Rob Schofield: The Tide Is High

 

Rob Schofield

Rob Schofield had some hard truths about Phil Berger, the president pro-tem of the NC Senate and the biggest dick in the NC General Assembly. Back before he had all the power, Berger had famously introduced a bill to do away with partisan gerrymandering. Then 2010 happened, and Berger found a new religion that didn't include the reform of gerrymandering.

So how did Berger react to the NC Supremes' okaying of extreme partisan gerrymandering?

With a degree of venom matched only by his hypocrisy, Berger wrote: “For years plaintiffs and activist courts have manipulated our Constitution to achieve policy outcomes that could not be won at the ballot box. Today’s rulings affirm that our Constitution cannot be exploited to fit the political whims of left-wing Democrats.”

You got that? A politician who abandoned a supposedly principled stance on a central tenet of our democracy [sponsored a Republican bill to end partisan gerrymandering], and then shamelessly and relentlessly used every lever of power at his disposal for more than a decade to rig electoral outcomes, silence opponents, and enfeeble other elected officials while seizing their power (and even to install his son and namesake on the Supreme Court) is purporting to lecture on the subject of “manipulating the constitution.”

All in all, the [Supremes'] rulings and [Berger's] bluster were enough to make a body fear for, and mourn the state of our democracy, and to wonder if all hope for reviving it – at least in North Carolina had passed.

Rob Schofield has been an important voice for North Carolina progressives for decades. From 1992 to 2005, Schofield worked as an attorney at the NC Justice Center – where he helped build the organization from a small Legal Services office into the state’s leading anti-poverty advocacy group. When the Justice Center branched out with "a special news and commentary project" called NC Policy Watch, Schofield spun off to it and became Research Director. Policy Watch published The Progressive Pulse, with Schofield as both opinion columnist and an executive editor of content. The Progressive Pulse has very recently gone through a major upgrade into NC Newsline, in which appeared Schofield's gloomy reflections quoted above.

But Rob, like any progressive-minded American in history, snatched some hope, kinda out of thin air:

…Americans of all ages … are sick to death of the kind of extremist lawmaking that’s practiced in the … North Carolina legislature; we might just be a lot closer to the end of the current dark era than the beginning.

And when the reactionary house of cards does collapse of its own weight in the not-so-distant future, we may well look back on the events of recent days and realize we were witnessing the moment at which the toxic right-wing tide crested and started to recede.

Republican Malpractice in the NC General Assembly

Rob Schofield decries the rush of new laws in this current session of the North Carolina General Assembly -- laws written in secret and sometimes quickly, with scant understanding of or respect for unintended consequences (let alone the nasty intended ones): "Time and again last week, in fealty to an artificial and never fully disclosed deadline, legislative leaders summoned new and hugely controversial proposed laws out of thin air, conducted rapid-fire kangaroo committee meetings to bless them, and then waved the detritus briefly in front of glassy-eyed rank and file members for quick, often dazed approval."

That's democracy malpractice, and the practitioners must be called to account. Here's two of them:

Republican Rep. Jonathan Jordan and Republican Sen. Deanna Ballard

A handful of the most powerful of the Republicans in Raleigh wrote their budget in secret and rushed it through by preventing any amendments. The new budget "starves schools, the environment and countless other essential state services in order to give tax cuts to millionaires" (Rob Schofield). Jonathan Jordan and Deanna Ballard voted yes to it and to everything else.

Out of Thin Air

Other pieces of shit coming out of the General Assembly in rapid order:

"A transparently partisan bit of legal scalpel wielding that would alter early voting laws in order to target and discourage participation by minority voters." Their monkeying with early voting now sits on Governor Roy Cooper's desk. It's clearly meant to discourage the whole infrastructure of early voting, as it mandates that all satellite sites must be open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every weekday, 12-hour shifts. That provision defies local knowledge of local populations and their druthers and will strap the budget of county boards of elections. Some -- probably many -- satellite sites will have to be closed in Watauga and other counties. Plus ending the last Saturday of early voting aims at black people, who have historically favored that day.

A brand-new "farm bill" -- "what ought to have been labeled The Polluting Corporate Industrial Hog Factory Relief Act.” It's a real piece of shit that we wrote about here recently.

An 18-page compilation of giveaways to favored special interests bearing the laugh-out-loud title “Regulatory Relief Act of 2018.” We'll slowly become aware of the political bribes this bill delivered on.

A bill to gerrymander the judicial districts of roughly a third of the state’s population, because General Assembly Republicans haven't liked the judges.

