How Republicans in the General Assembly Take Care of Republicans Leaving the General Assembly

Justin Burr

Huge props to Republicans in the General Assembly for continuing to feather their own nests faster than a flock of hyper-active pigeons. One of their number loses his job in the General Assembly, and the brethren rush to boost the pay for a state job he wants and which he apparently has an inside track to get. Smells like pigeon poop, even with all the feathers.

The member of the NC House suddenly out of a job -- he lost his Republican primary back in May -- is Lex Luthor understudy Justin Burr of Stanley County, who until recently was chair of the House Special Committee on Judicial Redistricting, which means he was trying to redraw judicial districts so that African-American judges would be cut in half and Republicans would have a better shot at winning judgeships. It was a plot worthy of a power-mad supervillain. But alas. A nice old small-town pharmacist knocked Burr out in the May primary.

The state job Justin Burr is angling for? Executive Director of something called the Outdoor Heritage Advisory Council, which as far as we can tell, would be not inconsistent with cheerleading at the campfire and encouraging s'mores for everyone. It's a mighty shallow website the council offers to this inquiring mind, and as it turns out, the Executive Director would be the sole employee of an advisory council that is a shell with no innards.

Travis Fain reports that the position of executive director was created by the General Assembly last year but has so far gone unfilled. Justin Burr noticed after he lost his May primary that there was a juicy state position going unfilled -- salary at the time ... $74,000 -- so Burr applied and was interviewed in June.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but immediately after that interview, the proposed salary was boosted to $119,000, and then the Office of State Human Resources got involved and down-graded the proposed salary to a maximum of $88,221, noting that "this position was vacant and, upon review, was determined to be more appropriately classified as a Program Development Coordinator," a classification typically used for positions in "small programs with a small staff and/or limited scope." Small staff? How about zero staff!

Justin Burr's scope has always been larger than small potatoes, so with the help of Rep. David Lewis, who runs the powerful House Rules Committee and who knows a thing or three about manipulating laws to the benefit of Republicans, has slipped it through that the council's members get to set Justin Burr's salary. Wait, what? There's an Outdoor Heritage Advisory Council with members? Overseeing an "agency" with so far no employees? Who's on this council and how did they get there?

According to Travis Fain -- because their website is wholly blank on the matter -- the membership of this council is appointed by "legislative leadership" (that would be Berger/Moore), by the Secretary of Agriculture (Republican Steve Troxler), and by the governor, which suggests a Republican dominated council that's being empowered to set the salary sufficiently high to please Justin Burr.

And now everything is perfectly clear.

Republican Voters in NC House District 67 Say "No, Thanks"

Justin Burr

I've been too wrapped up in gardening work to even notice that NC House Rep. Justin Burr of Stanly County lost his primary race to an unknown. Whaaa? Justin Burr is the Lex Luthor look-alike and act-alike who most recently was the chief sponsor of the attempt to turn the North Carolina judiciary into a partisan tool for Republicans.

Stanley County pharmacist Wayne Sasser beat the six-term Burr easily with 56% of the vote, running on only two issues -- the opioid crisis and getting broadband into rural areas -- and no campaign infrastructure to speak of. He comes across as a kindly older gentleman, and Justin Burr was not.

House District 67 is rated strong Republican, and Wayne Sasser is going to be its next rep in Raleigh. There's a Democrat -- Karen Webster -- on the ballot, but as far as I can tell, she's just a name on the ballot and otherwise wholly invisible. Too bad! Since, if there ever was a year for more surprises than just seeing Justin Burr lose his primary, this is the year. But you can't win an election if you don't run.

John Blust Stands Up Again

Justin Burr

Republican John Blust has spent one term as an NC senator and nine consecutive terms in the NC House, and though he's a good Republican soldier, he's also perfectly capable of being mavricky and pissing into the wind on occasion. He warned his House colleagues in 2013 about hubris, not that they were listening. He also vehemently denounced Republican Senator Trudy Wade's attempt to gerrymander the Greensboro city council in 2015.

Friday John Blust, who's not running for reelection and so what the everlasting hell?, stood up in a committee meeting and asked why the Devil Republican legislative leaders were even discussing seizing another appointment power from the Governor -- the right to appoint district and special court judges to vacated seats? (Special judges handle complex business cases and more, and though the governor’s appointments are subject to lawmakers' confirmation, Republicans want more.)

