Well, it looks like Pat McCrory is just going to be a sideshow once again. After looking irrelevant in the 2013 session of the legislature, he started the year with big ideas and tried to show a little muscle. This week, the Republican leaders in the General Assembly effectively shut down his ideas and showed him who really has the power.
McCrory began 2015 talking about auto plants, beefed up incentives programs, and infrastructure bonds. He tried to assert some authority by vetoing bills that he considered outside of mainstream North Carolina. None of it’s worked out too well.
The car maker he was chasing decided to go to South Carolina. The incentives program is still broke with no sign that it will be significantly funded anytime soon. And the ambitious bond measure he proposed is getting whittled down to a fraction what he wanted.
As governor, he’s vetoed four bills. This week, he broke his promise and continued his pattern of saying one thing and doing another. So much for his muscle or his integrity.
It’s quite clear that the General Assembly is still the main stage in Raleigh. Senate President Pro-tem Phil Berger is continuing his rightward march, remaking the state as a free-market utopia and pulling religious conservatives along with embarrassing social legislation. House Speaker Tim Moore is being pulled in the same direction by his caucus and spoiling his pledge to show that Republicans can govern.
McCory is living in the shadow of the General Assembly. Redistricting has created an ideological monster that lets the extremes in the Republican Party set the agenda. He has neither the political skills nor the political capital to exert his influence or will. And unfortunately for him, the moderates in his party have hung him out to dry, remaining silent as he looks increasingly irrelevant. It must be a lonely place to be.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Possibly the title and office as bestowed by the King caused State Constitution writers to seek to limit that sort of influence.
The European Kings feared democracy for two main reasons. One was of course internal. They wanted no challenges to their power to tax the poor whenever they wanted a war. They were then afraid that they would not be able to force the poor or anyone else in their realms to fight in their wars.
It wasn’t till the US Mexican War that there was some respect and relief in Europe showing that independent free men would fight for reasons the European Powers understood and respected. Prey upon the weaker nation, take their land and capture their markets.
The GOP is now the C.S.A.. NC is to be a “Christian” nation see.
“The poor will always be with us.” Justifies keeping 25 percent, a full quarter of the population poor and desperate. -Why not? He said there would be poor…
It is the Transportation Plan that might be of actual good for the State, especially if the Oceanside, Coastal Ports were properly connected and capable.
NC seems to ignore its strengths, if not its successes.
The “Fads” roll though and democracy breaks down into mobs catered to by ideologues and demagogues happy to satisfy the ignorant and theocrats who are the same thing since it is Baptists of the Old Testament, run by the Catholic Right, essentially doing what the Pope says in power in the Legislature of NC now.
Morality may be ethical but Ethical Is Always moral. Fair and Just is independent of carte blanche dictates of the empowered moralists with hate for their competitors who may be hedonists.
But why not talk about the Aviation Sector instead of groveling after a car maker? Honda and GE appreciate the attention to detail and work ethic of North Carolinians. They are willing to pay some more. It is likely from that excellent Community College Guilford Technical Institute with its Aviation Program.
Carlye Group as Landmark just bought Atlantic Aero where the Honda test flights were done spawning Alamance County industry making engines.
A car company wants a good port more than an aviation company.
Incentives cannot overcome but so much of a deficient infrastructure. But the McCrory plan for Transportation isn’t made clear to justify the Bond, because, because. What happened to the General Fund? Of course there must be a reserve maintained, but why not spend the tax money you have on the programs that matter?
Backwards Social legislation will just eventually whither or be cut out as illegal as unjust and unfair. Whomever it keep away, like those “liquor by the drink” folks who invaded with their money, may straggle back when things are on the rise again mentally for good deals on land.
Aviation and Aerospace can get along fine with the airports and the short ships.
While I cannot forget that the Governor said the idiotic: “We just corrected the calendar.” and want all the Neanderthals out of power, expect that somehow the progressive ideals of free men might take hold, I cannot take my eye off what successes could be caused, are a whiff of sanity in a storm of injustice and stupidity if there was no where in the State 4 hours from anywhere within it and in the world.
Apadoca has done a good deal to run away the future car maker, wanting to protect dealerships from Tesla. Elon Musk is one guy you ought not get on the wrong side of. Did someone spray paint: “Down with Apodaca.” on a wall in Asheville?