Speaking of the damned judicial system, a superior court judge recently ruled in favor of a tenant, and the General Assembly promptly passed a special giveaway to landlords. In Raleigh it pays to be upset by a court ruling, especially when you have expensive lobbyists and compliant Republican troops.

And the icing on the cake: Last Friday, a rushed new backroom deal to "put teeth" into penalties on crazy behavior by crazy prison inmates, because harshly punishing craziness always makes it stop.

It's a Raleigh power-trip on acid and with the pedal down. But be informed, you clowns of the apocalypse-- Judgment Day is coming, and the people remember.

Still Unpacking HB2, and Oh, the Stench!

I rarely say that something is "a must-read," though I think it often, and I'm thinking it strongly this morning about Rob Schofield's further exploration of the sweeping rewrite of our laws passed as House Bill 2 last week and signed by a befuddled governor who has bled nothing but support since he put pen to paper.

HB2 is, in Schofield's summation, "a truly stunning and almost unfathomable development – at least at first blush. A modern American state has enacted a sweeping statute that takes its law backward on a fundamental premise of human and civil rights (the right not to be fired because of your race, sex or religion) to the mid-20th Century (and maybe even the mid-19th Century). What’s more, it has done so with the ringing endorsement of conservative Christian advocacy groups – groups whose members are now, as a result, expressly unprotected in state law because of their religious beliefs!"

That's right. As the law is written, a hyper-conservative Christian could be fired simply because she's a hyper-conservative Christian, and she would have no recourse under state law (and good luck, Sister, getting relief from the federal bureaucracy!).

While national businesses and non-profit groups have roundly condemned the North Carolina General Assembly and especially our poor dumb governor, the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce has been very obviously and strangely silent on the law. Schofield reasons -- correctly, we believe, that the Chamber of Commerce "was bought off with the broad language added to the bill at the last minute to deep-six local living wage ordinances and to bar all state court lawsuits against employers who fire workers for discriminatory reasons."

Is the Chamber of Commerce willing to countenance blatant discrimination in order to gain more power over their workers? Apparently so.

By the same token, conservative Christians either haven't noticed that they are also exposed for unequal treatment by HB2, or they held their fire on giving away the right of their members to sue for discrimination, suggests Schofield, "so that [they] could pursue [their] longstanding holy grail of keeping LGBT persons marginalized and unequal."

An unconstitutional aroma continues to hang over this pile of legislative crap. The more we know about it, the more we smell the ugliness.

King of the World

Gov.-Elect Pat McCrory has actually done it, put Art Pope in charge of the state's budget.

I have no words. Rob Schofield does:

When the rumor surfaced yesterday that arch-right-wing money bags and politcal attack ad king Art Pope would be Pat McCrory’s new budget director, there was a lot denial amongst the folks we talk with over here at Policy Watch. Folks simply couldn’t believe that the new Guv would take such an outrageous and politically risky step.

This would be like a President Romney appointing the Koch brothers as his directors of the EPA and IRS.

But, here we are, 24 hours later, getting our arms around the idea that the man actually did it! Today’s edition of the Fitzsimon File will explore this momentous decision in more detail so be on the lookout, but here is a preliminary take:

In one fell swoop, before he’s even taken office, Pat McCrory has done at least three very ill-advised things:

1. He’s destroyed any notion that he has moderate tendencies that might allow him to govern somewhere closer to the middle. Pope is the leader of one of the nation’s most extreme, right-wing Tea Party groups, Americans for Prosperity. You can’t place such a man in charge of your most important legislation (i.e. the state budget) and pretend to be a moderate.

2. He’s raised enormous ethical issues for himself and his administration. How do state lawmakers work with a man with millions of dollars and a record as long as your arm of mounting destructive attack ad campaigns against politicians with whom he disagrees?

3. He’s called his own authority and role into question. How can McCrory be Pope’s boss when it is Pope who has all the money and power? Is he really going to crack the whip and tell Pope to toe the line that he establishes? Obviously, to ask that question is to answer it. If anyone’s going to be giving orders in the new administration, it’s clearly going to be Pope. The bottom line, if Pope is now the state’s “deputy budget director,” Pat McCrory is now Deputy Governor.

Whaaa? McCrory Going All Squishily Moderate

Gov.-Elect Pat McCrory, in Raleigh to measure the curtains, held a press conference today and pointedly took a very different tone about the newly created Dix Park. NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and what Rob Schofield calls "the conservative shock troops at Americans for Prosperity" had lambasted Bev Perdue for striking the deal with the City of Raleigh for the Dorothea Dix acreage to become a public park, which Berger and Americans for Prosperity had labeled a travesty of Everything Holy = private profit off public lands. Changing his tune considerably from last week, when he was singing from the same free market hymnal with Berger and the Rich Guys, McCrory said he was "all for" the park.

