The North Carolina Legislative Building (Photo: Clayton Henkel)
The legislative short session raced out to a hot start this year, with Republicans imposing a sense of inevitably as they moved quickly on their high-profile commitments.
However, Republicans left some of their signature issues simmering as legislators took off last Thursday for their first break of the summer.
Less than a week after the session began on April 24, a Senate committee had advanced the controversial bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE, a longtime GOP objective. Sheriffs would be required to hold people charged with certain crimes for 48 hours if federal immigration officials asked.
Another bill that sailed through a Senate committee early in the session added millions of dollars to the expanded private school voucher program, which now allows even the wealthiest families to use taxpayer money to help pay private school tuition. Republican leaders made increased voucher spending a high priority in the run-up to the session.
Those objectives and others remain unfulfilled while Republican legislators try to work out their differences.
The extra voucher spending was rolled into the House and Senate Republican budgets, but House and Senate Republican leaders could not agree on spending revisions for the new fiscal year that starts today. For the meantime, voucher spending will remain at the level approved last year.
The ICE bill stalled after the House decided not to agree to a Senate change.
Big majorities in both chambers seemed to be on board with adding “gas station heroin” – real name tianeptine – and xylazine, called “tranq,” to the controlled substance list. Limiting the sale of those substances was included in a bill that would regulate hemp-derived consumables, which also had wide support.
When the Senate added medical marijuana to the bill in late June, that stopped it dead in the House. Sen. Bill Rabon, a Brunswick County Republican, is a medical marijuana champion and is intent on trying to make it legal. He used marjuana during his colon cancer treatment decades ago and told a House committee last year that it saved his life.
As of March, 24 states and Washington D.C. have legalized recreational and medical marijuana, according to the Pew Research Center. Another 14 states have legalized marijuana only for medical use.
House Speaker Tim Moore told the Associated Press last year that there’s not enough support among House Republicans to bring medical marijuana legalization to a vote of the full House.
Legislators prepared a full plate of proposed constitutional amendments, including proposed amendments on an income tax cap, voter ID, repealing the voter literacy test, and limiting the governor’s power to fill vacant Council of State elected executive positions. Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment on the public’s right to access government records and public meetings.
The only proposed amendment that passed both chambers to appear on the November ballot says only US citizens are allowed to vote. Voting by non-citizens is already illegal.
The short session isn’t over. Republicans have time to make more laws before the end of the year. Legislators have agreed to return to Raleigh sporadically through the summer and fall.
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