The GOP Establishment in NC -- Still in Charge

Woodhouse

Grumbling on the far right of the NC Republican Party against visible corruption in the General Assembly, not to mention the executive directorship of the state party, got put firmly back in its place at this past weekend's party meeting.

Our window into the grumbling has been Brant Clifton's "Daily Haymaker" blog: here and here, for example. To their credit, the Tea Party wing does not like pay-to-play politics (they're looking at you, Speaker Tim Moore, and at General Assembly members like David Lewis, who've made headlines recently for manipulating legislation for their funding pals) along with certain perceived weaknesses of nerve in Senator Thom Tillis and with the general sleaze associated with the NCGOP's new Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse.

Turns out, according to the leaked votes on censure of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Woodhouse, that the far right amounts to about one-third of the Party's power structure, and no more.

One wonders what happened to the Tea Party's insurgent new Party Chair Hasan Harnett, who was elected in a big upset just last September. He was supposed to clean house and set the Party on a more rigidly conservative path. He seems not to figure in any of this at all.