See, when McCrory said he was going to call a special session to deal with disaster relief, the Republican honchos said, "Sure, we need an excuse to come to Raleigh." Taking care of the penny-ante disaster relief bill took no time at all, but the Republicans needed to deal with a much greater disaster, the election of Democrat Roy Cooper as governor.
Short version: they're stripping Roy Cooper of executive power, and they're making sure that every board of election in the state will be stalemated. Turns out if you're an effing Republican in the General Assembly, there's more than one way to destroy early voting.
If you can't win an election, you simply overturn the results legislatively. It's the Republican way. Let's go ahead and call it what it is: nullification.
From coverage in the N&O:
Lawmakers want to hobble the incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, before he takes office Jan. 1 by making his Cabinet appointments subject to approval by the state Senate and cutting his ability to appoint members to UNC schools’ boards of trustees and the state Board of Education.
Another proposal in the mix would equally divide election boards between the two major political parties, ending control by the governor’s party.
Yet another provision would cut the number of employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure from 1,500 to 300, reversing an expansion approved for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the start of his term.Here's the text of Senate Bill 4 which contains the changes to boards of elections. Bottomline: a new eight-member board with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, with the Republican leaders in the two houses of the General Assembly getting to appoint as many members as the governor. Local boards of elections also composed of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for a total of four members.
In other words, we've been under the thumb of Republicans at all levels of voting access in North Carolina for the last four years, and we're going to continue to be under their thumb.
And that, my friends, is how you nullify an election.
4 comments:
Copied from WRAL ... Mark Binker's coverage of S4: "The biggest problem with the Board of Elections rewrite proposal is the requirement to have six votes of an eight-member bipartisan board to take substantive action," said Mark Ezzell, a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections. "This will turn the State Board of Elections into a toothless tiger, much like the Federal Elections Commission."
Continuing to dig into this horrendous power grab. More updates coming
Binker: The new board would alternate the chairmanship between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans would chair the board during even-numbered election years, while Democrats would have that job in off-years.
That's FUBAR on the face of it. What executive director of the SBE could weather those flip-flops?
Binker notes that Governor would appoint half the members of the new 8-member board but fails to note that two of those appointees have to be Republicans.
Some are recalling how McCrory vetoed the NCGA when it tried to curtail his executive power. They are speculating that he might veto this new power-grab.
Ha! Also introduced last night was a "puppy mill bill" that McCrory's wife has wanted. Some powerful members in the GA did not want it, and it never passed. They now have that puppy mill bill to keep McCrory in line on all this other shit they're doing.
Plus he's a weak, weak man anyway.
Why even bother with elections?
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