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.

Raleigh GOP: Dead Set Against 'Pork Barrel' Until They Get Their Hands on the Pork

We're finally learning what powerful Republicans in the General Assembly slipped into the state budget bill to improve their own bragging rights with constituents. Some of it -- particularly what Speaker of the House Tim Moore scored for his home county of Cleveland -- has been known for some time.


But first ... the baseline for the rank hypocrisy:

"The Republican civic religion is that government is the problem and no problem can be solved by throwing tax dollars at it." [Gary Pearce]

Other that Speaker Moore's particular pork detailed at the link above, here are some more choice slabs of bacon doled out to districts where Republicans rule:

$1 million for the High Point downtown library "plaza project." Sen. Trudy Wade got language inserted into the budget bill: $1 million to be remitted to "a city with a population between 105,000 and 110,000 located in a county that changed its state poverty ranking last year." The only city that matches that description is High Point, and that's how the pork barrellers do it ... try to hide the recipient with highly specific language that only one town fits.

$100,000 for Lincolnton, which didn't ask for it, but it's home to Rep. Jason Saine, chair of the Finance Committee.

$100,000 for Reidsville, which didn't ask for it, but it's home to Clayton Somers, Speaker Moore's Chief of Staff.

$100,000 for Smithfield, which didn't ask for it (“It was a complete surprise,” said Sarah Edwards, director of the Downtown Smithfield Development Corp.), hometown of Rep. Leo Daughtry, a longtime Republican legislator whom Speaker Moore appointed to lead two House committees.

$100,000 for Rutherfordton, where House Majority Leader Mike Hager gets to brag.

$100,000 for Dunn, where House Rules Chair David Lewis gets to strut.

$2 million for an airport tower at Jacksonville, inserted into the budget by chief Senate budget writer Harry Brown.

$10.96 million for a new middle and high school in Jones County, also inserted into the budget by Sen. Harry Brown, making him the Grand Master of Pork in the 2015 General Assembly.

I'm not opposed to any of these projects, and that's not the point. All are worthy expenditures of money, no doubt. It's the process that's corrupt to the core. Powerful people in high places skimming for their powerful friends. The odor of the hypocrisy is enough to gag a slaughterhouse worker. Republican legislators who whined in unison when others doled out the earmarks are now grabbing the cash while the grabbing's good.

And pretending that they're still pure like the driven snow.

Long Knives Out in Raleigh To Kill Solar

This man, Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherfordton, has drunk deeply of the Koch Bros. tea (made of four parts petroleum and one part fantasy), and has embraced hostility to solar energy as his crusade to rid North Carolina of the coming evil of "renewable energy."

"Sustainability" is a nasty word to Mike Hager.

Backed by the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, the political lobbying arm of the Institute for Energy Policy, Mr. Hager held a round-table, ritual gutting of solar energy and other "renewables" at the General Assembly yesterday in an effort to convince his fellow legislators and the general public that the state's modest feint toward encouraging renewable energy with tax credits not only endangers democracy but actually robs poor people of money they could use to buy more lottery chances.

Some bird-nosed "expert" actually claimed at the meeting that solar energy took an average of $3,800 of disposable income out of every North Carolina household in 2013.

These legislative fossils who eat, drink, and spew fossil fuel will also be deeply embarrassed when ice-melt swamps the coast. No, check that. They won't be embarrassed at all. They'll still be deep in that river in Africa.

Mike Hager Tried To Pull a Fast One for the Frackers

Mike Hager

It was a little "innocent" sentence tucked inside a "technical correction" bill, but it was far from innocent. It would have lifted air pollution rules at fracking sites around the state. Air emissions from fracking have been linked to health effects including respiratory problems, birth defects, blood disorders, cancers, and neurological issues.

NC House Republican Majority Leader Mike Hager (R-Rutherford) did the dirty deed, and it shouldn't surprise anyone to discover that he's also the top recipient of oil and gas contributions in all of North Carolina state politics. At least he was in the most recent election cycle. 

Hager is also a former employee of Duke Energy and perhaps the biggest enemy of renewable energy in the General Assembly. He led the effort to kill the state's renewable energy standard, calling it an "entitlement program."

But back to the "technical correction" bill that would have sneaked in a provision lifting air pollution rules for frackers. It passed its first reading in the House 108-6, but then environmental groups sounded the alarm. It failed its second reading 41-77, with 33 Republicans voting against it, an unprecedented comeuppance for the Republican Majority Leader.

Not that 33 House Republicans are suddenly born-again environmentalists. No, many of them are saying, "Oh, we'll pass that amendment in due course. We just didn't like the underhanded way Mike Hager was trying to do it. We're fully capable of unleashing the fracking industry in an open-handed way!"