Stop the Insanity

Several precincts in last night's Democratic Party meetings county-wide passed the following resolution and forwarded it to the County Convention on April 14:

Indictment of the State Legislature
WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly was elected on promises of focusing on improving the economic climate in the state and on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but instead, on taking office, began a systematic dismantling of every progressive advancement in the state for the last several decades and launched an extremist attack on women, minorities, and various social safety nets; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly passed, over Governor Perdue’s veto, a budget that systematically crippled environmental protections under the Department of Energy and Natural Resources, weakened our courts system, and led to the loss of thousands of teaching jobs and other public sector workers; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly specifically targeted the entire educational infrastructure of the state, from kindergarten to college: slashed funding for textbooks and supplies and locked thousands of at-risk kids out of nationally recognized preschool programs; drastically cut funding for mentoring and professional development for teachers; abolished support for the N.C. Teaching Fellows program; and slashed funding to Appalachian State University by over 17%. The cuts overall dropped North Carolina to 49th in the nation in per pupil spending. Funding for public schools as a percentage of the state’s General Fund is the lowest in more than 40 years; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly passed a series of laws aimed at voter suppression, including a “voter photo ID” act subsequently vetoed by Governor Perdue that has been described as “a solution desperately seeking a problem”; and they still intend to remove Early Voting sites statewide by withholding Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funds, eliminate same-day registration, ban straight-ticket voting, repeal publicly-financed elections for the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Insurance Commissioner and Treasurer, jigger campaign finance law to allow political parties to accept corporate money for operational support, and shorten the Early Voting period by a full week; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly either introduced or passed laws that (a) would eliminate the state program that monitors and enforces clean air regulations, at the urging of some of the state's largest polluters; (b) brought the state a step closer to both off-shore oil drilling and in-state hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”); (c) would reduce state regulation of toxic industrial chemicals like ammonia and sulfuric acid released into the air; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly joined the extremist Republicans in the U.S. Congress in cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood of North Carolina (PPNC), overriding Governor Perdue’s veto. PPNC has nine clinics across the state, provides affordable birth control, preventative health care and family planning services to over 25,000 men and women; without the $434,000 a year it usually receives in state and federal funds, Planned Parenthood says it will now have to axe its teen pregnancy prevention and adolescent parenting programs and force its low-income patients to pay out of pocket; and
WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly passed one of the most intrusive and insulting anti-abortion laws in the country, over Governor Perdue’s veto, a law which in essence requires “transvaginal probing” of any woman seeking a legal abortion, as well as other provisions, one of which has been temporarily enjoined by a Federal judge; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly, when it failed in a special session called to override Governor Perdue’s veto of their weakening of the Racial Justice Act, adjourned and then immediately reconvened another unannounced special session after midnight to override another, wholly unrelated veto, punishing specifically and vindictively the North Carolina Association of Educators, by removing their privileges for payroll deductions; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly launched an attack on North Carolina’s cities, removing their ability to grow by annexation, threatening to seize Asheville’s water supply, making other moves to limit a city’s control over its boundaries, its long-range planning, even its ability to have billboard companies impose their urban blight on the citizens by clear-cutting city roadsides for the benefit of their signs; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly, the leaders of which, when they were in the minority, vociferously called for an Independent Redistricting Commission to oversee the redrawing of U.S. Congress and state legislative districts every ten years following the new Census, as soon as they assumed power in Raleigh set about cynically redrawing districts to (a) assure themselves power in Raleigh for at least a decade and (b) punish as many powerful Democratic women in the General Assembly as possible, by either drawing them out of their districts or “double-bunking” them; and

WHEREAS the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly chose to impose on the citizens a sort of holy war on gays, proposing to write direct discrimination into the state Constitution, and placing a constitutional referendum on the May primary ballot for political reasons;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Watauga County Democratic Party calls on the voters of the 45th NC Senatorial District and the 93rd House District to vote for Roy Carter for NC Senate and Cullie Tarleton for NC House, to end the insanity.