Mid-session update on the General Assembly from Sen. Jeff Jackson

We’ve been in session for about five months. No one knows how much longer we’ll be there because we have no fixed end-date and there are some major disagreements that are going to take time to resolve. Estimated dates of conclusion range from July to October, so who knows. But we’ve been there long enough for me to report back on some of the general features of the first post-supermajority session we’ve had in many years.

1. The number of bad bills that are actually getting passed has plummeted, largely because a credible veto threat is functioning as a deterrent. Bad bills are still getting filed, of course, but unlike previous years they’re mostly dying in committee. There have been a few notable exceptions to this, but relative to what we saw in the last several years — when one party had total power and there was effectively no check on their legislative will — we’ve seen a major drop in highly divisive legislation. Why? Because since the last election the minority party now has enough votes to sustain the governor’s vetoes, and as a matter of political strategy the majority party wants to minimize the number of sustained vetoes it lets the governor have. Their strategy is to be very selective in passing bills they know will be vetoed by only doing so when they think having the governor on record in opposition to that bill will hurt him in the next election. And frankly, most of their divisive bills would also be unpopular, so it would just be handing the governor a bunch of wins to pass divisive bills only to have them vetoed. So the quality of the legislation has notably increased, in that the bad stuff has notably decreased.
2. Budget negotiations have begun and for the first time in the five years I’ve been in the state Senate the minority party is actually at the table. That’s only because we broke the supermajority and can now vote to sustain the governor’s veto, which means we have influence, although it’s indirect. We’re in a position to block bad bills, but the only way to use our leverage to actually get good legislation passed is by the governor withholding his support for certain bills until they include his/our priorities. The biggest place you’re seeing this is the budget, where education funding and health care expansion are key focal points.
3. It’s still too soon to tell, but there’s a good chance that Medicaid expansion ends up be the defining battle of this session. Quick summary: We could cover roughly 500k people — most of whom are working but don’t earn enough to afford insurance — and the federal government would pay 90% while our hospitals pay the other 10%. So for basically $0 to the North Carolina taxpayer, we could see a massive drop in our uninsured population, while bringing $4 billion per year into our economy, creating roughly 40k jobs, saving 1k lives, mounting a truly effective response to the opioid epidemic, and probably saving a number of rural hospitals from going bankrupt in the next few years. The big secret is that expansion is overwhelmingly popular inside the General Assembly — in both parties. But members of the majority party are scared of losing their primaries if they embrace anything that came out of Obamacare because, during their re-election campaign, their opponent in the GOP primary could send 20 pieces of mail with the incumbent’s face next to Obama’s, and in a lot of districts that would be the whole ballgame. In other words, it’s considered a lethal primary threat for Republican legislators to accept the expansion funds, so the private support it has among them isn’t translating into public support (except for a few brave GOP souls in the state House, and major credit is due to them). The governor has made this a high priority and wants to see it included in the budget, which will ultimately need his signature. The tricky thing here is there’s probably not any middle ground: Either we accept the deal the federal government is offering us or we don’t. We don’t have too much flexibility on the terms of the deal and that makes it hard to strike a compromise, even if the sole purpose of the compromise would just be allowing the majority party to save face (which I wouldn’t mind — whatever it takes to get this thing done, honestly). So the outcome here is hard to predict, but it’s easy to see this becoming a major front in the larger budget battle.
4. Despite the relative overall improvement in legislative output, there’s been no interest by the majority party in passing any of the highly popular good government bills, like independent redistricting or automatic voter registration or campaign finance reform. A slew of those bills were filed by the minority party and were never permitted a hearing. That’s a particular point of frustration because those are measures that would do the most to restore faith in government and for which most of the arguments in opposition are, to my ear, made almost completely in bad faith. They are the lowest-hanging fruit and yet somehow completely out of reach, at least for now. (In fairness, it should be noted, my party wasn’t too eager to end gerrymandering when it was in the majority, either…)

Thanks for being interested enough in state politics to read this far. I’ll try to keep you posted as some of the larger battles resolve, but the best way to stay current is @JeffJacksonNC.