Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

 

Politicians abhor a vacuum as much as nature does, and the sudden concession of NC Senate President Phil Berger late yesterday afternoon has created one of the biggest vacuums in North Carolina history. Berger had ultimate power over every bill that made it through to a vote, every appointment to every important post that the General Assembly controls, every ambition of every fellow Republican senator who wanted to rise. Berger was the undisputed king, and perhaps no one will celebrate his absence more than some of his own allies.

The resentment of putative allies got a surprise airing yesterday in the New York Times, when reporter Eduardo Medina outed Sen. Thom Tillis for secretly lobbying wealthy Republican donors against Berger. On a Zoom call last month, well before the primary, Thom Tillis was clear that Berger had to go because he's too power-hungry, too authoritarian, too dismissive of any idea not his own, and too already fat with campaign cash.

So I can only imagine the ambitions right now surging through the Berger troops still in the Senate, the ones who could not rise because Berger stood in the way. The rivalries will now show themselves in the Raleigh Thunderdome. And all the while the in-fighting goes on and consumes the Republican ecology, the date of the mid-term reckoning with voters advances apace. Who knows? Voters appear quite irritated with abusers of power, and perhaps all the GOP's corrupt gerrymandering may not be shield enough against the wrath to come.

Meanwhile, Sam Page can take his seat in January as a new back-bencher -- he may need two seats to accommodate that ridiculous chapeau. He'll soon learn that his vote has been pre-programmed by higher ups (and probably doesn't matter anyway, if the Republican super-majority holds. Ha!). What High Sheriff Sam Page doesn't know about being low-man in a new pecking order might possibly be a harsh and disappointing education.