iHOUSE PASSES BUDGET - MOVES TO SENATE
The North Carolina House approved its two-year budget plan on Thursday by a vote of 78-38; it now goes to the Senate for consideration. Republican lawmakers claim their proposed budget, which includes significant worker raises and cautious spending, addresses inflation.
Spending under the proposed budget would total $30.9 billion starting in July 2024 and $29.8 billion during the fiscal year beginning on July 1. Later this spring, the Senate will approve its own version of the budget. A final bill will be hammered out by the two chambers and sent to Governor Roy Cooper. Last month, Cooper proposed a budget that would have spent more than $3 billion annually than what the House and Senate had agreed to spend.
Rank-and-file state employees would receive raises of more than 7.5 percent, and teachers would receive combined average raises of 10.2 percent over the course of two years.
A significant portion of the reduction in individual income taxes would come from increased standard deductions and per-child deductions for filers, as well as billions of dollars set aside for infrastructure and construction.
Republican lawmakers claim the bill, which includes over 1,000 pages of spending and policy directives, aims to keep North Carolina's economy expanding while also trying to fill open state jobs and prevent public employees from going into the private sector.
A number of unrelated changes that aim to advance GOP policy preferences are also included in the budget. Since a budget for the upcoming year must be approved for Medicaid expansion, which is contained in a separate law Cooper signed last week to take effect, they will test the claim that Cooper will swallow policy prescriptions he opposes.
Republicans now have veto-proof majorities in both chambers, but that caveat in the Medicaid expansion law gives them additional power. Earlier on Wednesday, Representative Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County declared she was joining the GOP, giving the GOP a supermajority in the House. However, that had no bearing on the budget vote, which was approved by ten Democrats and all the Republicans present for the vote.
Read more about the budget by AP News
REPRESENTATIVE COTHAM SWITCHES PARTIES
Representative Tricia Cotham of North Carolina said on Wednesday that the party she had been affiliated with for years had stifled her. Cotham left the Democratic Party on Tuesday and joined the Republican Party. Her surprise move grants Republicans the 72 seats they need in the 120-seat House to have a veto-proof majority. In the Senate, Republicans already held 30 of the 50 seats required to override vetoes when party members were present and voting; however, until Wednesday, they still lacked the necessary one seat to secure a similar advantage in the House following the November elections.
Just five months ago, Cotham was elected as a Democrat to a seat in the heavily Democratic Charlotte region. She ran on a progressive platform, advocating for laws to protect LGBTQ rights and access to abortion as well as doubling the minimum wage.
The key question at this point is which legislation the Republicans will be able to pass that would have previously failed because every Democratic supporter of Governor Roy Cooper's veto had opposed it. The primary problem is abortion, but it is by no means the only one. Now that Roe v. Wade is no longer a legal precedent, conservative activists are pushing for additional restrictions on abortion.
Cooper will now have less influence over state law during his nearly two-year remaining term thanks to Cotham’s decision. Republicans lost their veto-proof majority in the 2018 "Blue Wave" elections, so Cooper has had veto power over controversial GOP-backed bills for the past four years. But the GOP won the 2022 midterm elections, giving them a supermajority in the Senate and just one seat lacking in the House, which Cotham now seems to be handing to the GOP.
LIMITING GOVERNOR’S APPOINTMENT POWER
Three days after it was announced, Senate Republicans overcame Democratic opposition to pass a bill that would strip the governor of a wide range of appointment powers.
The N.C. Utilities Commission, which determines electricity rates, the Board of Transportation, and the Environmental Management Commission, which establishes pollution standards, are just a few of the nine boards that Senate Bill 512 tinkers with in terms of appointments. The bill is the most recent in a string of laws that aim to limit the governor's authority.
There are currently 66 appointments from the governor on the nine affected boards. Governor Roy Cooper or the incoming governor would keep 42 of those. There will be no term reductions for current appointees. Additionally, even though the General Assembly and the Republican majority in the legislature would have a significant increase in influence on each board, only two of these boards would have a majority of seats appointed by lawmakers: the Board of Transportation and the state's Economic Investment Committee, which makes decisions on grants for job creation.
On Thursday, the Senate approved one amendment to the bill, reducing the size of the state's Utility Commission from seven to five members. As introduced, Senate Bill 512 would have increased the composition of this commission from its current seven members to nine.
Republicans voted against a Democratic amendment that would have prohibited lawmakers from electing lobbyists and recent campaign contributors to these boards. Additionally, the proposed amendment would have required the Republican majority to appoint some Democrats to these boards. The amendment was brought up for discussion by the GOP majority, who then decided to table it.
The bill was approved 29-18 on a party-line vote and will now be taken up for consideration in the House of Representatives. It could also come up during budget discussions in the legislature because the GOP majority frequently includes policy changes in the state budget that Governor Cooper and other Democrats find objectionable, forcing them to either accept the policy or vote the budget down in its entirety.