Well, that would be Thomas Person, Richard Caswell, Cornelius Harnett, and the other guys who have streets in Raleigh and various counties named after them and who wrote a constitution for the state in 1776 that was famous for the power it concentrated in the hands of the General Assembly and the weakness of the governor, who was elected by the Assembly, served only for a year, and who was hobbled by the Councillors of State, who were also chosen by the Assembly.
Since then, the legislature has ceded various things to the governor, from the right to be elected by the whole state directly in 1835 to a very limited veto power in the mid-1980s (only a 3/5th supermajority is needed to override the veto, and redistricting measures and “local bills”–such as the seizure of Asheville’s water system and Charlotte’s airport–cannot be vetoed at all). But you’d have a hard time imagining what sane legislature would ever initiate an amendment that would give a governor equal clout.
Marc Basnight spent nearly two decades carefully educating everyone in Raleigh about what was and is the most powerful office in the State of North Carolina. Phil Berger has been an attentive student and a successful teacher in his own right.
It’s true that Berger’s new student Pat McCrory successfully parleyed his position as a weak mayor into becoming a major power broker in every part of North Carolina where you could eat lunch at Showmar’s.
But it is a mystery why he ever thought that Jesse Helms’ political heirs, Tom Ellis’ acolytes, and Carter Wren’s proteges would allow themselves to be courted, cajoled, and circumvented like the Charlotte city council had been. Or how he thought that he would ever wrest the reins from the Republicans in the legislature who had spent year after weary year being trampled and ignored by a Democratic majority, and who had learned from them that power was the end and policies were the means, more often than not.
Democrats who would like to object to that last observation should reflect on the Global Transpark boondoggle, the Golden Leaf Foundation, ECU’s medical school, and so on. Not to mention countless parliamentary and redistricting capers that left their Republican colleagues sputtering, red-faced, and impotent. They took them to school, and now that’s the problem.
When will the governor get power equal to the legislature’s? Well, as at every other time in the state’s history, currently the only place where any real, systemic change can start is in the leadership of the General Assembly. Once you could have asked Jim Black and Marc Basnight when that would happen. Now you can ask Phil Berger and Tim Moore.
Nice.
“Republicans in the legislature who had spent year after weary year being trampled and ignored by a Democratic majority”
Perhaps there was a reason if the current NCGA is any indication.
Regarding the ECU Medical School, Leo Jenkins would snicker at your implication.
“But here is the real issue, what kind of party would deliberately set out to deny folks health insurance, pass 19 century legislation and raise taxes on the middle class while lowering them on the wealthy, drive away major employers, while cutting unemployment benefits?”
The one currently running the show and who were elected by a majority of misfits in North Carolina. Sad but comical. Better than Saturday Night Live.
Thanks for that history lesson, Chris. All new to me, not being a native. I mentioned NC governors’ limited power earlier, but did not know how it got that way…..
I wonder who made nc governance a weak governor strong legislature form and when they did that and why they did it.
Corporate executives rarely make good elected officials because government is not a business. He’s also not dealing with capitalists in the legislature. He’s dealing with feudalists and theocrats who are too busy doing this http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/denny-hastert-molested-wrestling-team-equipment-manager-sis-article-1.2247614 and this http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/03/what-to-expect-from-the-fox-news-interview-with-josh-duggars-parents/ and this http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/former-brooklyn-tea-party-head-and-anti-obscenity-candidate-arrested-for-child-possession/ and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal and if they’re not doing that they’re busy doing this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Craig_scandal to actually govern.
The real governor is The little Prince of Rockingham County. Phil Berger.All hail the prince.
Amen.
If his veto of the bill letting magistrates refuse SSM is overruled by the NCGA, the governor will have lost in every possible way over the last several days. NCGA overruling of his vetoes aside, he might have still won new support from the NC center if he had just vetoed that abortion bill. But he managed to snatch political defeat from the jaws of moral victory.
His key budget proposals have been hamstrung. His vetoes have been steamrolled, and his attempts to re-image himself as a strong player at the political table and to appeal the middle of the electorate have failed. He has once again been put in his place by his overlords.
In civics and political science textbooks, NC is rightly categorized as one of many states having a “weak governor” form of government. But it’s clearly time for NC to be placed in its own new category, i.e., States Having a Hapless Governor.
….Not getting enough consolidation of Exc power from the federal level to satisfy? This darn representative government thingy is so passe