The cadre of Republicans in Raleigh who basically run the state have streamlined their budget process by making it into a conference report. You have to get into the weeds a little bit to unpack their methods.

A typical process might go like this: a bill is proposed in the House Appropriations Committee and passes there after deliberation. Then, the full House can debate its merits and demerits, finally resulting in another up or down vote. The bill then moves to the Senate, where the same process repeats. If there are any differences in the final product, such as rewording or some amendments, the bill has to go to a conference committee. There, a few members from both the Senate and the House will work together to craft a final product which has identical language. That finished bill goes back to both houses for a final vote, and if it passes, the Governor elects either to sign it into law or veto it.

But that’s a typical process. The way the GOP runs the General Assembly is anything but typical. The vehicle they’re using is a conference report. They’re gutting some random insurance bill, already passed by both houses, and loading it up with the text of what would be a normal budget proposal. Take all of the explainer above and skip down to the part where a few members from both houses get together, and that’s where this budget begins. The important part of the conference report is that you can’t offer amendments. You either vote yes, or you vote no; there’s no deliberation or discourse.

Why would Tim Moore and Phil Berger do this? For starters, it’s quite a streamlined process. Whereas before there was at least the facade of input from rank-and-file party members, now power seems to be entirely and blatantly concentrated within the hands of the GOP leadership. Democrats have basically no power in Raleigh right now, given the Republican supermajority, so even with Governor Cooper’s likely veto of the budget, the GOP can overrule him and push bills through. But it isn’t just Democrats who lose out in this process. Many Republican members will have no say in the budget, and will only have the option, like Democrats, to vote yes or no on the finished product. Voters elect a representative to be their voice in Raleigh, but through this process that voice is stifled. Legislators are meant to do more than just vote on what someone else writes — they’re supposed to offer criticism and their own language to the bill. That’s not happening.

This budget writing process is devilishly clever political maneuvering on the part of the Republicans, though it is terrible for what little remnants of bipartisanship remain in the General Assembly. It is particularly telling that the Republicans are resorting back to their typical justification of questionable activity: the Democrats did it too. Anybody could tell you that two wrongs don’t make a right. Hopefully, we can get past that tired line of thought. With all the money pouring into the NCGOP this year, perhaps they might be able to afford some new political consultants for messaging. It isn’t a clever or fresh rationale for doing something, and in fact undermines the legitimacy of the tactic. If you have to defend your actions by yelling that the other side does it too, maybe you should just reconsider what you’re doing. I don’t pretend to defend what Democrats may have done fifteen years ago — justifying one over the other is just partisanship and isn’t particularly useful for the state.

The consensus from many across the state is that the process is intended to produce attack ads for the fall. Whereas in a normal process, Democrats could offer bound-to-fail amendments that Republicans would vote down, the reverse will now take place. The GOP has included some positive measures, like moderate teacher pay and full-time state employee pay raises. Cooper’s budget didn’t even include the latter. Instead of Democrats bragging about what they would’ve done, they’ll have to defend what they voted against.

Don’t misconstrue that last bit for an endorsement of their budget. Instead of begrudgingly adding decent items to their budget to make attack ads against Democrats, North Carolinians would benefit from having a party in power that starts with those proposals as a starting point.

But there are more issues with the budget than just the surreptitious nature by which it was crafted. This hurried process has resulted in issues that normal oversight would have caught. One such example is the suicide prevention hotline, which the News and Observer reported. The state’s Suicide Prevention Lifeline receives an average of 5,000 calls a month, they say, and unless the budget allocates funds it will close July 1.

Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat whose office the General Assembly constantly undermines, objected to the lack of funding in the new budget for rape kits. The state has a backlog of over 15,000 untested rape kits, the funding for which Cooper’s budget provided. In the budget that Moore and Berger concocted, that money is nowhere to be found. These are just two examples of questionable features in the 267 page proposal.

You could even give the General Assembly the benefit of the doubt in these cases. Regardless of their intent, writing the budget in a small circle of elites leads to oversights and mistakes. If the Republicans were to have done this process openly, perhaps North Carolinians would get a decent budget. For now, we’re stuck with the flawed hodgepodge from the GOP’s cabal of leaders. If this is how they want to do things in Raleigh, why have other legislators?

Kirk Kovach

Kirk Kovach is a native North Carolinian interested in writing about politics, communication and culture.