North Carolina Republicans lost the governor’s mansion and control of the state Supreme Court last month, but instead of accepting defeat, the GOP is mounting an eleventh-hour power-grab to curtail all potential sites of Democratic power. The scope of the Republicans’ effort to nakedly shred democracy so as to thwart the will of voters and desperately cling to power is breathtaking.
The GOP-led legislature convened a special session that was ostensibly aimed at dealing with relief efforts for Hurricane Matthew, which struck North Carolina in October. Instead, Republican legislators have introduced a set of bills that drastically change the structure of state government. The idea is for outgoing Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who lost his bid for re-election in November, to sign these bills in advance of Democratic Gov.-elect Roy Cooper taking office next month.
The bills would limit Cooper’s power to appoint state officials, specifically curtailing his control over the state Board of Education and the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina and subjecting his appointments to confirmation by the Republican state Senate.
The GOP also plans to strip Democrats of the majorities that they were set to gain on the state Board of Elections and on all county election boards. Under current law, the governors’ party gets a majority on elections boards. The GOP proposal would divide all boards between the two parties. While bipartisan boards might sound good in theory, they could in practice benefit Republicans by fomenting gridlock when it comes time to expand benchmarks.
In fact, Republicans have benefited from just this dynamic in Indiana, where a new law established bipartisan election boards that require unanimous agreement to set up new early voting locations. The sole Republican on the board in heavily Democratic Indianapolis was then able to block proposals to open more than one early voting site in the state’s biggest county.
Yet it gets even more outrageous.
