COLUMBIA, SC ― Maybe you’ve seen some of the eye-catching headlines bouncing out of North Carolina’s capitol over the last couple months. Stories about legislative measures like the one that would have made it possible to create an official state religion, or another that would mandate a two-year waiting period for a divorce.
It’s the first time in more than a century that Republicans have control of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature. And they haven’t wasted any time in trying to drastically reshape North Carolina’s political, social, and economic landscape, unfurling a wave of bills on matters ranging from the relatively mundane to the momentous. Legislation has been proposed that would dole out prison sentences to women who go topless in public, allow public high schools to offer Bible study as an elective, and restrict access to abortions. A dozen years after the industry was outlawed amid concerns over predatory practices, there’s a push to bring back payday lenders. Other measures would end teacher tenure, eliminate green energy rules, resume executions, and restrict the power of local government, especially in the state’s largest cities. Unemployment benefits have been cut amid persistent high joblessness, and there’s a proposal that would turn the state’s corporate income tax from the highest in the Southeast to the lowest. There’s a Voter ID bill, and another one that would penalize families whose college-age children register to vote at their campus location. There are proposals to allow hunting on Sundays―something that hasn’t been permitted since 1868―and to raise the maximum speed limit for school bus drivers, and a group of GOP lawmakers recently tried to make North Carolina’s state marsupial the Virginia opossum. Asheville Citizen-Times columnist John Boyle even did a gag bit in which he challenged passers-by on the street to “name the fake bill” (most folks could not distinguish the made-up measure from the real ones).
For North Carolina reporters, it has been a daunting story to cover, one that involves trying to keep up with the rapid pace of proposed legislation while deciding which measures merit devoted coverage and which to dismiss as hackery.
“I think the hard part about it is trying to balance,” says Laura Leslie, capitol bureau chief of WRAL in Raleigh, the state’s leading station for political coverage. “There are crazy bills that get filed in every session under every kind of leadership. How much attention do you devote to those versus the ones that are actually going to move in committee?”
Striking that balance is harder than usual this year; Republicans have streamlined the legislative process so a bill might have to clear only one panel before coming to a vote, sometimes with little debate. “You have to kind of move faster and keep a closer eye on what gets filed,” Leslie says, “because if it moves, you’re not going to have a lot of time to catch it.”
It’s a tension that John L. Robinson, former Greensboro News & Record editor and a journalist in the state for 37 years, has acknowledged in his influential blog―even as he has encouraged reporters to tackle a big story with big journalistic ambitions. From an April 3 item:
You know in Hollywood disaster movies there is always some lone person―usually ignored―who senses the early tremors of the earthquake or the distant sighting of the meteor or the readouts of the soon-to-be erupting volcano or the first wave of a tsunami? If I were a reporter in North Carolina―or a reporter for a national news organization―I would try to be that person. I would be pitching a story about what’s happening in Raleigh. With the GOP takeover of the legislature and the governor’s office, the world as we North Carolinians know it is up for grabs.
Also worth noting: Many Democrats stayed home in 2010, enabling the GOP to gain legislative control in a redistricting year.
Why did they stay home? Some just weren't as fired up without Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Some were actively annoyed at Obama because they thought he'd sold them out on health care. And even some Democrats either stayed home or voted GOP because they thought Obamacare went too far (despite being a Heritage Foundation plan in all but name).
And the pace has picked up this year because the GOP knows it doesn't have to worry about Pat McCrory's veto pen. McCrory will sign anything they send him because he doesn't want to get primaried from the right in 2016. You watch: He said in the third 2012 gubernatorial debate that he would veto further abortion restrictions, but some are headed his way. He will let them become law. You heard it here first.
#1 Posted by Lex, CJR on Tue 23 Apr 2013 at 12:35 PM
Unmentioned as a cause of the GOP ascendence was the toxically inept performance of ex-Gov. Bev Perdue. If she had been competent, what Art Pope wants wouldn't matter, but push-button pro-Democrat journalists like Jane Mayer cannot explain setbacks for her party in any other but conspiratorial terms. The state's Democratic Party has also given the country leaders of the quality of John Edwards, of fragrant memory - maybe there's something kooky about the North Carolina Dems, too. Perdue pushed through a bill mandating affirmative action in criminal sentencing, including capital cases, which is as extreme as anything evinced above, to the average voter.
In the meantime, over the past couple of decades, another prominent state called California become a symbol of chronic dysfunction at the state-government level, but it is difficult (in spite of some pathetic efforts by Krugman and others) to blame wicked conservatives, since the Democrats have been firmly in control since about the time of the Phil Burton gerrymander of the early 1980s. Socially liberal and supposedly 'fiscally-conservative' Republicans have occuped the Governor's mansion through most of those years, to no avail. California's legislators, the lot of whom would no doubt pass the ideological-sanity tests of CJR and its sources for this article, have presided over the combination of the highest taxes and most regulated economy of any state, coincidentally accompanied by unemployment rates much higher than the national average.
Eyes are averted. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, California is on its way back, etc. Let's not talk about it - or about Illinois, another state in decline, which happens to be the fiefdom of President Obama's Cook County Democrats. Let's talk about what those crazy Republicans in growing states are up to. The thing about partisan/ideological journalism is that it ends up unable to explain a lot of reality.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 23 Apr 2013 at 12:58 PM
North Carolina journalist Erica Perel points this out on Twitter: "no one, journos or politicos, ever mentions the NC Dems' leadership void as factor in this."
https://twitter.com/EricaPerel/status/326724468774928385
#3 Posted by Corey H, CJR on Tue 23 Apr 2013 at 02:33 PM
Hear hear, Mark. And there's the issue of constitutionality. Maybe if the 10th Amendment was seriously invoked, the press would have to dig beyond the Dem-Rep veneer. Even closer to the root are the debates over natural rights and the role of govt.; e.g., should any govt hold a monopoly on social contracts, schooling, etc., in the first place? The results of said discussions, however crushing to journalists' fantasies, would be mostly helpful toward a freer, more enlightened society. Instead, press luminaries suggest journalistic electioneering as an ethical practice.
#4 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 23 Apr 2013 at 03:30 PM
Not to worry. Many among the strangest of these gambits seem simply unconstitutional.
#5 Posted by Russell B. Barclay, CJR on Wed 24 Apr 2013 at 02:48 PM