He didn't mean it, probably, but he said it, and these days that gets marked down in the "moderation" column.

Schofield summed up what was striking about the whole scene:

No silly name-calling or manufactured outrage; nothing akin to Berger’s absurd and inflammatory statement on Twitter that "Having failed for years to advance her agenda, Gov Perdue is desperately trying to craft a last-minute legacy at NC taxpayers’ expense” or AFP’s claim that the deal is “a billion-dollar giveaway of taxpayer resources.” 

So, Republicans, how ya gonna handle your RINO governor?

The Big Tent Party

Our thanks to Rob Schofield for pointing out this clause # 3 under "Individual Liberties" in the new North Carolina GOP platform, cobbled up in Greensboro this past weekend to give voice to every personal prejudice harbored by every last one of that pursed lip, tight-sphinctered, self-righteously judgmental, Taliban-like congregation:

3. Government should treat all citizens impartially, without regard to wealth, race, ethnicity, disability, religion, sex, political affiliation or national origin. We oppose all forms of invidious discrimination. Sexual orientation is not an appropriate category.

Schofield is quite correct, that you cannot read that clause in any way that doesn't declare quite openly that the Republican Party of North Carolina has decided that discrimination against gay citizens is A-OK with them. Government-sanctioned discrimination, which gives the lie to their other cover story, that they are for small, non-intrusive government.

Conservatives Will Rue the Decision

Why I'm glad to call Rob Schofield my friend, and hereby beg his indulgence as I reprint entire his wise words from this morning (via NC Policy Watch):

Why yesterday’s vote is more likely to hasten marriage equality in North Carolina than delay it
Assume that a couple of years back you had been thinking about how to bring about marriage equality for North Carolina’s LGBT community. What might have been your first steps? What would you have done to jumpstart the issue in what was by any fair assessment, a hidebound, conservative, Bible Belt state with essentially zero tradition of high-profile gay rights advocacy?

At the time, the answers to these questions would have been elusive. The state had a longstanding law banning same sex marriage. Leaders of both major political parties were strong, on-the-record opponents. Support in the public opinion polls was very low. The possibility of a successful court challenge seemed remote at best. Even most liberal activists were indifferent -- having never really thought much about the issue or, if they had, maintaining a cynical pessimism. Even the flurry of activity around the country in recent years – from the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” to the emergence of full marriage equality in a handful of northern states — seemed not have an impact in North Carolina. By just about any measurement, the issue in North Carolina was, in a word, “dead.”

The turnaround
And then came 2011 and the fateful decision of North Carolina Republicans to advance an amendment to the state constitution.

You know what’s happened since that decision last fall to ram through a national hate group-approved proposal that’s among the most extreme in the country: a remarkable and inspiring change.

Forced to take sides and to really confront what it means to deny hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens a core human right that the vast majority takes for granted, large numbers of North Carolinians underwent a remarkable transformation. In just a few months, millions of people who would have never given the idea of same sex marriage even a hint of sympathetic consideration – straight-laced middle-aged bankers and religiously conservative African-American pastors, self-absorbed college kids and church-going grandmothers, even Republican politicians and think tankers – looked in the mirror and really thought about what our state’s lack of marriage equality means and what it would mean to enshrine that discrimination in the constitution.

And then – perhaps even more remarkably – they did something else: they spoke up publicly. They put signs in their yards and on their cars. They self-identified as opponents of the amendment in letters to the editor and on Facebook. They gave money and talked openly about the issue to friends and family members.

And they voted. In an otherwise low-energy primary with no presidential contests at all, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to say “no” to discrimination. They turned out in all regions of the state. In the state’s largest urban counties where media coverage was most intense and accurate information the most plentiful, they voted “no” by sizable majorities.

Overcoming long odds
And to make all this that much more remarkable, it occurred in an environment in which the really big national money and political figures were AWOL. Sure, Bill Clinton recorded a robocall at the last minute and, to be sure, a lot of good people from around the country chimed in. But, make no mistake, the big money at the national level decided early on that the amendment would be impossible to stop and stayed away. By any fair and honest assessment, the “no” campaign was a true grassroots, shoestring operation.

And yet, despite these handicaps, the “against” vote was surprisingly large. Had just a couple hundred thousand people — a tiny fragment of the state’s adult population — seen the light and changed their minds, the amendment would have failed outright. If you think about it, it’s really quite remarkable.

