Partisan push blurs content and assessment of NC legislation

The General Assembly is pushing to close its short session by the end of this week with passage of a state budget. It should be a basic process of merging the House and Senate budgets into one and setting the state’s spending plan for the next fiscal year.

But it won’t be that. It will be a rushed, secretive misadventure in which big shifts in policy will be buried among the budget bill’s hundreds of pages. After the lawmakers go home, lawyers, advocacy groups, journalists and even some who voted for the budget will try to assess what was wrought.

It’s common in legislatures around the nation – and it has long been the practice in North Carolina – to hide policy in budgets to avoid separate public hearings or to add unrelated amendments to bills. But Republicans who have led the General Assembly since 2011 have taken the practice of rushed and deceptive legislation to an extreme. Remember the 2013 changes in the state’s abortion laws that were added at the last minute to a motorcycle safety bill?

That was just the beginning. The so-called voter ID bill imposed a raft of voting changes that disproportionately affected low-income and minority voters, but it was presented as only a “common sense” requirement to show a photo ID. House Bill 2 requiring that transgender people use the restroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificates also blocks workplace discrimination cases from state courts, bans localities from setting their own minimum wage and keeps cities and towns from including sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws.

That fabrication turned to farce when House Speaker Tim Moore rejected a Democratic budget amendment to repeal HB2 saying, “If you open it up to allow any amendment on anything, that would completely circumvent the legislative process.”

But circumventing the legislative process has become the hallmark of the current legislative leadership. They don’t consult with affected groups. They don’t ask Democrats what they think (nor do they ask their Republican governor). And they often are deaf to what the Constitution has to say.

State Rep. Verla Insko, a Chapel Hill Democrat, has served in the legislature for 20 years. She said Democratic leaders put their share of policy in budgets and hid changes in unrelated bills, but never on the scale she is seeing now. The lack of transparency in the bills is compounded by the speed with which they’re pushed through.

“I don’t know what’s in them and then there are too many coming through too fast,” she said. “This is a misuse of power. It’s not democratic.”

Add fixing the legislative process to the long list of what must be done once the reactionaries are ousted.

Meanwhile, the mad rush to close is on. Senate and House leaders said late Monday they have reached a budget agreement. After the session ends, North Carolinians will pick through the new laws and see what happened mostly without their knowledge or consent.

This story was originally published June 27, 2016 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Partisan push blurs content and assessment of NC legislation."