri Beasley, who became
the state’s first Black female chief justice. Newby called the
decision “raw, partisan politics
[[link removed]]”
and publicly promised to challenge Beasley in 2020. 

He ran a bare-knuckle campaign
[[link removed]],
attacking Beasley’s work to start a commission to study racial bias
in the court system and fighting her efforts to remove a portrait that
hung over the chief justice’s chair portraying a former justice who
had owned slaves.

Newby’s family members played key roles in his push to lead the
court. 

He’d persuaded the state Republican Party
[[link removed]] to create a
fundraising committee to boost conservative candidates for court
seats. His daughter Sarah, who had recently graduated from college
with a degree in agriculture, was picked to run it, though Newby’s
disclosure forms
[[link removed]]
described her previous job as “Ministry thru horses.” She “more
or less” ran her father’s 2020 race, a Republican political
consultant said. (Sarah Newby did not respond to requests for
comment.) 

Newby’s wife, Macon, put almost $90,000
[[link removed]]
into Republican campaigns and the state GOP. She also invested in a
right-wing media outlet, the North State Journal, that reported
favorably on her husband without disclosing her ownership stake, the
Raleigh News & Observer reported
[[link removed]].
(The then-publisher of the North State Journal did not respond to The
News & Observer’s request for comment; he referred questions from
ProPublica to the Journal, which did not respond.)

Still, the race was tight. On election night, Newby led by about 4,000
votes
[[link removed]],
but his margin shrank over the following month as officials continued
to cure provisional ballots and conduct recounts. 

Macon wrote to friends, asking for their prayers in helping her
husband win. “Paul, as a believer in Christ Jesus, is clothed in the
righteousness of Christ alone,” her note said. “Because of that,
he has direct access to Almighty God to cry out for wisdom in seeking
for the Court to render justice.”

After around 40 days and 40 nights, which Newby later described as a
biblical sign [[link removed]], Beasley
conceded. The final margin was 401 votes
[[link removed]]
out of around 5.4 million cast.

Justice League

When Newby was sworn in just after midnight on New Year’s Day, he
became chief justice of a court with a 4-3 Democratic majority,
limiting his ability to shape laws in the courtroom.

Still, as chief justice, he possessed considerable executive authority
to unilaterally reshape the 7,600-person court system and moved
swiftly to use it in ways that had no precedent, multiple former
justices and court staffers said. 

Chief justices have considerable hiring and firing power, though
Newby’s predecessors had used it sparingly, typically replacing only
a few top-level appointees. In Newby’s case, his senior-level hires
cleared out additional people in the courts’ central administrative
hub, including at least 10 managers and lower-level employees, many of
whom were outspoken liberals or openly LGBTQ+, current and former
employees told ProPublica. 

They were replaced by people with conservative political connections,
such as a former clerk of Newby’s and attendees of his prayer
groups, court staffers said. Court officials didn’t respond to
questions from ProPublica about these steps. At the time, a court
spokesperson said
[[link removed]]
that Newby was bringing in an executive “leadership team consistent
with his vision, as other state leaders have routinely done in the
past.”

Newby also could promote or demote judges on lower courts, deciding
who served as their chiefs and held prestigious committee posts. These
appointments affect crucial elements of the legal system, from the
composition of court panels to policies on bail. In the past,
seniority had dictated most of these choices. Newby, however, demoted
or forced into retirement as many as nine senior judges with little
public explanation, according to sources familiar with the matter; all
were Democrats
[[link removed]]
or moderate Republicans
[[link removed]],
or had clashed personally with Newby or his allies.

Among the most notable was Donna Stroud, the Republican chief judge
[[link removed]]
of the Court of Appeals, whom Newby removed after she was reported to
have
[[link removed]]
hired a clerk favored by Democrats over one favored by a Republican
justice. Stroud didn’t respond to a request for comment from
ProPublica; at the time, she told WRAL News that Newby had given her
little explanation
[[link removed]]
for her demotion. 