Indeed, if the experts and Public Policy Polling are to be believed – and when it came to the actual vote, they were just about spot on – a large majority of North Carolinians oppose the actual substance of the amendment, but simply couldn’t connect the amendment to its actual impact. Many voters didn’t actually understand the amendment at all!

Add to this the blatant and shameless appeals to hate and intolerance propagated by so many pastors and priests – from the embarrassing and troubled mega-church zealots like Fayetteville’s Sean Harris to the backward-looking, top-down push from the state’s ultra-conservative Catholic hierarchy – and it’s really amazing that the “against” forces managed to do as well as they did.

Going forward
So what now? Where does the marriage equality camp go from here? Clearly, nowhere but up. In a state in which the movement lacked momentum and a rallying cry – some kind of a tangible and visible manifestation of hate and exclusion against which to fight and organize – we now have our target.

Eight months ago in this space, I worried about the damage that the amendment fight would do to our state and its public psyche. In particular, I worried about how it would divide us and force us to “choose sides.”

But I also wrote the following:

[R]egardless of the outcome of the vote, there can be no doubt that the months to come will speed up the process – already well underway – in which North Carolinians are coming, at long last, to accept and embrace the concept of LGBT equality. This time next year, we can rest assured that more people than ever before will accept LGBT North Carolinians as full and complete citizens. The trend on this matter is strong and irreversible and the impending campaign will abet it.

Today, it’s clear that the predictions about actually speeding progress were accurate. Rather than harming the public debate and turning it disastrously toxic, the amendment passed (if such a thing is possible) with a whimper. Even conservative Democrats who voted for the amendment last September spoke publicly against it in recent weeks. Many proponents ended up almost sheepish and embarrassed. Conservative corporate executives ran for cover. The top architect, House Speaker Thom Tillis, even called it a generational matter and predicted repeal in the foreseeable future.

So, here on May 9, 2012, the bottom line is this: There are plenty of reasons for caring and thoughtful people to be frustrated and depressed this morning. The near-term impact of the new law will be a lot of unnecessary confusion in our legal system and a lot more wrong-headed and mean-spirited pain and exclusion for a lot of human beings.

But the following is also true: Full marriage equality was never going to come to North Carolina until millions of people woke up to the truth and began to act on it. And when it comes to making such a process a reality, there’s been no single more effective force in state history than Amendment One.

Twenty years ago people picketed and pilloried Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh for performing “holy union” ceremonies within its own walls that had no legal effect. Last night, voters in the county where Pullen is located voted against marriage discrimination for everyone by a large majority.

The proponents of the Amendment may have won the battle last night, but it will ultimately prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. Amendment opponents would, obviously, never have chosen this path, but now that it’s been thrust upon them, there’s no denying the following: 1) the day on which North Carolinians will no longer tolerate marriage discrimination is coming sooner rather than later, and 2) the last eight months have only served to expedite the process.

The Rich Are Driving a Billboard Around North Carolina. No Kiddin'!

Photo, Donnie Roberts for the Lexington Dispatch

We have to reprint Rob Schofield here to get the context:

For several days now, Americans for Prosperity NC and the Pope-Civitas Institute have been promoting “a major new effort” entitled the “Real Solutions Road Tour” in which their advocates would "criss-cross North Carolina" to promote their defense of the conservative General Assembly and its extreme policy decisions. 

To read the various tweets and website posts, you’d have thought there was going to be a long series of well-attended campaign-style rallies with tea partying conservatives coming out of the woodwork at stops throughout the state. 

Here’s essentially what actually happened on Day One of the tour today: Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis.
AFP-NC Director Dallas Woodhouse and “Real Solutions” TV spokesperson Donna King drove a billboard around a handful of cities. In a couple of places they parked and got out, took a picture and went into the local newspaper for a few minutes. In Winston-Salem they parked in front of the building that houses the progressive Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation for a few minutes. That’ll show those liberals! 

There was no evident news coverage. There were no rallies. There were no crowds. In most places, most people on the street didn’t even appear to notice the billboard truck driving by....

Well, since Rob wrote that report, there has been one local newspaper article in the Lexington Dispatch. It featured a photograph of the billboard-truck (the photo reproduced above), with a group of five people waving. But the caption on the photo makes clear that these folks were waving "sarcastically," because they sure 'nuff don't support the new Republican majority in the General Assembly.

What if you drove a Rich People Rule! billboard around the state and no one saluted?

John Hood Comes Out of the Closet

John Hood, leader of a mere sliver of the Art Pope Empire, comes out against Amendment 1 (via Rob Schofield):

"I think amending North Carolina’s constitution to forbid gay and lesbian couples from receiving any future legal recognition, including civil unions, is unwise and unfair. In my opinion the real threat to marriage is not the prospect of gay people getting hitched. It is the reality of straight people too quickly resorting to divorce, or never getting hitched in the first place."

