Natasha Marcus Lets Fly on the Republican Incumbent

 

Natasha Marcus

The State Employees Association of North Carolina (SEANC), a venerable and actually pretty powerful state workers org (46,000 state employees and retirees), endorsed the incumbent Republican Mike Causey for Secretary of Insurance. (SEANC endorsed in all 2024 Council of State races, leaning decidedly Democratic in all contests except Insurance and Agriculture. Some can't imagine life without Steve Troxler. Most can't imagine life with Mark Robinson.)

I would have thought that Causey endorsement appropriate, given his Boy Scout reputation as the public official who wore a wire for the FBI to catch the CEO of an insurance empire in a case of bribery (bagged the Chair of the NCGOP at the time too, Robin Hayes). That move branded Causey something of a class traitor to the Republican hierarchy in the General Assembly. And there were new irritations. In April of 2023, Republican Causey came out publicly against "the corrupt deal that was pushed through the legislature this session to allow Blue Cross to raid its reserves and put the money in a new for-profit entity" (description, accurate enough, out of The Daily Haymaker). Bottomline: Phil Berger and Tim Moore make it possible for Blue Cross to transfer assets into a parent holding company able to move money with little oversight. Other Bottomline: HB 346 passed both chambers and was signed into law by Gov. Cooper. Causey's lone voice warning that permissive restructuring would be a time-bomb for policy-holders meant little. He was ignored, but as far as I'm concerned, he was the stand-up-to-tyranny fellow you want to see in public office, doing the honorable and ethical thing.

But that fellow, it turns out, is not all of that fellow.

Just bare minutes after he was elected in November 2016, he was playing games with Cannon Surety, a shady insurance company that underwrites bail bonds. A month after his election, December 2016, he was allegedly cooperating in a planned high-dollar fundraiser that Nick Ochsner uncovered for WBTV. A fundraiser, Ochsner conclusively demonstrated, that would have been illegal under NC law. After that exposure, said fundraiser dissolved like an Alka-seltzer in spring water, with everyone quickly denying knowledge or participation in any such fundraiser, legal or illegal.

In January of this year, a team of News & Observers reporters exposed a much darker portrait of Causey as an adept at cronyism. Democrat Natasha Marcus, the other candidate for Secretary of Insurance, is now using cronyism as an attack against Causey. I've reported on two of the crony examples below. Here's one. I've not heard before of Mendy Greenwood.