RALEIGH — Senator and former Durham Mayor Wib Gulley announced Monday that he was leaving the North Carolina Senate to become general counsel to the Triangle Transit Authority, which hopes to spend upwards of a billion dollars building and running a system of choo-choos.
Gulley has been one of the most reliably left-wing votes in the General Assembly, and the source of several key pieces of legislation that have changed North Carolina politics and public policy, often for the worse in my judgment. A thoughtful and engaging man, one who might have enjoyed a more spectacular statewide political career had the rest of North Carolina more closely resembled Durham or Chapel Hill in political leanings, Gulley will go on to shape public policy in our state, again mostly for the worse I fear, in his new post.
I find it interesting that Gulley isn’t just stepping down at the end of his sixth term later this year. He’s stepping down now, before the beginning of the 2004 short session. I further find it interesting, and unfortunate, that he offers as a major explanation the idea that he could no longer “economically afford” to serve in the legislature. With two school-aged children, one bound for college in a couple of years, Gulley said he could not pass up the TTA’s offer of nearly $113,000 given the extent to which his legislative duties had cut into his income as a Durham attorney.
Make no mistake: I’m not doubting Sen. Gulley’s veracity here. He’s got every right to take a Parthian shot — now known as a parting shot, but I prefer the original term — at a political system that keeps good people from wanting to make the financial sacrifice to serve. But his shot is aimed at the wrong target. The problem isn’t the amount of money lawmakers are paid: about $14,000 in official salary, more like $35,000 to $50,000 when you add in the value of tax-free expense payments and other compensation. The problem is that North Carolina’s General Assembly, designed long ago for part-time service by citizen-politicians employed in other professions, has progressively taken on more and more of the characteristics and responsibilities of full-time legislatures like those in California and Michigan.
It’s not a welcome trend. Yes, if North Carolina is to have a full-time legislature, we should do it straightforwardly and pay our elected officials accordingly, so the current system is unworkable and generates questionable legislative and political outcomes. But North Carolina does not need, and should not have, a full-time legislature. The longer politicians give themselves to make public policy at the taxpayers’ expense — both in the sense of their own compensation and in the sense of spending other people’s cents — the more public policy they will make.
The argument is that they will make better public policy, but I see no evidence of that in the states that have already stumbled down this path. Quantity will be the result, not quality, and if anything we need the state legislature to do less, to stop passing laws and meddling in affairs far outside the proper scope of coercive government. A couple of big pieces of legislation a year, plus a two-year budget in odd-numbered years and a modest budget adjustment in even-numbered years, is about all that the General Assembly should feel empowered to do — and certainly all that citizens in a free society should want it to do.
Instead of going the direction that Gulley and other self-styled “campaign reformers” advocate, complete with highly paid and firmly ensconced professional politicians and a constant flow of mostly pesky legislation out of Raleigh, we should seek to restore a real citizen legislature and real self-government to North Carolina. Annual sessions should be limited, with key committees and study commissions meeting during the off-session months primarily via electronic means so folks don’t have to head back and forth to the state capital (and so average North Carolinians with an Internet connection can have the same access to the process that lobbyists and the media do). Legislative terms ought to be limited, too, to ensure a rotation in office, reduce the power of incumbents in political campaigns, and prevent legislative fiefdoms from distorting the policymaking process. Localities ought to receive more autonomy to make their own decisions, as long as they can’t export the cost to other taxpayers, so that the General Assembly doesn’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time on “local” bills.
And lawmakers wanting to propose legislation should have to stay under a strict cap of bill introductions (they could trade permits to introduce bills like power companies do permits to emit pollutants into the commons, which is pretty much what the politicians are doing if you think about it) and be required to cite the section of the state constitution that authorizes them to pursue their new tax, subsidy, or regulation.
I’m sure some lawmakers would have plenty to say about these recommendations. But it seems that Wib Gulley is leaving such issues behind, at least for now, so he can focus on how best to finish assembling the TTA’s train set. If I think about it, I’ll send him one of those engineer caps my son fancied at the model-railroad show. And maybe a whistle.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
