RALEIGH — Just about every time I visit the Legislative Building in Raleigh to see our North Carolina General Assembly in action, I have a similar thought: should all the schoolchildren you see around really be exposed to what is going on inside there?
Usually we try to protect our children from bad influences. We know that, eventually, they will have to face the world and all the temptations and challenges that await. But at least for a time, we try to preserve something of their innocence. We talk of jolly elves in red suits and fairies with dental fixations. We choose stories, movies, and images with positive role models. We teach them to respect their elders and the institutions of our free society.
But what the children who visit our state capital see is not a shining example of American civics in action. They see leaders, elected by the citizens of the state, who bend every rule, twist every term, and pervert every parliamentary procedure to accomplish what they want. Sure, the pretense is preserved. Lawmakers meet deadlines by stopping the clock. They fulfill requirements to vote on bills on separate days by waiting until just before the stroke of midnight. They ignore duly elected lawmakers wishing to speak by claiming that they “didn’t see them.”
As the 2003 session draws to a close, the latest outrage is a Senate plan to stuff a $180 million cancer hospital for UNC-Chapel Hill into an omnibus “technical corrections” bill. As it sounds, the technical-corrections bill is designed to be a noncontroversial, non-policymaking piece of legislation to correct wording or legal errors in previously passed bills. Suddenly, a few powerful members have decided that their pet project — another egregious taxpayer subsidy for one of the nation’s most mollycoddled and profligate universities — should avoid serious debate, avoid that pesky committee process, and avoid being considered in the context of the other fiscal needs of the state in a budget or capital-projects bill. (The fact that the project would be financed by tobacco-settlement funds is no defense of a separate consideration of the hospital, since some of these settlement funds have already been diverted to General Fund purposes over the past two years).
At some point, you have to wonder whether protecting the pretense of self-government is worth the cost in hypocrisy. Both children and adults learn from example. If the leaders of North Carolina can ignore the rules of government whenver it suits them, mumbling some rationalization or devising some pathetic scheme to make it seem permissible, then why shouldn’t their constituents? Why honor any rules at all if they become inconvenient?
I wonder if these elected officials teach their children to cheat on tests in school if they believe the teacher isn’t being fair, to ignore traffic lights and speed limits if they are in a hurry, or to steal from stores that, in their view, charge excessive prices. If so, they’d at least be able to boast of their honesty and consistently.
Somehow, though, I doubt they do.
And yet they feel no compunction about acting, very publicly and in full view of observers, to subvert their own rules and the process of representative government in North Carolina.
It’s time to revisit the policy of exposing classes of North Carolina students to the spectacle of the state legislature. After all, won’t somebody please think of the children?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.