In 2 a.m. vote, NC lawmakers target coronavirus measure on wearing masks in public
A 2 a.m. vote Friday in the North Carolina Senate has some politicians questioning if it’s going to be illegal for people to wear face masks in public, starting in a little more than a month.
“We purposefully took out a provision that would have made it legal, and that just seems wrong to me in the middle of a pandemic,” Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus of Mecklenburg County said.
The early-morning vote in the Senate came on the same day that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s statewide order making mask-wearing mandatory in public was set to go into effect. Republican Senate leader Phil Berger has strongly criticized that order, which will begin at 5 p.m. Friday.
The hours preceding the mask vote were also filled with numerous other contentious, partisan debates on various executive orders from the governor related to coronavirus and the reopening of bars, gyms, playgrounds, amusement parks and more.
The day’s schedule at the legislature began first thing in the morning Thursday and didn’t end until nearly 3:30 a.m. Friday.
“It sounds to me like we’re getting really silly here in the early hours of the morning,” Marcus said as the Senate passed the bill over her objections.
Sen. Chuck Edwards of Henderson County said he and some fellow Republicans have been talking about potential mask-related changes for the future but that there were no details ready to be made public yet.
“I can’t tell you specifically what we are doing,” he said.
The legislature adjourned Friday morning, but left open the possibility of taking more votes next month. If the mask issue doesn’t get resolved then, there could be at least a month when the legality of mask-wearing is unclear, since the legislature currently doesn’t plan to meet at all in August but does plan to come back Sept. 2.
It’s normally illegal to wear masks in public in North Carolina because of a 1950s law targeted at the KKK. But earlier this year lawmakers voted to suspend that law until Aug. 1, with public health experts advising people to wear masks to slow the spread of COVID-19.
On Thursday another plan — to extend permission for public mask-wearing until next February — surfaced at the legislature in a bipartisan agreement. It was proposed by the top Democrat in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Wake County Rep. Darren Jackson, and then backed by GOP leadership.
But hours later, the calendar turned from Thursday to Friday and the legislature was still in session. And Republicans in the Senate took that provision out of the bill, bringing it back to the current Aug. 1 deadline.
“The suggestion that someone would get arrested for wearing a mask during a pandemic in NC is honestly laughably ridiculous,” tweeted Brent Woodcox, a Senate GOP lawyer, after Senate Democrats raised concerns over the decision.
In mid-April, the top prosecutor for Rocky Mount and Wilson said his office wouldn’t prosecute anyone for wearing a face mask to fight coronavirus. Robert Evans, the district attorney for Wilson, Nash and Edgecombe counties, told the Spring Hope Enterprise that in his opinion the state’s mask ban “has no application for those wearing protective masks to prevent the spread of disease in a pandemic.”
Lawmakers, however, appear to have believed it was not so clear. Later that month they passed the new law exempting people from the mask ban until Aug. 1. The News & Observer reported at the time that Republican Rep. John Bell, the House majority leader, “said that date could later be extended if the measures are still needed in late summer.”
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