Elections have consequences

Editorial from Durham Herald-Sun, July 26, 2013.

As midnight neared in the General Assembly Thursday, representative after representative stood to speak his or her piece against the sweeping election law changes the State House was soon to vote into law.

The effort was futile. The majority in the House knew it would prevail, and was allowing the minority to have its lengthy say out of the sort of indulgence that can come from certainty of victory.

But the effort produced some memorable moments. Durham’s H.M. “Mickey” Michaux, a veteran and venerable House member, was especially eloquent.

Michaux, as he noted, counted among his friends lions of the civil rights movement – some, like Martin Luther King Jr., who gave their lives in it. He spoke of that movement and its restoring the right to vote to so many, and accused his political adversaries of once again making it difficult for some citizens to vote.

The election-law vote in the session’s final hours seemed to capture the tectonic shift that the Republican leadership effected in just a few short months.

In fairness, the majority’s juggernaut should have been no surprise. As columnist D. G. Martin noted on this page recently, “The Republican legislators ran for election on a platform of smaller government, reduced spending and lowering taxes for businesses and the wealthy. They have spent months preparing a legislative program based on their platform, and nothing is going to get in their way.”

That’s our political system. Elections have consequences. The winners last fall – building on victories two years earlier – believe the state has been drifting, even steaming, in the wrong direction for years. They had a plan to not just correct that course, but to reverse it. They told the voters that in no uncertain terms. They reasonably took last fall’s vote – which gave Republicans control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion for the first time in over a century – as a mandate.

And, by their calculus, and presumably that of most of those who voted for them, they carried out their plans efficiently and effectively.

We get that.

But we’re not sure, perhaps because we’re optimists, that voters wanted quite such a draconian approach. Some who wanted a leaner, less intrusive government in concept may not have wished for what seemed, intentionally or not, as the mean-spirited nature of changes to abortion regulation, voting rules, environmental regulation, Medicaid funding and the like.

Some may conclude that intrusion into local government decisions by the legislature does not fulfill a goal of less power in Raleigh, that unnecessary regulations designed to shut down abortion clinics do not fulfill a goal of less government interference, and that erecting barriers to the act of voting does not embrace greater public participation in the process.

For those troubled by these past few months on Jones Street, the mission is clear -- just as it is for those celebrating their victories. The campaign to ask the voters in 15 months to ratify or reject the new face of state government has begun.