GOP lawmakers undermine democracy in Greensboro

Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly have once again abused their power by infringing on the rights of people to elect their government officials as they see fit.

First, the victims of this legislative meddling in local elections were the people of Wake County. This time, the disenfranchised are the people of Greensboro

Under a bill that initially failed in the House, but was passed after a GOP caucus meeting, Greensboro City Council districts would be changed. Instead of having at-large and district representatives, the council would be divided into exclusively district races. The mayor would lose some voting power. And the new districts would force incumbents to run against each other, including four current minority council members. Thus, minority representation would likely be reduced. As with other redistricting curiosities in this General Assembly, legal challenges await.

Running all this mischief, perhaps at the behest of her leadership, is Republican Sen. Trudy Wade, a former Greensboro council member. But two Guilford County House members were opposed. Veteran Rep. John Blust, a Republican, said he would not support the bill unless Greensboro voters got a chance to have their say in a referendum. Basically, Blust saw a power play by the Senate.

Blust said to his colleagues that the overhaul of Greensboro’s city elections was a priority of Senate leaders, but not of his House colleagues. “Most of you do not represent Greensboro, and I bet 95 percent do not care about this issue,” he said.

Republicans, when in the minority for decades, often complained about Democrats ramming through whatever their leadership wanted, and playing hardball to do so, with secret meetings and all sorts of arm-twisting. It would now appear the GOP leadership is trying to master that unfortunate art, but they’re pretty clumsy at it.

Earlier in this session, GOP lawmakers, seeking revenge on Democrats and for that matter the people of Wake County, redrew Wake’s school board and county commissioner districts to make them more likely to deliver Republican majorities in the next election.

Why? Republicans had been turned out of both boards after years of angry, unproductive rule. They were summarily dismissed in fair-and-square elections, elections conducted, by the way, under the same rules that were in effect when Republicans came to power. So GOP legislators fixed that, literally, by drawing new districts skewed to diminish the voting power of Democrats.

Now in the Greensboro case the GOP’s devotion to having the politicians choose their voters has gone from arrogance to absurdity.

The House initially voted down this bad bill, by three votes. Then a closed-door Republican caucus was held. In less than an hour, several Republicans changed their votes, and Mecklenburg Republican Rep. Charles Jeter, who’d voted against the bill, made a motion to reconsider it. The bill was approved.

Then the Senate, where President pro-tem Phil Berger gives all the orders, did likewise and made bad law. Done deal. The people of Greensboro had been smacked around by high-handed legislators.

Was Wade pressured by Berger to push this through? What deals were made behind the closed doors of the caucus? Did the Senate leadership make it clear House bills would be dead if the lower chamber didn’t go along?

So let’s not have Republicans defending this insult to democracy, on the eve of the Fourth of July no less, by whining that the “Democrats did it all the time.” The Democrats most certainly were inclined to have their way no matter what, but they didn’t jump into local redistricting, and the Republican move to cram blanket environmental deregulation into a technical bill was amateurish and irresponsible to an amazing degree. Even Gov. Pat McCrory, a fellow Republican, has argued that too many policy issues are becoming part of the budget debate.

And these excesses are coming from GOP lawmakers who vowed they would do things differently, most importantly doing them in the open after all that secrecy under the Democrats. Right. They did this nasty bit of business in a closed-door caucus. Never speak of your commitment to open government again, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve made a mockery of it.

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 3:00 PM with the headline "GOP lawmakers undermine democracy in Greensboro."