Anderson Clayton, Turning Up the Thermostat on NCGOP

 

AP News/Gary Robertson

Yesterday in Raleigh in front of the state Supreme Court, NC Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton called out the NCGOP's evident intent to use the smokescreen of "election fraud" and "election integrity" to continue to contest the reelection of Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs (who beat Republican Jefferson Griffin after two recounts by 734 votes). 

Jefferson Griffin, Clayton said, "needs to drop out of the race and concede defeat." Stop the steal.

Based on the stuff that the NCGOP has already done to cripple Democratic office-holders and gerrymander the rest into compliance, Clayton forecast the Republicans' pushing the Riggs reelection into the court system to get it eventually in front of Chief Partisan Paul Newby, who is a grub soldier but thinks himself clean and righteous. 

He's actually the last cog at the top of a Republican power machine in Raleigh that's totally brazen, unafraid to be cruel, expansive in its ambitions for forcing the Right point of view. So there was good logic for Clayton to answer very frankly, “Do I have fear? Absolutely.” Truth is a motivator.

After all, what did Phil Berger and his boys do immediately after four Democrats won statewide office -- governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and state superintendent of public instruction? They rewrote with S 382 the job descriptions for those four, taking away former powers -- for just one notorious example, the governor's right to have under his executive control the administration of elections, and gives it to Dave Boliek, the brand new Republican state auditor and a partisan hack who used to be a Democrat when that was useful. Berger passed the sweeping reorganization of the Executive Branch in a big hurry, before the session ends and they lose their veto-proof majority in the House. Insult on top of injury -- Berger did it under the guise of "hurricane relief" -- S 382 appropriates zero dollars to hurricane relief -- and thought he could get away with it.

Gov. Cooper vetoed S 382. The veto-proof Republican Senate immediately overrode; but the veto-proof NC House was suddenly shaken by the defection of three mountain Republicans who voted initially against S 382. so the scheduled veto-override vote in the House has waited until today. I have every expectation that all three mountain Republicans will fall in line. The one potential Republican holdout could be Rep. Mark Pless. If he voted to uphold the veto, S 382 would be dead, and Berger & Co. would have to get busy and actually pass some hurricane relief pronto. But I'm skeptical of Pless's standing up to his caucus.