Rep. Justin Burr, a Stanly County Republican and chair of the House Special Committee on Judicial Redistricting, called the special meeting last Friday. Burr, an Albemarle bail bondsman, has been leading the effort to change election districts for judges across the state, and he'd also like to seize the power of appointing some judges. What could possibly be in it for a bail bondsman?

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article210061849.html#storylink=cpy

John Blust, last Friday, on the subject of hubris:

“Why are we competent to make this kind of decision on appointing judges” Blust asked. “Why do we want to take on one more thing that may not be an area we have expertise when we claim we have limited time and we can’t get to so many important subjects because of that limited time?”

Blust knows that only a few Republican leaders -- including presumably Justin Burr -- would actually be making those judicial appointments, if they're taken away from the governor. We know who “holds most of the cards,” Blust said. Everybody knows it. Phil Berger, Tim Moore, and their boys.

According to reporter Anne Blythe, John Blust invoked the virtues of democracy itself: “The governor’s one person, but he’s elected statewide,” Blust pointed out. Who elected us? Blust might have continued, in our gerrymandered districts? The people spoke. They wanted this governor to make those appointments, in keeping with the powers granted by the state constitution. Who are we to seize that power?

Anne Blythe: "The committee ... left on Friday without making any recommendations or scheduling any more meetings." Maybe because John Blust stood up?

"Republican legislators have seen more than a dozen of their unconstitutional laws overturned in court, so now they want to handpick their judges," Ford Porter, a spokesman for Cooper, said in a statement after the meeting. "Legislative Republicans should respect our state’s Constitution instead of repeatedly working to inject partisan politics into our courts. "

Another Republican Scheme To Make the NC Judiciary a Partisan Tool

If there's one thing Republicans in Raleigh are good at, it's thinking up new ways to grab more power and then to keep it.

They've been thwarted over and over by court rulings that find many of their power grabs unconstitutional. So what to do? Change the courts, and they've got new court-packing laws wending their way through the General Assembly right now.

They intend to deprive the governor of his ability to appoint special superior court judges and new judges to vacancies on district courts. Who are they proposing to give the appointment power to? Why, to themselves, of course! More pernicious, they intend to shrink the size of the NC Court of Appeals from 15 to 12, explicitly to prevent Governor Roy Cooper from making appointments for three Republican judges who have mandatory retirements coming up during his first term.

The proposed court-packing bills are all the work of this man, Rep. Justin Burr, who represents Stanly and Montgomery counties. In a party full of power mad manipulators, Burr stands out as exceptional.

The NCGA's own Lex Luthor.

Sign of the Times?

Rep. Justin Burr

Today, PoliticsNC blogger Thomas Mills highlights the interesting NC House race in Dist. 67 between incumbent thumb-in-the-eye Republican Justin Burr and his baby-faced Democratic opponent Carson Snyder.

Both Justin Burr and now departed House Majority Leader Mike Hager were consistent agitators against the Republican leadership in the House. Hager rather mysteriously resigned his seat this month, and no doubt House Republican Speaker Tim Moore would just as soon see Justin Burr forcibly retired too.

All is not well in NC Republicanland. Tea Party conservatives hate the party's leadership, and the voters may very well hate them all. The highly publicized Dallas Woodhouse memo to Republican board of elections members to "screw the Democrats, ever which way you can," and the bizarre actions taken by the Watauga County Board of Elections and by the boards of elections in a third of NC's 100 counties -- still to be resolved by the State Board of Elections -- none of this is helping Republican bids for reelection.

Who wants these creeps back in power?

NCGOP: There's No Fighting Like In-Fighting

Rep. David Lewis

Civil war breaks out among Republican members of the General Assembly, and it ain't patty-cake. The most conservative members are accusing establishment leaders of being no better than jail-bird Democrat Jim Black.

Current target of backbiting and bitterness: NC House Rules Chair David Lewis of Dunn, strongly suspected of "pay-to-play" favoritism and of putting his thumb on legislative scales. (Lewis had previously been implicated in another cronyism scandal, so the charges are mounting up against The Man Who Would Be Speaker.)

Chief accuser of Lewis: Rep. Justin Burr of Albemarle, whose bill to save money on mandated printing ofcourt decisions, got modified by Lewis at the last minute (according to Burr) to protect the financial interests of one of Lewis's donors.

