The following editorial appeared in the September 2014 print edition of Carolina Journal:
Take the closing days of the General Assembly’s short session. Please. Weeks after legislators should have been home, raising money for re-election, touting the many accomplishments of the two-year session, and (largely) leaving the rest of us alone, they were stuck in Raleigh, not allowed to depart before they confronted a handful of convoluted measures that were stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster.
Several provisions would have led to sound, conservative policies. Others would have been a setback for the free-market, limited-government cause. But the process that moved these measures forward stank. They were rolled out in a fashion that would have made former Democratic legislative bosses Marc Basnight, Tony Rand, and Jim Black gleeful — using the rushed, secretive, and high-handed methods that became a hallmark of Democratic leadership in recent years — and that aided the GOP in its 2010 victory that grasped control of the legislative branch of government.
We’d like to think Rep. Michael Speciale, a freshman Republican from Craven County, spoke for many North Carolinians on Aug. 20, the next-to-last day of the session. The chamber was debating House Bill 1224. The legislation began as a mechanism to provide subsidies to the Evergreen Packaging paper mill in Canton, which was forced by federal bureaucrats to shift its energy source from coal to natural gas. By the time Speciale rose to debate the bill, this two-page measure had expanded to 45, with new provisions enabling counties to raise sales taxes, creating a new corporate welfare business grant program and expanding another, and enacting into law two separate, tangentially related pieces of legislation.
Speciale was fed up. He said he had witnessed legislative sessions from the chamber’s balcony for 14 years, watching Republicans argue against Democratic schemes to provide special favors for politically connected businesses. “I thought, ‘Oh, if only the Republicans could be in charge, they would fix this,'” he told colleagues. But now, he noted, Republican lawmakers were being asked to support a measure doing “the very thing that we argued [against] year after year after year.”
During the same debate, Rep. Darren Jackson, a Wake County Democrat, expressed frustration at the way H.B. 1224 was shoved through the chambers. “We should have been out of here two weeks ago when we had a chance,” Jackson said. “That’s when House leadership made a commitment to me personally that [H.B.] 1224 was dead. A promise around here apparently does not mean what it means when I give someone my word.”
In the end, fortunately, the leaders lost. The House rejected the bill 54-47, with 28 Republicans joining 26 Democrats. The session ended quietly the next day, though Gov. Pat McCrory has hinted he may call a special session to reconsider economic incentives.
A word of advice, governor: Don’t. Many legislative leaders at the end of the session behaved like petulant children. They deserve an extended time-out. Citizens could use a break, too. Say, until January?