If you need any reminder that strange things can happen when the legislature meets in September . . .
Regular Order
Wish I could tell you what’s coming next week when the legislature hits town, but very few of us are in the loop enough to provide much detail.
The dynamic of a session so close to an election adds another variable. Typically, they happen out of necessity, in this case the ongoing response to a pandemic. Sessions prior to and after an election tend to also include moe than the usual political point scoring. Based on what happened the last time the legislature was in town in June, expect a lot of that.
What’s coming is likely to be a kind of abbreviated budget, a collection of must-pass items like required state matches for federal grants, a smattering of policy changes and several pages of local “special needs” for communities in a key race or two. In a year when it sucks to be an incumbent, every little bit helps.
The budget, of course, won’t be a real state budget. We haven’t had one of those since 2018 and count me among the lucky winners of the Capital Press Corps pool who last year picked “not until after the election” for when we’d have another real budget.
Since things broke down last summer, state government has operated under an automatic budget law that was put in place after a long standoff in 2015 between the legislature and then Governor Pat McCrory. The 2016 law says that the old budget kicks in if a new budget isn’t passed by June 30. That’s what happened last year when the governor vetoed the legislature’s budget and the drawn out, occasionally dramatic, budget stalemate ensued. Intended to end, brinkmanship and disruptions due to government shutdowns, the law has taken the pressure off and at least temporarily become a fail-safe used to justify intransigence.
Last fall the General Assembly passed a series of mini-budgets to fill in gaps, do disaster relief and fund certain departments and items everyone seems to agree on. Other parts of state government are getting the shaft, put in a position to keep functioning in the 2020 hellscape with limited resources.
The new spending plan that may or may not happen over the next week or so is likely to be a little bit bigger than last year’s various mini-budgets, but nothing near a full year, government wide plan. Roy Cooper’s plan, released last week, weighs in around $1.5 billion. About $978 million is federal coronavirus relief money, a mix of funds held back in June in anticipation of further federal legislation, and reallocated unspent funds from the initial round. The rest of the funds, $559 million, comes from state revenues. Here’s the governor’s 22-page proposal. Enjoy.
The governor and legislative leaders are already fighting over how much is really available and what it should be used for. One fight looming is over who gets a piece of the pie.
Cooper wants another $200 million for local governments, this time better distributed between counties and municipalities. Some towns have complained that county governments took too big of a chunk of an earlier $150 million appropriation But more local government aid is an issue at both the national and state level and there may not be enough votes in the GOP caucus to get that sum or any sum through this session.
There’s is some movement on changing NC’s notoriously stingy unemployment benefits. Cooper wants to double the 12 week limit to 24 weeks and raise the roof (ceiling) to $500. Legislature wants to toss in $50.
My best guess for what’s going to happen comes from what’s been telegraphed so far — a bunch of money for broadband programs and disaster relief, including ongoing matches for FEMA and HUD grants, something-something for education, other stuff made to draw a veto and make the governor look bad and whatever big achievement a retiring legislature has lined up. Also, predicting they’ll come back in early December, since Thanksgiving is on the 26th.
The upshot to all this is that the hard choices on the budget are going to be kicked down the road, and maybe appropriately so. When things ground to a halt last year, it started to become clear that there wouldn’t be substantial coordination between the legislature and the governor on major initiatives and strategic spending until the dust settles on this year’s election.
Even a pandemic hasn’t changed that.
Here’s the story I did this week on the gov’s budget and the legislature’s preemptive rejection. GOP pans governor’s latest spending plan.
Elections & Politics
• The State Board of Elections has a snappy new site. Early last week the board published guidance for students on voting by mail in response to shutdowns on campuses across the state. The online request form for absentee ballots opens up on the site on September 1. (I would just say Tuesday but nobody knows what day it is anymore.)
• Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball featured North Carolina in it’s latest State of Play profile, laying out in detail the dynamic of the races here and putting them in a national context. Includes a good look at the role of independent voters as well as the volatile history of Senate races. Sam Wang, from the Princeton Election Consortium, notes the kicker:
• The piece inspired Western Carolina’s Chris Cooper to spin a history thread on unaffiliated voters in NC.
• Coleman and Stillerman aren’t the only ones framing North Carolina’s critical role in the upcoming election. Read through this sobering tweet from Obama campaign director and White House advisor David Plouffe:
Yeah no pressure. Thanks.
Reads
• In Memoriam, Randall Kenan, who died this week. Here’s his last piece, published on the 18th. Letter from North Carolina: Learning from the Ghosts of the Civil War
• John Hensen talks about the protests, his former teammates leading the way and getting profiled in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, athletes take a stand.
• The green new deal ain’t all windmills and tofu. UNC’s Todd BenDor, a top researcher on resiliency strategies, talks about rethinking infrastructure, because one day, dammit, it really will be infrastructure week.
Items of Interest
• Carolina continues to lead the way in COVID response.
• 14 Arrested in Raleigh protests last night, including two legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild, which put out a statement this morning blasting the move.
• Via NC Health News, an AP story outlining what went wrong when Florida officials tried to manage the news.
• Governor files suit over Rules Review Commission — I could talk about this for hours, You see, rules making is a complic . . . wait. Come back. Anyway, the timing is interesting since this is a longstanding area of disagreement and it sure looks like the governor firing a shot across the bow on separation of powers before the legislature reconvenes.
About the photo
If you need any reminder that strange things can happen when the legislature meets in September see the above photo from early September 2019, capturing the moment when they set up a lotto machine to randomly select maps during redistricting.
Thanks for reading.
Hope you have a swell Sunday, pandemic notwithstanding.
— kmr