North Carolina Republicans Exhausted All Their Benefit-of-the-Doubt Long Ago
By now, we should all take as gospel the proposition that anything that redounds to the credit of the Republican Party in the newly insane state of North Carolina is prima facie dubious and not to be trusted. For example, on Tuesday, the state held two special elections for Congress. The Republicans won both of them. In one of them, the race for the seat in the Ninth Congressional District, this was the second special-election held for the post, a do-over made necessary by the fact that a bunch of GOP goobers had ratfcked the first special election so clumsily that they actually got caught.
On Tuesday, a Republican crackpot named Dan Bishop defeated Democratic candidate Dan McCready by less than 5,000 votes. (Bishop, the brainiac behind the "bathroom bill" that cost the state almost four billion in revenue, was a substitute crackpot. Mark Harris, the original GOP candidate who had profited from the ratfcking in the first election, withdrew when the do-over was announced, and after his own son had given him up in a hearing.) Far be it from me to suggest anything untoward, and I have been assured by various figure filberts that I'm wrong to be concerned, but there was one group of precincts largely populated by Lumbee Native people that swung 24 points away from McCready compared to the first special-election last November. I wouldn't even bring it up except that the North Carolina Republican Party used up any benefit of any doubt years ago.
And, if you're wondering why that is, you got a further lesson from the shenanigans the GOP pulled in the state's House of Representatives on Wednesday morning. With only 64 members present, and all but 12 of the chamber's Democratic members out at various 9/11 commemorations and the like, the Republican Speaker of the House rammed through an override vote of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper's veto of the proposed state budget. (This brawl was going on all summer, with the GOP trying various tactics to swing enough Democrats over to their side.) According to the members of the Democratic leadership in the House, they had been assured by their Republican colleagues that no recorded votes would be held Wednesday morning. From the Charlotte News & Observer:
House Democratic leader Darren Jackson, of Wake County, said he told his caucus that they did not need to be at the morning session because Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican, told him there would be no recorded votes. Jackson was not at the 8:30 a.m. session. There were just 12 Democrats, and they did not all have a chance to vote, they told reporters. Jackson said that microphones were cut off. “If we can’t trust each other, this place will fall apart, it’s just too big an entity to run, too many processes to require for everything to be in writing,” Jackson said. He said if someone with power tells you something is going to happen, you have to trust that it will.
Jackson said he wants Lewis to recall the veto vote before it goes to the Senate, which is a simple majority vote. Butler told reporters that she was threatened with arrest on the House floor. She called the Republicans’ governing “scorched earth politics” and an “embarrassment.” “What happened in that chamber this morning is heartbreaking,” she said. “The fact that they would sit and lie in wait to trap these good citizens, these good representatives, is disgraceful."
So, OK, maybe Bishop's win is legit, and the residents of the Ninth Congressional District of North Carolina want to be represented in the Congress by the guy who regularly refers to news coverage he doesn't like as the product of the "jihad media," and who referred to LGBTQ activists as the "politically correct Taliban." But I take nothing on faith from this state any more. Bastards out of Carolina, indeed.
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