Back in March, two Democratic NC House members, Carla Cunningham and Shelly Willingham, were primaried for being problems for the Party. Their local parties turned against them. The state Democratic Party punished them. The governor especially wanted Carla Cunningham gone and publicly endorsed her opponent. Thus were both Cunningham and Willingham (and two others) purged in the March primaries. Both Cunningham and Willingham quickly changed their registrations from Democrat to Unaffiliated, and they've begun to take blood.
They still had a whole legislative session yet to serve, and about the first thing put to the House was veto overrides of two more bills that had originated in Phil Berger's Senate:
Two combined bills: S 227 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the public school system. S 558 bans efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in the university system.
S 153 requires that everybody, from local law enforcement to public school employees, must be nice to ICE, must participate in assisting the deportation of people that ICE picks, and any entities deemed not in compliance would lose their governmental immunity, allowing private citizens to sue them.
In the veto overrides yesterday in Raleigh, Cunningham and Willingham helped the Republican majority just by being absent. WRAL reported that although the two House members had been present for morning committee meetings, they were not present in the House chamber when the override votes happened, thus decreasing total attendance from 120 to 118. For the override, they need a three-fifths (60%) majority of those present and voting. Yesterday, the vote on each override was 71-47. If everybody's there, they'd need 72 votes. Absence made the heart grow fonder.
Revenge tastes good hot or cold, but I wonder about the after-taste in this particular instance. Those laws belong to the 1950s, and I don't think either Cunningham or Willingham want to go back there. In this case, sweet revenge required it.
No comments:
Post a Comment