Blust still wants to get the rules right

It’s no surprise when Democrats in the North Carolina House of Representatives complain about the way Republican leaders conduct the chamber’s business. Those complaints have become common over the past 15 years.

It’s more unusual to hear a House Republican raising procedural concerns. But the frequency of those complaints is likely to rise this year, thanks to the return of Rep. John Blust, R-Guilford.

Blust has pushed consistently for legislative leaders in both major parties to adopt rules that maximize transparency and minimize concentration of power.

After a brief tenure in the state Senate in the late 1990s, Blust joined the House in 2001. He served for 18 years before declining to seek a 10th consecutive two-year term in 2018. Returning to the General Assembly this year, he is a rare Republican who remembers how Democrats ran the legislature.

In his earliest days in Raleigh, Blust regularly criticized Democratic House Speaker Jim Black. While often disagreeing with Black about policy positions, Blust’s complaints generally focused on the way Black conducted House business.

When a corruption scandal toppled Black, Blust saw an opportunity for reform. Democrats maintained control of the House in 2007,  but Blust urged them to rewrite chamber rules to prevent another all-powerful speaker in Black’s mold.

“We have come to the crossroads,” Blust said during an 80-minute debate on House rules in March 2007. “We must follow a path. Let’s follow the right path — the path of reform, the path of principle — that will lead to restored confidence in this organization.”

Black’s federal and state corruption charges tarnished the House’s reputation, Blust argued. Only significant rule changes would prevent similar problems in the future.

“I think we’re missing a major opportunity here to do nonpartisan, nonpolitical-type reforms that would fix this place,” Blust said. “I think every editorialist in the state has called on us to do it. I think every reform group, advocacy group — left and right — has told us we need to do this. Why aren’t we listening, folks?”

“Let me explain it this way: If you’ve had a house broken into, and a couple days later, the police caught the person who did it, you wouldn’t say, ‘Great. Now it won’t happen again. Now I can sit back and do what I always did, and my house won’t be broken into again,’” he told colleagues.

“No, you get a dog. You get floodlights. You get deadbolt locks for the doors. You get special locks for the windows. You form a neighborhood watch committee. You get an alarm system. You would do something to put in place some safeguards so that it can’t happen again. That’s all we’re asking for,” Blust explained.

Democrats rejected Blust’s proposal to allow a simple House majority vote to overrule the speaker’s decisions. They also shot down his plan to rein in the speaker’s ability to ignore other House rules through his power to have “general direction of the Hall.”

When Republicans took over House leadership in 2011, one might have expected Blust to back off. After all, now his team had gained power.

Yet Blust pushed a list of reform proposals that would have restricted then-Speaker Thom Tillis.

“Among Blust’s top priorities are taking away some of the ‘arbitrary’ powers of the speaker of the House, making sure popular bills aren’t ‘quietly killed’ in committee, and ending the practice of hiding ‘substantive law changes’ in the budget,” Carolina Journal reported in January 2011.

“If Republicans are going to get in there and say, ‘Hey, now that we’ve got it, we don’t have to do anything,’ then I say, a pox upon us,” Blust said 14 years ago.

Republicans can believe their leaders will be “far more benevolent than the Democrats, but I say let’s guarantee it,” Blust argued. “We are a government of laws, not of men.”

Observers familiar with Blust’s history should not have been surprised when he and three Republican colleagues recently supported a rules change proposed by Democrats. It would have limited legislative leaders’ ability to use a document called a conference report to avoid debate on controversial issues.

“I’m not picking on anybody here right now, because I’ve seen some of these abuses for decades now, and I wonder: Why can’t it ever change?” Blust said during the debate. “Why can’t it ever change?”

As long as Blust roams the House chamber, North Carolinians can count on a vocal advocate for change. That’s good news for fans of greater transparency and less concentrated power in the General Assembly. 

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.