RALEIGH Most legislative sessions start out with a congenial break-in period that lets lawmakers learn one another’s names, ease into committee assignments and find out how to turn ideas into drafts of new laws.
This year, everything is different. Committees were named fast, drafts of major legislation were ready to go to committees, and legislative leaders were intent on passing laws as quickly as they could get to them. There were high hopes for a bipartisan start to the session, but they soon showed signs of strain.
The House approved a bill in effect exempting North Carolina residents from the new federal health care law’s mandatory purchase of insurance, producing some testy exchanges with Democrats led by former Speaker Joe Hackney.
The Senate tentatively approved a bill giving the governor more power to order $400 million in savings in the current budget year to get a head start on covering a big shortfall expected next year. But it also ordered the capture of $140 million more in unspent funds, including more than $67 million for the Golden LEAF Foundation and more than $8 million from the One North Carolina Fund and the Job Development Investment Grants program that Gov. Bev Perdue considers essential to entice businesses to create more jobs.
Pretty soon Republican patience wore thin with Democrats’ attempts to preserve those items. Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, spoke for a number of GOP members who for years sat in the minority and watched while Democrats got their way. Pointing his finger, Rucho said, “You spent us to death…. Pay attention – this is what you should have done when you had a turn. Don’t come crying about jobs now.”
Rucho’s sharply pointed remarks drove home the key point about this session: Republicans not only have the votes, they also have firm ideas about what to do. They’re going to do it as fast as they can.
In fact, says House Speaker Thom Tillis, the majority hopes to produce a new state budget by June 1 – dramatically sooner than most legislative sessions in recent decades and well ahead of the June 30 end of the current fiscal year. Not only that, but legislators will also have at least three days to read the bill before they have to vote, he vowed. The House plans to adopt a budget by April 22, in fact, just a week after tax day, and the Senate will act by May 13 on its bill.
I asked Tillis spokesman Jordan Shaw whether the House would need to return to the legislative schedule lawmakers followed in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first covering the General Assembly – staying in session each week through Friday mornings instead of leaving after sessions around midday on Thursday.
Friday sessions were axed in the 1990s in part to let legislators have more time to tend to their jobs and other matters back home. Tillis plans to continue that practice to help preserve a citizen’s legislature. But if lawmakers need to be in town to handle important work, Shaw e-mailed, there may be exceptions.
In other words, Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger are pushing their members to get more work done faster — not only not adding to the length of the legislative session, but finishing things earlier.
I cannot recall anything like this before in 34 years of covering the place – where members came to Raleigh ready to work right away, announced a schedule for when the budget would be voted on or when a final version would be approved.
This depends on a number of things, primarily party discipline. Democrats have come to town determined before – but watched as those plans fell apart over differences among party factions, rivalries between the House and Senate and deteriorating relations between the legislature’s two chambers and the governor. Even when Democrats held most of the votes and the governorship too, there were plenty of disagreements, delays and dysfunctions.
What’s different this year, it seems to me, are five things:
The new majority’s leadership is intent on working fast.
It is focused on what it wants to do on jobs, on the budget, on charter schools, on elections laws and a host of other issues.
It has specific plans for what it wants to approve in the early going and what it will do later.
It has a schedule in mind for when it wants to finish its major work.
And, perhaps most remarkably, it has members who appear to be unified in what they’re doing and how and when they’ll do it.
Each of these things could fall apart as the session moves along and as legislators approve spending cuts or make unpopular program decisions. When Republican legislators’ constituents start squawking about consequences of legislative actions, the going will get harder for the new majority.
But so far the early going has been fascinating to watch from a strategic point of view.
Remember: In the mid-1990s when Republicans held the House for two sessions, there were serious questions about whether Republicans were ready to govern.
Quite aside from whether you like or dislike what the Republican majority is doing this time around, it’s evident they are not only prepared to run the place, they are doing it exactly how they want to.
By Jack Betts
Associate Editor
Posted: Sunday, Feb. 06, 2011
Jack Betts writes on politics and life in The Carolinas for the Charlotte Observer’s Editorial page.
