Legislative leaders bypassed committee hearings and multiple votes by gutting a bill on dental services that had passed both chambers but with differing versions.
“This seems like power politics to the max,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
If it seems like deja vu to longtime observers of the legislature, that’s because Republican lawmakers held a similar session after the 2016 election that resulted in Democrat Roy Cooper defeating incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
After that election, state lawmakers took the governor’s abilityto appoint trustees to public universities, reduced the number of the governor’s political appointees from 1,500 to 425, and required Senate confirmation of gubernatorial cabinet appointees such as the health department secretary.
They also moved to end the governor’s control of the elections board by increasing it from five to eight members whose appointment was to be split between the two major political parties.
The courts turned back the elections board changes and voters rejected a constitutional amendment that also would have stripped the governor’s power over the board. But in 2018, lawmakers moved to exert more control over the board of elections differently, by barring its campaign finance investigations from becoming public.
A Tradition Among the Powerful
Republicans are not the only ones to make moves to reduce the powers of an office held by the other major party.In 1989, after Republican Jim Gardner won election to lieutenant governor, the Democrat-controlled Senate stripped him of the power to assign bills to committees and select members and chairmen to committees in the chamber, theN.C. Center for Public Policy Research reported at the time.
But GOP leaders, after winning the majority in 2010 for the first time since Reconstruction, have often turned to tactics that are less than transparent, Cooper said.
Republican legislators have used conference reports repeatedly in recent years to quickly pass significant legislation. That included state budgets in 2018 and 2022 that each spent more than $23 billion and last year’s success at banning most abortions after 12 weeks.
They have also inserted policy and spending changes in the final versions of state budget bills that have increased their hold on power and cloaked more of their activities.
In last year’s state budget, for example, legislators exempted themselves from the state’s public records law, a key tool members of the public and the press use to understand what’s happening in government when officials aren’t being forthright with information.
Another provision in the budget expanded the investigative powers of the Joint Legislative Commission on Government Operations, which scrutinizes state spending and is led by Republicans. State employees and others now can’t disclose if they’ve been contacted by the commission, and it can seek criminal charges for those who choose not to cooperate with its investigations.
The commission replacedthe legislature’s nonpartisan Program Evaluation Division, which ran from 2007 to 2021, and identified inefficient and wasteful spending in government programs.
John Turcotte was the division’s first and only director. On Wednesday he said that the legislature has gone overboard in gaining control over state government, taking over functions that should be the purview of the executive branch.
He likened it to a corporate board taking over the day-to-day operations of a business.
“In the private sector the corporate board doesn’t need to be deciding constantly how the infrastructure of a corporation runs,” he said.“If they were constantly changing the organization’s structure and ignoring the CEO it wouldn’t work.”
Response to Possible Supermajority Loss?
This week’s power-shift move emerged after election results so far show Republicans losing their supermajority in the state House, which means the legislation might not survive incoming Democratic governor Josh Stein’s likely veto if it was put to vote next year.The maneuver of substituting the text into bills that were already voted on allowed them to insert the new legislation in what is known as a conference report, a proposed law that requires only a single yes-or-no vote in both chambers.
It also includes another effort by legislators to remove the governor’s control over the State Board of Elections, by shifting it to a newly elected Republican state auditor.
House Democrats and the public had little time to review the gutted bills that could usher in more power shifts favoring the Republican majority in the North Carolina General assembly.
The legislation, which wasn’t released until an hour before the chamber took up the bill on Tuesday night. passed, but not a single Democrat voted in support and three Republicans in Helene-impacted counties voted against.
One of them told Blue Ridge Public Radiothe legislation hardly resembled a hurricane relief bill.
“Well, I didn’t see anything in there that really did a lot for Western North Carolina,” said Rep. Mark Pless, a Haywood County Republican was quoted saying. “I’m not sure why it had disaster in the title, and even I asked that that be removed.”
The bill cleared the Senate on Wednesday in a party-line vote.
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