A simple bill to move up the date of North Carolina’s 2016 primary elections? Hardly.
Republican legislators meeting in a conference committee added a provision that their state party called a “surprise poison pill.”
Republican Gov. Pat McCrory shouldn’t swallow it.
The House gulped Thursday, passing the measure by 62-59 — but only because seven Democrats voted for it.
It allows the creation of “affiliated party committees” controlled by the speaker of the House, president pro tem of the Senate or House and Senate minority leaders. Bob Hall of the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina called them slush funds that could raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations or lobbyists, even during legislative sessions.
“These changes take us backwards. They undercut the reforms adopted after the deal-making scandals involving House Speaker Jim Black a decade ago,” Hall said in a news release Friday.
He should know. He and his organization initiated the complaints that led to federal corruption charges against Black, the Democratic speaker.
Hall added: “They give wealthy special interests new ways to dominate N.C. politics. And they create new ways for legislative leaders to sell access, steer money into their pet causes and exert control over other legislators.”
The last point isn’t trivial. While the Republican Party can’t spend money to help one candidate over another in a GOP primary, one of these new committees could. It could spend money to defeat Rep. John Blust (R-Guilford) for opposing the Greensboro City Council redistricting bill, for example.
Blust spoke passionately against the provision, for two reasons. First, it appeared Wednesday night and was never properly vetted by legislators or the public. Second, it’s self-serving.
“It will feed that attitude out there that the political class sure looks out for itself,” he said. “When there’s money at stake those guys can move at lightning pace. I think it’s going to fuel more bad faith that people have for us. ... I’d like to do something to improve public confidence.”
He’s right. This measure will strengthen the conviction that legislative leaders are giving wealthy special interests even greater advantages. Political parties will lose influence, but more importantly so will the people.
There’s another largely overlooked provision in this bill. In moving primaries to March 15, it also sets an early filing period for candidates: from Dec. 1 to Dec. 21. Any person who is registered as unaffiliated is ineligible to file as a candidate. To run in a party primary, a candidate must register with that party at least 75 days before filing to run.
The legislature has created partisan elections for the Guilford County Board of Education beginning in 2016. More than 85,000 registered voters in Guilford County are unaffiliated and ineligible to file to run for a school board seat unless they change their registration to align with a party. We are already nearly at the 75-day deadline to do that. It was wrong to create a partisan school board, and now time is short for unaffiliated candidates to change their registration so that they can have an equal chance to run for a seat.
Just for the reasons that Blust, Hall and the N.C. Republican Party expressed, McCrory should veto this bill.
