By custom and rule, the purpose of North Carolina’s legislative long session is to craft and pass a state budget. In years past legislators would do little else and depart Raleigh on a prompt basis after sending their spending plan to the governor. But Republican leaders Phil Berger, Tim Moore and former House Speaker Thom Tillis have recently found more interesting things to do with their time, such as banning critical race theory, cramming constitutional amendments onto the midterm ballot, and attaching abortion restrictions to bills banning Shari’ah law. (Seriously.) If they’re not passing a budget, they’re failing at their duties to the state. And they are coming up short in efforts to fulfill that essential task.

The Republican-controlled House and Senate have, respectively, been considering their budget priorities since Spring. It took them little time to decide on cutting taxes for corporations, the only difference between the two chambers being that the Senate wanted to eliminate the corporate tax entirely while the House wanted to do the exact same thing, only more gradually. After a log interval, the houses agreed on a stingy growth rate for state investment, and in the midst of the lazy days of summer they finally passed budgets of their own. Nothing public has happened since.

Senator Berger’s lieutenants have been negotiating with their fellow partisans in the House for months. This is puzzling, given how narrow the differences were between their individual proposals. But heedless of the public’s time and money, they’ve buried themselves in the narcissism of small differences. Word has it that they are almost ready to bring a unified budget to the governor. The political establishment in Raleigh hopes that legislative bull moose will be able to reach an agreement with out Democratic chief executive and avoid yet another veto on the state’s spending plan.

Hope is the thing with feathers….

What their fiscal snail routine shows above all else is disdain for the people of North Carolina. Our state faces acute needs in areas ranging from environmental cleanup to relief for the uninsured, and yet the people charged with crafting and passing a state budget have shown all the urgency of a man letting his lawn grow into a savanna rather than mow the grass in the North Carolina heat. Everyday that goes by without a budget is a day in which PFAS proliferates in our water supply, another person gets sick and can’t afford treatment, a teacher takes a second job, and a state retiree chooses between medicine and the rent.

This display of rank incompetence reflects a legislative majority that has been too powerful for too long. Senator Berger and Speaker Moore have grown very comfortable with doing whatever they want regardless of the people’s needs and views. Their near absolute power over state government in North Carolina–a degree of control now a decade old–has inured them to public sentiment and allowed them to gain a comfortable distance from public accountability. They need to do better. They need to pass a damn budget.