Newby replaced Stroud with a close ally, Chris Dillon. (Dillon did not
respond to questions from ProPublica.) 

Dillon had been appointed chair of the Judicial Standards Commission
just before Newby took over as chief justice. Newby kept him in the
role, filling one of six seats he controlled on the 14-member panel;
through those appointees, Newby has exercised considerable control
over the commission.

In 2022, after the commission’s longtime director clashed with
Dillon about limiting judges’ political activity
[[link removed]], she was
ousted. Her replacement, Brittany Pinkham, swiftly led two
investigations into alleged misconduct by Democratic Supreme Court
Justice Anita Earls, who had spoken publicly
[[link removed]]
about Newby’s actions to end initiatives to address a lack of
diversity in the court system. 

Newby personally encouraged
[[link removed]]
at least one of the investigations, ProPublica reported. Pinkham and
the commission’s current chair, Court of Appeals Judge Jeffery
Carpenter, didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the
cases in person or via email. Earls declined to comment on Newby’s
role in the commission’s investigations into her conduct. 

Neither investigation resulted in sanctions
[[link removed]],
but judges said that, in combination with the firings and demotions,
the probes conveyed a chilling message that Newby would punish those
who crossed him. Several judges said they were intimidated to the
point that it shaped how they did their jobs. Some said they or others
had felt pressured to participate in prayers Newby conducted at
courthouses or conferences. 

Judges and court staffers “are afraid of speaking out,” said Mary
Ann Tally, a judge who retired near the beginning of Newby’s tenure
as chief justice when she hit the statutory retirement age. Tally, a
Democrat, said other judges had told her they were “afraid of Newby
retaliating against them or that they would end up in front of the
Judicial Standards Commission.” ProPublica spoke to more than 20
current or former judges who expressed fear that Newby or his allies
might seek to harm their judicial or legal careers.

Newby didn’t respond to questions about whether his actions had
created a climate of fear. 

Newby’s appointments affected aspects of life in North Carolina well
beyond its courthouses. The state’s administrative law office
decides whether rules and regulations written by North Carolina
agencies are in keeping with state law. Newby replaced the office’s
longtime head
[[link removed]]
with Donald van der Vaart, a climate change skeptic and fracking
proponent who served in the first Trump administration. During van der
Vaart’s tenure as chief administrative judge, which ended in July,
he ruled against limits
[[link removed]]
on potentially dangerous chemicals in drinking water set by the
state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Van der Vaart declined
to answer questions from ProPublica about these decisions, saying he
could no longer comment on the court system now that he’s left.

The 2022 election offered Newby a chance to expand his powers beyond
personnel. Two Supreme Court seats held by Democrats were up for
grabs, enough to allow Republicans to regain the majority.

The races drew $10.4 million in outside dark money that favored
Republicans over Democrats by about 2-1, according to an analysis by
the Brennan Center
[[link removed]].
It was well known within the party, former justices and other judges
said, that Newby hand-picked Republican judicial candidates, demanding
that those vying for seats be “in lockstep” with his views, as one
described it. In one Supreme Court race, he championed a former clerk
[[link removed]]
whose career he’d nurtured since 2005.

During Newby’s tenure as chief justice, a cartoon
[[link removed]] has
hung in the Supreme Court depicting him as Superman, surrounded by a
coterie of conservative appellate justices caricatured as other
members of DC Comics’ Justice League.

It’s a gag, but one that hints at his dead-serious ambition to build
a lasting judicial dynasty. Berger, the son of North Carolina’s
Republican Senate president, who’s described himself as Newby’s
“wingman,” [[link removed]]
appears as Batman. Dillon, Newby’s pick to head the Court of
Appeals, is Aquaman.  

In November 2022, Newby took a giant leap toward realizing this
vision. North Carolina Democrats gained seats in Congress that year,
but Newby’s candidates ran sophisticated, well-financed campaigns
and crushed their Democratic opponents. 

With Newby leading the way, Republicans had swept the last 14
appellate judicial elections, cementing their dominance of the Court
of Appeals and the Supreme Court. 

