Incoming North Carolina House Speaker, Rep. Destin Hall (R-Caldwell), during a House vote on Sept. 11, 2024. (Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)
In case you ever wondered, here’s a sure indicator that a politician has been caught doing something sketchy and underhanded.
When the only explanation they have for an action they’re taking is to mumble that it’s “business as usual” or that it’s analogous to something their political adversaries once did, you know they’re up to no good.
North Carolinians were reminded of this hard truth last week when Republican lawmakers floated these excuses and other similar ones to justify a massive and secretly crafted scheme to reorganize state government and seize power from offices held by Democrats. The changes were rammed through the legislature (as part of a bill that purported disingenuously to be about hurricane relief) in just a matter of hours.
Senate Republican leader Phill Berger, incoming House Speaker Rep. Destin Hall and outgoing Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson all played this cynical game.
According to Raleigh’s News & Observer, Hall told reporters after the 131-page bill was approved in a strictly partisan vote that it had been fully and adequately debated because – gee whiz! – the House spent a whole 90 minutes on it and Democratic lawmakers would’ve likely still been opposed if they’d had another month to examine it.
“But tonight, you know, we knew that they got the bill a little bit later, so we allowed them debate it, and it sounded like they debated just about every page of it,” Hall said smarmily.
Berger, likewise, said the process used was “within the rules” and was akin to what “Democrats have used before” — though he did not say how or when that was the case.
Meanwhile Robinson, whose presence in the Legislative Building to preside over the Senate has been so rare over the past four years that his sudden appearance last week raised concerns that he might try to usurp Gov. Roy Cooper’s powers and sign the bill while Cooper was in Washington begging for more federal aid, echoed Berger’s take by telling WRAL.com the bill was “just politics as usual.”
All three men are fully aware, however, that their explanations are transparently bogus.
As NC Newsline reporter Galen Bacharier detailed in Monday report, the bill in question is chockful of dozens of controversial changes – some of them unprecedented, hugely impactful and of questionable constitutionality.
- It makes major changes (i.e. cuts) to the powers of the governor, lt. governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction.
- It makes significant changes to state election law by transferring power from the governor to the state auditor (the auditor!) and erecting new barriers to the counting of votes.
- It creates a whole new state government department.
- It alters appointments to and leadership of the state utilities commission and abolishes the state Energy Policy Council.
- It weakens the state building code.
- It makes an array of appropriations – some of the highly questionable — completely unrelated to hurricane relief.
- It even grabs some state-owned parking spaces near the Legislative Building for the use of legislators.
And the list goes on.
Hall’s claim that 41 seconds per page is plenty of time to discuss such a catalogue of important changes – changes of which the general public was not even remotely aware – would be laughable if it weren’t so outrageous.
Meanwhile, Berger and Robinson’s “politics as usual” take – perhaps a reference to the 1993 decision of state Senate Democrats (later validated by Republicans) to alter the chamber’s rules governing the competing duties of the Senate President Pro Tem and Lt. Governor – is hardly analogous to such a multifaceted power grab.
But what makes the legislation a downright cruel joke, of course, is that: a) it was labeled as a hurricane relief measure – something designed to embarrass Cooper if he were to veto it, and b) it doesn’t even really provide significant relief.
As Bacharier’s report notes, the bill allots only a tiny fragment of the billions of dollars needed ($225 million) and even that money was not actually appropriated. The bill merely transfers the money from the state’s savings reserve to its Helene Fund, where it will remain unspent until appropriated at a later date by the legislature.
The whole thing was so absurd that even three House Republicans voted ‘no’ – something virtually unheard of in the modern, Trumpified North Carolina GOP, where public disagreement is generally verboten. One of the three – Rep. Mark Pless of western North Carolina’s Haywood County – even had the guts to decry the lack of process and lack of real aid for his home region in a statement to NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar.
Of course, the notion that Pless or either of the others — Rep. Karl Gillespie (R-Macon), Rep. Mike Clampitt (R-Swain) – would muster the courage vote to sustain a gubernatorial veto still seems hard to imagine, but the mere fact that three such dedicated archconservatives would dare to publicly cross the GOP leadership speaks volumes as to how far out of bounds the bill (and the excuses used to justify it) stray.
One can only hope that at some point soon, the trickle of dissent gives rise to a flood.