The printing contract held by New Bern businessman Owen Andrews is worth, on average, about $350,000 annually, and Rep. Burr's bill would have shut down that money spigot. But businessman Andrews is and has been a dependable donor to Lewis.

March 4, 2015: A House judiciary committee signed off on Burr's bill and sent it to a budget committee for further review.

June 9: Burr's bill gets removed from the budget committee and referred to the Rules Committee, which Lewis chairs.

July 22: With Burr out of state, Rules met to consider changes to the bill, with Lewis leading the meeting. Lewis changes the bill to keep the money flowing to his donor businessman Andrews.

Burr's bill next went to the Finance Committee. There, Rep. Mike Hager, a Rutherfordton Republican, House majority leader, and conservative rival to Lewis, returned the bill to its original form, eliminating the mandate for the printing of the court reports. That version passed through that committee and was approved unanimously by the full House, including Lewis, in mid-August. But Burr's bill never passed the Senate.

Ethics Complaint Filed Against Lewis

Jump to December 2015: Rep. George Cleveland, a Jacksonville Republican, filed a complaint against Lewis with the General Assembly's Legislative Ethics Committee, dealing with the previous pay-to-play accusations investigation bythe News&Observer -- that Lewis protected the state contract of a company run by Lewis' friend and campaign donor, Rickie Day.

Both donors now implicated as favored cronies of Lewis -- Owen Andrews and Rickie Day -- inexplicably got their names, occupations, and/or businesses mis-reported or misspelled in Lewis's campaign finance reports filed with the state Board of Elections, making investigation of pay-to-play activities more difficult. If done deliberately, the misspellings were a juvenile and transparent cover-up.

Reps. Burr and Hager joined Rep. Cleveland to form a potent whistle-blowing trio against Lewis. Burr and Hager suggested that discrepancies in Lewis's finance reports "were done intentionally to try to mislead the public about who was giving to his campaign." Rep. Burr said, "Once is an error. Twice is a pattern."

Indeed.

"Lewis and Hager, as Rules chairman and majority leader, respectively, are two of the most powerful House members. The fact that they are feuding so openly points to serious divisions among House Republicans. In speaking out against Lewis, Hager cited a need to 'defend the integrity of the caucus'."

The feud has broken out into the public and not only in the pages of the state's daily newspapers. Tea Party blogger Brant Clifton has his longknives out for Lewis (and for also-tainted-with-financial-irregularity-allegations Tim Moore, who is the current Republican Speaker of the House).

All of this is not a good look for the North Carolina Republican Party, currently going into a crucial election year.

Republican Member of General Assembly Compares Tim Moore to Jim Black

Back in January, when new Republican House Speaker Tim Moore was taking the reins of his side of the General Assembly, he demoted Rep. Justin Burr (R-Albemarle) from the powerful Appropriations Committee. We're sure there's more to the story, but now Rep. Burr has slapped back at his boss in the most public way ... right smack in his "filing statement" for reelection.

Check out the last couple of paragraphs on the page below (sorry -- the 2nd page of the letter was not posted to Rep. Burr's Facebook page, just the 1st page).

Wow. Comparing the sitting Speaker of the House to the crooked and jailed Jim Black, the Democrat that Raleigh Republicans love to hate, is pure acid.

Dealing With "At Risk" Kids in NC: Define Them Out of Existence

Justin Burr

In 2011 Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning ruled that the state of North Carolina has a constitutional duty to provide free pre-kindergarten to all at-risk four-year-olds. The state defined "at risk" as children from families of four making less than $51,000 a year. Last year, under that definition, the number of at-risk four-year-olds in the state was estimated at 67,000. But under the first Republican budget, the one that Governor Perdue vetoed and the Republicans in the General Assembly (with the help of five dim Democrats) over-rode, the state allotted funding for only about 26,000 seats.

That's when Judge Manning got involved and said, "You can't do that, you poltroons."

In 2012, the state Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Manning's ruling. The State Supreme Court agreed last month to also hear the case.

In the meantime, Republican Appropriations Committee chair Justin Burr came up with the perfect Republican solution: "up" is no longer up, and "down" is no longer down, and his bill would change the definition of an "at-risk child." Under Mr. Burr's bill, an at-risk child would have to be at 100% of poverty, which is about $22,000 for a family of four.

Fun with definitions!