Time for a new approach to our budget debate

by | Aug 8, 2014 | Budget, NC Politics, NCGA, Politics | 4 comments

We’re pleased to have Senator Jeff Jackson (D-Mecklenburg) as a guest. Sen. Jackson caught the attention of the state with his floor speech on the Senate budget. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from Senator Jackson.

I get that Republicans are in charge.  In the state Senate, it’s 33 to 17.  In the state House, it’s 77 to 43.  Add a Republican Governor.  We get the picture.

I also know my history.  Democrats ran this state for a long time.  Most recently, the Democrats who ran the Senate used their procedural power to sideline Republicans and silence their voices.

Nowhere was this more true than with respect to the budget.  Today’s Republicans remind us that when Democrats were in charge, each member’s copy of the budget would still be hot to the touch from having just been printed – and then the vote was called.  For years, Republicans had no serious input into our state’s fiscal priorities.

Now the shoe is on the other foot – and Republican leadership has chosen to plant that foot firmly on the neck of the opposing party.  We all understand why.  

If politics were simply a sport, this would be no more objectionable than celebrating the defeat of your loathed rival.  But we’re not just putting points on a board – we’re impacting people’s lives.  Our budget will chart a course for an enormous ship of state that will engage the effort of hundreds of thousands of state employees and ultimately affect millions of state citizens.

To be clear: Democrats were completely excluded from any substantive input into this year’s budget, just as they were last year.  This doesn’t make headlines because it’s entirely predictable.  It’s become “just the way things work.”

That may be.  But in my floor speech during the budget debate, I wanted to pause for a moment and remind everyone that it may be tradition, but it’s also plainly wrong.  It does an obvious and alarming disservice to all the citizens of North Carolina to exclude the elected representatives who speak for roughly half of the state’s registered voters.  

At the end of the day, the majority party is going to call the shots on the big issues.  But total exclusion of one side – followed by a rapid fire voting process that prevents the minority from even reading the whole document – should be a part of our political history.  People expect more from us, and they should.

When the pendulum swings back – as it always does – I plan to be a leading voice for ensuring a full and fair debate among all sides.  I’m sure I will have to convince a few of my colleagues that revenge isn’t an option.  It will be a lot easier to make that pitch if we aren’t immediately following a slam-and-jam budget season.  Magnamity fosters reciprocation.  

How Democrats regret taking the low-road on issues such as redistricting reform.  Let our regret be an object lesson to current Republican leadership: Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and let the chips fall where they may.  The neck you save may be your own.

4 Comments

  1. Sara

    It sounds to me like we have a statesman here. Thank you Senator Jackson. Hopefully this will be contagious.

  2. Someone from Main Street NC

    Excellent post by State Senator Jackson. I am newish to NC and though I come from a state loaded with corruption and fraud – and I thought I’d seen it all before, what the NCGOP is doing is appalling in ways that shock this jaded observer.

    There is a callous disregard for everyone who is not rich. There is a focused effort to destroy public education – from K-12 all the way through UNC-system (UNC-system faculty are not getting the raises promised to state employees, from what I understand, which will lead to the loss of talented faculty.)

    “Turnabout is fair play” works to a party’s advantage ONLY when that party actually makes things better for citizens. I don’t see ANY area where NCGOP has made improvements – not environmentally (Dan River disaster remains unaddressed; funding has been slashed for state regulators, etc.), not education (this raise does not address systemic issues with teacher payment and raises), not economic (poverty is rising; more than 50% of our students qualify for the reduced or free lunch program.) A family’s savings from the income tax cut have been cut into with sales taxes on new things – like movies, events, etc.

    Where I come from, politics & elections are considered as among the great sporting events. It is very strange to see a party so singularly devoted to such destructive policies. Who has benefitted from NCGOP policies? Who?

  3. Troy

    I certainly can’t disagree in totality. I remember sitting in a Political Science Theory class and the professor made the observation that politics is a game, not unlike a 2×2 game matrix. Some days you win and some days you lose, but it’s important to remember that it’s just a game. I raised my hand. I certainly couldn’t challenge his observation, but I also said that politics ceases to be a game when the game pieces you’re playing with are peoples’ lives. Real people, not a theory, not a test platform, but real people. The decisions being made and the policies and laws implemented have an actual impact.

    But I would like to make an observation here. While Senator Jackson has a point about working together for the common good, I’d like to point out that while the Democrats ran the Legislature, people prospered, schools were funded, and there was a general sense of well-being in a general overall sense. More people had a sense of belonging and civic participation in government and the political process.

    At some point, the Republicans in charge are going to go too far and as Senator Jackson observed, the pendulum is going to swing back. How far back the other way will probably be determined by how angry the population is over the policies presently being inacted. And there will most certainly be retribution for the slight that is currently taking place.

    Right now, the Republican party could care less that the people, the majority of people, are in the vacuum and they’re hurting. The policies they’ve passed have hurt many who voted for them, but they don’t care. It’s all about punishing those that silenced them and they haven’t gotten their bellies full yet.

  4. Randolph Voller

    I am proud of Senator Jackson for his speech. It is time to shift the paradigm and focus governance on creating just outcomes and improving the quality of life for all citizens in every community around the state.

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