North Carolina

[simrob]

In the past two weeks I've spent a lot of time either at the NC State legislature (2 blocks from where I work, conveniently) or following the various clusterfucks there. This is just my own personal recollections of what happened, and it may not be interesting to others.

First, the governor called a special session to fund disaster relief for the drowned bits of eastern NC and the burnt bits of western NC. This on its own was probably a good idea, but from the beginning there were two big worries. One, that the legislature would use a sketchy constitutional^* maneuver to basically install the barely-defeated governor. This mostly went away when the governor conceded. Two, that the legislature would use a totally valid constitutional time bomb to grow the elected state Supreme Court to get two more appointees. (Before election, court was a 3-4 conservative majority, after election a 4-3 liberal majority. Two appointees would make it a 4/5 conservative majority.) Republicans claimed this was just liberal FUD, but because the odious HB2 was also passed in either the first or the second special session, there was some distrust about special sessions.

The disaster session almost finished with no shenanigans. Right before it ended, there was an announcement of a fourth special session, beginning in two hours. The fact that all the Republicans in the legislature were planning this for two days and no word got out is frankly pretty impressive. With a few weeks of perspective, I'd say this special session passed a couple of pretty severe but, in all honestly, not incredibly unprecedented political dirty tricks. Highlights, in increasing order of oh-crap:

• Took away powers from the state Supreme Court and put them in the hands of another body with a conservative majority. I get the impression the legislature has been playing this game under both parties nonstop for the last half-century.
• Changed the classification of political appointees so that about 1,000 positions that the outgoing (R) governor got to hire/fire at will are now locked in their jobs. I agree that personnel is policy, so this magnificently kneecaps the incoming (D) governor. However, it's hard to say it's out of line with the way business is done in North Carolina.
• Requires a lot of the governor's appointments to be confirmed by the legislature. See above, except with maybe a bit more unprecedented.
• Took away the governor's power to appoint members to the university system's board of trustees, and gave that to the legislature. This wouldn't make most people's top five lists, but I do not trust the school system with the current North Carolina GOP at all, and took this one pretty personally.
• Changed the way the state oversees elections dramatically. In recent elections, the governor's party had a 3-2 majority on the state board of elections (and a 2-1 majority on all one hundred county boards of elections). The state board was turned into an 8 member board that needed a supermajority for decisions, and turned all the county boards into 2-2 boards that need a majority. The current design makes the governor highly accountable for county boards of elections, and seemed to kind of work in the previous election. (Democratic accountability sometimes looks like making people defend their horrible views out in the open, for example.) This new system design seems intended to make sure nothing gets done and nobody can be blamed when nothing gets done. I'm really worried about it.

Then, last week's disaster. As near as I can understand it, Roy Cooper and Jennifer Roberts (mayor of Charlotte) decided on two things: first, that HB2 would only be repealed by the current NC legislature if Charlotte repealed its anti-discrimination ordinance; second, that the Republican legislature would, post HB2-repeal, reinstate the law if another city (say, Asheville), passed a similar law. If you believe both of those things, their actions over the past six months make sense:

• The worst outcome is that HB2 isn't repealed and is upheld in federal court. HB2 is likely permanent in that world, economic destruction be damned.
• The second-worst outcome is that HB2 is repealed and there is a sitting Republican governor. Then, everyone is exactly as unable to pass LGBT non-discrimination policies as they were under HB2, but there's no explicit law to fight.
• The next-to-best outcome is that HB2 is shot down in federal court, and this was honestly pretty likely given enough time.
• The best outcome is HB2 is repealed and there is a sitting Democratic governor, because it would take a completely united Republican party to re-pass HB2.

This leads Cooper (new governor) and Roberts (Charlotte mayor) to do something pretty politically underhanded: Charlotte refuses to repeal their non-discrimination ordinance until after the governor's election. Doing otherwise would have almost certainly have lead to Cooper not being elected. Then, without any apparent justification, they change their minds.

Or maybe Roy Cooper was just using the lives and rights of trans people as pawns to win the governor's seat. Certainly that's the most obvious alternative to the reasoning above. And these explanations aren't mutually exclusive. But I see the tenuous argument that would lead Jennifer Roberts to feel like resolving the issue in December was morally better (and not just better politics) than resolving it in late summer.

So. For some reason, even after the election, the Republican leadership seems willing to take the repeal-for-repeal at face value and call a fifth special legislative session, even though the next step (other cities, maybe even Charlotte, passing the non-discrimination ordinance again) seems so obvious I feel like I'm missing something when I first notice it. The Republicans seem figure this out too and are looking for a way out of the deal, and Charlotte gives them ammunition in the form of not passing a clean repeal of their ordinance. (It left some parts in place, and had a deadline attached for HB2 repeal. I suspect that was because the Charlotte city council wanted a unanimous vote for whatever reason?) The Republicans cry foul, and Charlotte decides to go all-in rather than risk the deal: completely repealing their LGBT non-discrimination ordinance, even the parts that were legal under HB2.

But this is a pretext for the Republicans to play tough-guy dominance politics to get themselves out of the deal because they now understand the implications, just a bit too late. Because Charlotte tried to change the terms of the deal - even though when confronted/pressed/caught they clearly satisfied the original terms - Republicans felt like they had cover to change the terms of the deal unilaterally on their end. And the suggested change was to repeal HB2, but to put in place a "temporary" blanket ban on any city or county passing anything that even looked like it might be a non-discrimination ordinance of any kind: the "cooling off period."

What's not surprising to me is that Democrats rejected this deal. It seemed transparently designed to let the legislature re-pass a better-worded version of HB2 that just barely passes muster with the NCAA's PR department next summer when people weren't paying attention. What's more surprising is that about half the Senate Republicans either like HB2 so much, or hate Charlotte so much, that they split with their party leadership and wouldn't go in on passing the "cooling off period" bill. (Surprising, given that passage of the modified bill seems like it would have been a small symbolic loss, a significant practical victory for Republicans, and a big increase in the emergency powers of the NC Legislature.)

Wow that was long. If people find this remotely interesting let me know I guess.

Update: I'm glad people found it useful over on LJ, I hope I'll be able to write some more posts like this in the future.

^*When I say "constitutional" in this post I always mean the NC constitution.