North Carolina Republicans can boast of a very real accomplishment this week: a long-overdue state budget signed by the governor. So why did they follow it up with a flurry of legislation that’s headed nowhere?
Immediately after approving the budget, the Republican-majority House of Representatives passed four restrictive voting measures, including Senate Bill 326, which would change the date by which mail-in ballots must be received. These bills have innocuous names like the “Election Day Integrity Act,” but they curb access to the polls under the guise of protecting it. They’re also not likely to become law. Senate Bill 326 will now head to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk, but he seems unlikely to sign it.
“The real way to guarantee election integrity is to make sure every vote counts that is legally cast. This bill does the opposite and makes it likely that some of them won’t. The Governor will carefully review this bill before taking action,” Cooper spokesperson Mary Scott Winstead said in an email to the Editorial Board.
Each of the bills passed strictly along party lines, so it appears neither chamber has enough votes to override a veto. So why are lawmakers passing bills that they know will probably never become law, instead focusing on something that will?
“To simply avoid considering any legislation that the Governor indicates he will not sign would be a gross abdication of responsibility,” Pat Ryan, spokesperson for Senate leader Phil Berger, said in an email to the Editorial Board. “The legislature decides what bills to vote on and present to the Governor, and the Governor decides whether or not to sign those bills into law. That’s the basic functioning of our system of government.”
Of course, the legislature doesn’t need the support of Cooper or any other Democrat to simply vote on a bill.
But if Republicans want anything more than just a vote on voting bills, they need to work together with Democrats. But a vote appears to be all Republicans really wanted this week. “You’re gonna pass these bills, the governor’s gonna veto them, and then we’re gonna use them as election fodder to shoot at each other,” Rep. Billy Richardson, a Democrat who represents Cumberland County, said when he spoke against one of the bills on the House floor Thursday. “Let’s not do that … it is not helpful.”
Republicans did it anyway, of course, repeatedly ignoring the pleas of Democratic colleagues who asked that the bills be revised to address some of their concerns.
That effort might score points with the Republican Party’s base, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t amount to much more than political showmanship. And not only are Republicans wasting time and resources, the voting bills they passed push a poisonous narrative that something is wrong with our elections. There isn’t, but there are critical issues North Carolina faces that lawmakers should turn to instead of crafting their next campaign message around the governor’s inevitable veto.
Since North Carolina became the last state to grant its governor veto power in 1996, Cooper has rejected more bills than any other governor. Republicans may blame Cooper for that, but it also reflects their own unwillingness to collaborate or compromise with their colleagues across the aisle. After all, compromise in North Carolina is so uncommon that we didn’t have a comprehensive budget for several years.
When both sides do choose to come together, progress is possible. We’ve seen it twice this year, with the energy bill and the state budget — legislation that, while still deeply flawed, proved that something resembling compromise in North Carolina is possible. But just minutes after taking a final vote on the budget — something they touted as a big, bipartisan success — Republicans reminded us that such bipartisanship is a long way from becoming the norm.
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