The Long Run

In late January 2023, the day after the legislature petitioned the
Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case, Newby and three of
his colleagues, all Republicans, flew to Honolulu.

They made the trip to attend a conference
[[link removed]]
organized by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School,
which megadonors like Leo have turned into a crucial pipeline and
convener for the conservative legal movement
[[link removed]].

Newby’s presence at the weeklong gathering — held at The Royal
Hawaiian Resort, a pricey beachfront hotel known as the “Pink Palace
of the Pacific [[link removed]]”
— reflected his growing national stature. 

According to emails ProPublica obtained through a public records
request, he’d been personally invited to participate in school
events by Donald Kochan, the director of the school’s Law &
Economics Center. They’d met the previous August at a summit for the
Federalist Society
[[link removed]],
the influential conservative legal group.

Records from Scalia Law show the school spent about $14,000 to cover
expenses for Newby and the others. They went to lectures
[[link removed]]
on conservative legal principles in the mornings, then enjoyed local
attractions, from hot-tubbing to hiking, the rest of the day,
according to a ProPublica reporter who was at the event. On the final
evening, they attended an outdoor banquet lit by tiki torches that
featured a whole roasted luau pig. 

Only one of the four — Berger — disclosed the trip in their annual
judicial ethics forms
[[link removed]],
though the form directs judges to report gifts of over $500. Berger
did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.

Experts said that only the Judicial Standards Commission could
definitively determine if Newby had violated disclosure rules in this
instance. The commission declined to answer detailed questions from
ProPublica beyond directing a reporter to the Code of Judicial Conduct
and information on its website.

Newby didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the trip or
why he didn’t report it.

Ethics experts said Newby has made a habit of flouting North
Carolina’s rules on judicial conduct, a pattern startling in the
state’s highest-ranking jurist. 

The rules state judges “may not personally make financial
contributions” to candidates seeking elected office, but campaign
finance data shows
[[link removed]]
Newby is among more than a dozen judges and judicial candidates who
have ignored this prohibition
[[link removed]].
He’s made four such donations since 2008, including one in 2022
[[link removed]], when
he was chief justice.

Billy Corriher, the state court manager for the People’s Parity
Project, which advocates for what it calls progressive judicial
reform, alerted ProPublica to Newby’s contributions and described
them as “crystal clear” violations. Newby didn’t answer
questions about his political contributions.

North Carolina judges hold sole authority over whether to recuse
themselves from cases, but its judicial code advises them to do so
when their impartiality “may reasonably be questioned,” including
if they have “a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party.”

Yet, in late 2021, Newby wrote an opinion
[[link removed]] in an
adoption case without disclosing his connection to one of the parties:
Amazing Grace Adoptions, the anti-abortion adoption agency he’d
founded
[[link removed]]
in 1999. He’d gone on to serve on the agency’s board of directors
[[link removed]]
and touted his connection to it during his 2004 Supreme Court
campaign. 

His ties to the agency ended then, but experts in judicial ethics
expressed surprise that Newby hadn’t at least disclosed the
relationship even if he thought he could rule impartially on the case,
which he decided in Amazing Grace’s favor. 

“Disclosing can mitigate the appearance of impropriety,” said
Jeremy Fogel, the executive director of the University of California,
Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge. “I think
people ought to disclose. That’s what I would have done.”

The case involving the adoption agency wasn’t the first Newby had
decided despite having a potential conflict, according to experts and
media reports. According to the Center for Public Integrity, he ruled
at least six times
[[link removed]]
in cases involving Duke Energy or its subsidiaries while he and his
wife held stock in the company, always siding with it. During that
eight-year period, Newby and his wife’s shares were worth at least
$10,000 each year, according to
[[link removed]]
his disclosure forms
[[link removed]].
He also authored two opinions
[[link removed]]
on a federal agricultural program from which he, as a farm owner, had
earned income, while disclosing his participation in the program in
court.

As Newby finishes his third term, his cumulative effect on democracy
and justice in North Carolina stands out in bold relief. 

