The follies

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, September 25, 2015.

The new political slush fund

It’s hard to believe, but what may be the most shocking piece of legislation passed in this General Assembly session snuck through Thursday afternoon when the House approved a bill that moves all primary elections to March 15th next year.

That’s troubling enough considering how much it helps incumbents, but that’s not the shocking part.

A provision inserted into the bill at the last minute also creates new political entities called “party affiliated committees,” four of them, completely controlled by the Senate President Pro Tem, the House Speaker, and the House and Senate Minority Leaders.

Unlike the personal campaign accounts of the legislative leaders, the new committees can receive unlimited contributions from special interests, lobbyists, even corporations, and can receive them during legislative sessions when lawmakers themselves can’t raise money.

Legislators are banned from received money from lobbyists at any time.

Grassroots activists on the Right are upset by the change because they think it diminishes the role of political parties by giving legislative leaders the ability to control massive amounts of money on their own that they can use to punish or reward other candidates. That’s true and disturbing enough.

But as Democracy North Carolina’s Bob Hall points out, the new committees also dramatically expand pay-to-play politics in the state.

It will now be legal for Duke Energy, the video poker industry, payday lenders, or any other well-funded special interest to make a huge contribution to a committee controlled by the most powerful legislators on the eve of a vote on legislation supported or opposed by the special interest.

Here’s how Hall describes what the creation of what he calls political slush funds will do.

They undercut the reforms adopted after the deal-making scandals involving House Speaker Jim Black a decade ago. They give wealthy special interests new ways to dominate NC 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 disastrous bill is not law yet. Gov. McCrory, who has repeatedly complained about the “special interests” in Raleigh, has yet to weigh in. We’ll see if he has the courage to use his veto stamp.

The company McCrory keeps

Speaking of McCrory, the governor’s press office hadn’t published his schedule for this weekend as of Friday morning. When they do it will be interesting to see if they include McCrory’s long planned appearance at a conservative religious event in Charlotte Saturday called The Response, sponsored by the controversial group the American Renewal Project.

McCrory’s connection to the event sparked controversy earlier this month when the group paid for a full page ad in the Charlotte Observer featuring a picture of McCrory and an invitation apparently from him asking people to “Come Join Me in a time of worship, prayer, fasting and repentance…”

A McCrory spokesperson said the governor had only agreed to speak at the event and the organizers of the gathering admitted the ad was poor worded.

There were also complaints about McCrory crossing the line separating church and state and the ACLU filed a public records request to see of any taxpayer money was used to promote the event or McCrory’s participation in it.

Left out of most of the coverage of the controversy was the troubling history of the American Renewal Project noted earlier this month by Rob Schofield at NC Policy Watch.

The head of the group, David Lane, openly demands that U.S. be a “Christian nation,” and said that “homosexuals praying at the Inauguration” of President Obama in 2013 will provoke God’s wrath in the form of “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa.”

There’s plenty more bizarre and extreme rhetoric from Lane which begs an important question someone needs to ask McCrory? Why is he doing hanging out with these guys?

After all, you are known by the company you keep.

The mysterious fine print of the legislative session

And finally, the General Assembly may be on schedule to adjourn next week, but’s a safe bet that it will take many more weeks to discover everything lawmakers have done this session.

Many of the members of the House and Senate don’t even know about all the secret provisions snuck into the budget or into bills that are flying through committees and floor votes in the session’s final days.

The News & Observer noted that when House Finance Chair Bill Brawley was asked about a revenue bill on the House floor recently, legislation that he was in charge of, he said “a significant part of this bill – well, it was new to me.”

Brawley runs the committee that vets all revenue bills.

If he is not sure what is in legislation that he is encouraging people to vote for, how can the public have any chance to understand it?

We will all be reading the fine print from this session for a quite while.