Veto overrides aren't the end of McCrory

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, September 5, 2013.

A cynic might suggest that Gov. Pat McCrory prop his portrait in his office chair and take the next three years off. But it's not that bad. Yet.

The bills McCrory vetoed deserved it, but House and Senate together devoted less than half an hour to the task of reminding the governor who runs North Carolina.

The overrides left us with a law that gives farmers and other employers almost year-round access to the labor of migrant workers whose legal status they haven't verified.

Another new law makes social workers do police work instead of calling the police when they suspect a public-assistance applicant of illegal drug use.

Actually, it's a little worse than that. The social workers are to demand that applicants submit to testing if they have a "reasonable suspicion" of drug crime. This requires them to make not just one, but two cop-type judgments: that the suspect behavior isn't a mere facial tic, a speech impediment or a lingering symptom of a stroke or seizure disorder; and that the drug in question, if there is one, isn't being used exactly as directed by the doctor who wrote the prescription for it.

Another drawback is that an applicant who is a criminal can walk away; he just doesn't get the aid for which he applied.

Skip over the question of why we're not requiring the same scrutiny for elected officials and political appointees, and get back to the consequences for governance.

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger is right: McCrory is free to agree with the lawmakers as often as he pleases. Thus far, they've agreed about almost everything. But that may have ended on Wednesday when McCrory announced that he will take no action on the drug-test law, and may contest the immigration statute if it doesn't measure up to national law.

Berger, annoyed, publicly reminded the governor of his oath of office and his duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws.

That was confusing because McCrory's first loyalty is to the federal Constitution (because the state constitution says so, that's why), and similar drug-test laws have already been overturned on appeal. And just this year the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that immigration law enforcement is a federal responsibility.

Oddly, though, McCrory based his non-enforcement of the testing law on a non-federal issue. He essentially denounced it as an unfunded mandate and insisted that the legislature appropriate money to carry out its provisions.

How this ends, we don't pretend to know. But business as usual just went off the rails.