He’s played a decisive role in the ongoing power struggle between
the state’s governor and General Assembly, which has intensified as
Democrats have won the last three races for the governor’s
mansion. 

That’s because, as lawmakers have passed measure after measure
transferring powers traditionally held by the governor to other parts
of government controlled by Republicans, the governor has sought
relief in the courts. 

But the chief justice picks the three-judge panels who hear these
cases. Since 2023, when Newby gained more power over this process, his
picks have repeatedly upheld laws shrinking gubernatorial powers, as
have Newby’s conservative allies on the Court of Appeals.

Collectively, these decisions have reduced the governor’s control
over a broad array of entities, including those responsible for
regulating utilities, the environment and building standards. 

This year, Newby helped Republicans wrest away control over what many
saw as the most valuable prize: the state election board. 

The board had long been controlled by the governor, who appointed its
members. After years of failed attempts to change this, in late 2024,
the legislature passed a law giving the state auditor, a Republican,
the power to make election board appointments
[[link removed]].
The governor filed a legal challenge, but Newby’s court had the last
word, affirming the Court of Appeals’ decision permitting the
takeover.

The legislature has raised the mandatory retirement age for judges
from 72 to 76, allowing Newby to complete his current term, but he’s
not expected to run again in four years. He will leave behind an
intensely partisan, politicized court system in which elections are
brutal slugfests.

The most recent Supreme Court race ended after a six-month legal
battle
[[link removed]]
that the Republican challenger, a Newby mentee
[[link removed]],
conceded only when a federal court — a venue beyond Newby’s
control — rejected his bid to toss out 65,000 ballots. 

Even with that loss, conservatives hold a durable advantage in North
Carolina’s judiciary. On the Supreme Court, they’ll be in the
majority until at least 2028 even if Democrats win every election
between now and then — and much longer if they don’t. 

Newby no longer bothers to have the members of the court deliberate
together on important cases with political implications, according to
sources familiar with the matter. Instead, the conservative majority
just provides drafts of its decisions to the two Democratic justices;
if conservative justices oppose Newby, sometimes they are cut out,
too. 

The changes Newby has driven have turned North Carolina into a model
for other states, providing a road map conservatives elsewhere have
used to consolidate control over court systems. 

Ohio has followed North Carolina’s lead and switched to partisan
judicial elections, a move that’s tilted courts in Republicans’
favor
[[link removed]].
In Arizona and Georgia — where justices are appointed, not elected
— lawmakers have expanded state Supreme Courts
[[link removed]]
to allow Republican governors to add more conservatives. 

Big-money judicial races increasingly have become the norm in other
states as they have in North Carolina. Wisconsin saw the first $100
million state supreme court race
[[link removed]]
in U.S. history in 2025, with Elon Musk alone spending $20 million on
an unsuccessful attempt to swing the court back to Republican control.

The fierce politicking has eroded Americans’ confidence in the
judiciary. According to a Gallup poll released in December, only 35%
of respondents
[[link removed]],
a record low, said they trusted courts, down from almost 60% in 2006.

Some North Carolina Republicans — including Tillis, who sees
Newby’s efforts largely as rebalancing scales tilted by Democratic
lawmakers a generation ago — acknowledge that the tactics that have
put them in the political driver’s seat may be destructive over the
long haul.  

Tillis called partisan judicial elections “a bad idea on a long-term
basis.” He’s not running for reelection in 2026, after clashing
with Trump over health care cuts and concluding the current
divisiveness had made it impossible to serve all of his constituents.

Experts fear what will happen nationally if there is no reversal of
course and the approach that Newby has pioneered becomes the norm.

“The distinct line between the judiciary, the legislature and
politics is blurring,” said Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana
University Bloomington who specializes in judicial ethics. “And if
we don’t preserve that, it’ll be naked power all the way down.”

_Doug Bock Clark_ [[link removed]]_
is a reporter in ProPublica’s South unit. He investigates threats to
democracy and abuses of power throughout the region._

_ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important
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positive changes, our reporting has contributed to the passage of new
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