Whaaa??? It was Art Pope's dutiful minions in the NC General Assembly, like Li'l Danny Soucek and Jonathan Jordan, who pushed this s**t in the first place.

So what gives with the cognitive dissonance, Mr. Hood?

Transvaginal Airlines' NC Hub

Quote of the day, from Rob Schofield, in the Raleigh News&Observer:

The Republican legislative leadership [in the NC General Assembly] is male dominated in a way we have not seen in Raleigh in recent years. Is there a chromosomal dimension to their bitter feud with a female governor, their targeting of female legislators, their war against a female-dominated teachers association and their effort to restrict the reproductive freedoms of women?

May we all answer in unison ... "Well, yes!"

Gen'l Assembly Repubs: "Let's Sell Our Cultural Assets to Corporations"

Yeah, that's the ticket!

Sell the North Carolina Zoo to Furminetech Inc., maybe, and let them charge enough to be profitable, or sell off the animals to Russian mobsters and other wealthy collectors.

Sell the North Carolina aquariums, or close them and dump the tanks.

Museums, state parks, cultural sites. Who needs 'em? Certainly not the people of the state. Why should we own all this stuff? We don't go there, and if we do, we can pay MegaCorpPlus for the privilege of gawking and pay premium prices for T-shirts made in China and go home and sleep tight in the sweet knowledge that we're not burdened as citizens by owning any public assets whatsoever.

Rob Schofield calls it the return of the plantation mentality, the belief that only rich white men deserve to own such things and control access to them. The rest of us can go be beggars and thank Gawd that not one penny of our tax money goes to support anything that adds knowledge, beauty, recreation, or spiritual nourishment to our desperate little lives.

NC GOP: "Pardon, Your Sexual Obsessions Are Showing"

Rob Schofield, this a.m., summing up the GOP's queerfear press conference in Raleigh yesterday and their push next week to get a special constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2012:

...by any honest assessment, what really went on in the General Assembly yesterday and what, sadly, appears destined to happen next week, is but the latest in a long and desultory list of historical events in which American conservatives (and, indeed, backward-looking people all over the planet) have taken their own uninformed, troubled, and repressed obsession with sexual behavior and attempted to elevate it into some kind of divine command.

News From the Clown College

As always since January, it's difficult to keep up with the ludicrous jokes pouring out of the new Republican majority in Raleigh. Here are just a few of the most recent:

1. Harry Payne writes in the N&O about the craven attempt to let businesses off the hook for employees permanently injured on the job. He starts by observing how this New Bunch in Raleigh has jumped on the old Washington Republican habit of naming a new law in the most misleading way possible:

House bill 709, "Protect and Put NC Back to Work," is a shining example of the latest in that dark art where the bill title says one thing and the text of the bill does the opposite. A more accurate title would be "House Bill 709, An Act Pushed by Insurance Companies to Reduce Payments to Workers Permanently Disabled on the Job and to Tilt a Delicately Balanced Legal System Against the Interests of Every Injured Worker."

2. Rob Schofield calls our attention to a bill introduced in the NC Senate, the “School Violence Protection Act.” Among other things, the bill would require the expulsion of kids who have been twice alleged to be delinquent or undisciplined. Shadows of the 16th Century, when all it took for torture was someone's saying he saw you reading the Geneva rather than the Douay translation of the Bible. Plus the proposed new law specifies that “No school employee shall be reprimanded or dismissed for acting or failing to act to stop or intervene in an altercation between students.” May I hold your jacket, chum, while you beat the crap out of that gay kid?

3. Laura Leslie reported on perhaps our favorite head-scratcher of the week. Representative George Cleveland has decided that North Carolina can be -- and should be -- as ignorant as Oklahoma, so he's pushing our own anti-Sharia-law bill. Rep. Cleveland could offer no rational reason for why such a law is needed, other than the possibility that he heard something about it on right-wing talk radio.

David Hoyle Sneers at the Unemployed

One of the most powerful men in the N.C. General Assembly, Democrat David Hoyle, is sometimes more obnoxiously patrician than ... your average rich Republican. According to Rob Schofield, Hoyle was loudly signaling his disdain yesterday for anything in President Obama's stimulus package that doesn't enrich the Paving Lobby. Questioning a provision that will allow for the hiring of additional child-care workers (jobs, Senator?), Hoyle asked sarcastically, "What's that? Babysitting for people who lost their jobs?"

Jeez!