The bipartisan House budget, which passed overwhelmingly last week, looks like it’s going straight into the State Senate shredder. This can be gleaned from an article published in the Carolina Journal. It’s an indication that legislators could be sticking around for a while. Working to create a compromise budget will take a significant amount of work for two chambers with such different priorities, even though they’re controlled by the same party.
Interestingly, it looks like the governor will be allied with the Senate in this upcoming fight, a departure from the past when McCrory aligned himself with the House. The always-outspoken Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, says the Senate’s budget will be more in line with what McCrory has proposed, adding that he imagines that “Berger and the leadership … want to maintain what we have accomplished with tax reform, and actually move it in the direction of less credits, less deductions and exemptions.” Rucho and Berger probably view the Senate as a strict college professor, and the House budget as the product of a student who completely misunderstood an assignment.
Stuff Rucho doesn’t like:
-$40 million in film incentives paid with one-time funds
-Historic preservation tax credits
-Extension of solar tax credits
-Uncertain, but probably spending $1 million to place fruits and vegetables in some convenient stores located in “food deserts”
From a political point of view, it will be interesting to see how Governor McCrory positions himself in this fight. While we know that McCrory will probably back the Senate, the House budget was heralded as “bipartisan”, always a good thing to support headed into an election year. In the end, no one is going to get 100% what they want, but the length and nature of the budget battle should have an impact on the elections in 2016. The current split between North Carolina Republicans, probably the widest since 2004, will probably have interesting consequences.
John Wynne is the “conservative voice” at PoliticsNC, where he also provides polling analysis and commentary on legislative campaigns. When not writing about politics, he enjoys gardening and listening to opera. Contact: johncwynne@gmail.com.
Couldn’t be happier to see the budget divide widen between House and Senate GOP leaders. Here’s hoping that the modicum of bipartisanship exhibited with the passage of the House budget gets villainized in the Senate, and that the House budget gets fully trashed by GOP senators. That would only help to portray GOP representatives for what they really are, i.e., extreme, small-minded, polarizing, and socially intolerant uber-conservatives. Yes, were that to happen, it would likely mean another tough, miserly budget year, adversely affecting many NC’ers. But it might also help to turn more “in-the-middle” voters against the GOP come 2016.