Oh, the many ironies of Rep. Rayne Brown's scolding
Published July 22, 2015
By Doug Clark, Off the Record, Greensboro News-Record, July 22, 2015.
Oh, my. What a scolding Greensboro received from state Rep. Rayne Brown on our editorial page Tuesday.
Talk about adding insult to injury. The Davidson County Republican wasn’t content with telling Greensboro how it must govern itself when she voted for House Bill 263. No. She rebukes its residents for reacting “as willful and petulant children deprived of a treat, impotently flailing their little arms and legs about.”
Scornfully, she hurls the L word: “It seems that you liberals have been hoisted on the tip of your own petard, and you don’t like it one bit. Liberals are not content to effect change by convincing others of the rightness of their cause by the force of their arguments. Government has and continues to be the instrument by which they force the rest of us to concede to their vision of the world.”
These same liberals, she says, accept the pronouncements of “unelected and unaccountable judges (who) find rights in the Constitution that are not there and that our founders never conceived of. Thus we have Roe v. Wade and the death knell to marriage. This same arm of government finds that the intent of Congress outweighs the actual law that was written, i.e., Obamacare, and we have a president who willfully ignores the laws of this country in the advancement of a political agenda, i.e., immigration. This is all fine with liberals, as the end always justifies the means.”
I confess that Brown’s critique confuses me ... unless it’s meant as satire. If so, she reveals a sharp wit and a willingness to skewer the hypocrisy of Republicans in our state legislature, herself included.
How else could she blame “liberals” for viewing government as “the instrument by which they force the rest of us to concede to their vision of the world” when that is precisely what she and her colleagues did to Greensboro? After all, Greensboro’s fault wasn’t promoting abortion, same-sex marriage, Obamacare or immigration. What control can Greensboro have over those issues?
Instead, Greensboro’s elected leaders and many of its residents simply contend they should decide for themselves how their city is governed. There’s nothing particularly “liberal” about that, as Rep. Brown surely understands.
I assume this wise woman from Davidson County appreciates the irony of the supposedly conservative legislature imposing its will on Greensboro. I assume so because, on her campaign website, she complains: “For decades, NC government has sought to impose its will on us, and the results have been disastrous.” Greensboro agrees!
There’s a further logical incongruity in the details of the new council plan that Rep. Brown believes is better for Greensboro.
It eliminates at-large representation, creating instead an all-district system. This is said to be more fair because it guarantees better geographic representation throughout the city.
Well, then, the same thinking should apply all across the state. Alas, no.
Davidson County, we read on its website, “is governed by a seven-member Board of Commissioners who are elected at-large.”
Furthermore, voters in Lexington elect two at-large members of their City Council.
If these are the formats that the people of Davidson County and Lexington think best for their local governments, they have the right to keep them. It is not the business of anyone in Greensboro to tell them they should do anything differently. If Greensboro did try to tell Davidson County and Lexington how they should govern themselves, the good people there would have every right to tell Greensboro where to go.
Greensboro won’t dare, of course. But the legislature would. If it were imposing a uniform vision of local government on all of North Carolina’s cities and counties, it would treat Lexington and Davidson County just as it treated Greensboro and Guilford County. Instead of allowing at-large representation, it would divide Davidson County into districts — preferably with skillful gerrymandering to assure certain election outcomes.
Rep. Brown would raise no objections and, if her constituents did, she would chastise them for “impotently flailing their little arms and legs about.”
This is because legislators don’t look at the citizens of North Carolina as adults who can think for themselves but as “petulant children” who must be told what to do and punished when they misbehave — for their own good, of course.
Which brings us to the ultimate irony, which may escape Rayne Brown:
