RALEIGH – When the Republican majority of the North Carolina House of Representatives adjourned its Racial Justice Act special session late Wednesday night and convened a new special session early Thursday morning to end state government’s payroll deduction for the North Carolina Association of Educators, they made lots of people mad.
Obviously, they angered the leadership of NCAE, the state’s largest teacher union*, and its chief beneficiaries in the Democratic Party.
They also angered the state press corps, whose deadlines and bedtimes they screwed up, although they also gave these reporters many days worth of juicy material for articles, broadcasts, and blog posts.
And the Republicans angered advocates of government transparency, including but not limited to liberal pundits and special-interest groups.
Count me among them, although in my case the term “disappointed” is more apt. I certainly don’t think that state government should ever have been in the business of collecting and remitting NCAE dues, some of which are used for lobbying and independent expenditures about political issues. So I’m fine with the outcome of the legislature’s action.
But I don’t think holding a sudden veto-override vote in the middle of the night was a good idea. I think it set a bad precedent, one that might well come back to bite future governors and legislators, and further damaged the prospects for trust and collegiality on Jones Street.
I don’t think the action was unconstitutional, and I doubt that NCAE and its allies will have much luck getting the veto-override vote thrown out by the courts. The leaders of the General Assembly have the constitutional power to call special sessions, be they at 10am on a Tuesday or in the wee hours of the morning on a Thursday, and the state’s public-notice law is a bit vague when it comes to the General Assembly.
But to say that an action is legal or constitutional is not necessarily to say it is wise.
Would Republicans have liked to be treated this way if they were in the minority? Republican lawmakers might well retort that my question is hardly theoretical – that they were treated this way numerous times over the years in which they were in the minority in the House and Senate.
Yes, Democratic arrogance and abuse of power were often in evidence in the past. No matter what you think of last week’s Republican maneuvering on NCAE payroll deduction, it isn’t in the same league of misbehavior as former House Speaker Jim Black bribing a Republican member to switch parties, a crime that kept Democrats in power despite having lost the 2002 elections and allowed them to redraw the legislative maps to stay in power through the rest of the decade. (The crime also resulted in convictions for both the briber and bribee, albeit many years after the fact.)
None of the suddenly holier-than-thou Democrats upset about the NCAE vote ever deemed it necessary to apologize for going along with the 2002-03 criminal conspiracy. None offered to rescind any of the legislation Democrats enacted (such as the creation of the state lottery) because of the power they obtained through the criminal action of their former leader.
Still, two wrongs don’t make a right, and the ends do not justify the means. I think it would have been wiser for Republicans to hold their special veto-override session only after advance notice. If it then proved impossible to round up the override supermajority needed, I think it would have been wiser to wait for a more opportune time to address the problem of state government collecting NCAE dues – even if it meant waiting for the election of a governor who wouldn’t veto such a measure in the first place.
Perhaps after reading my argument, some will criticize me as naive. Go ahead, I can take it. Again, NCAE should never have had access to state government as a dues-collection agency in the first place. Good riddance.
But bad form.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.
* To all the usual suspects who send me furious letters and emails every time I call NCAE a teacher union, feel free to waste your time again – but don’t expect to change my mind. NCAE is the state affiliate of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union. Neither the possession of formal collective-bargaining authority nor a 501(c)(5) tax designation is required for an organization to operate as a labor union for all practical purposes. Unions existed for decades before either of these conditions existed. Your political sensitivity about the label “teacher union” is understandable – North Carolinians don’t much like unions – but to me it is merely an encouragement to continue using the term.