Now Is Not The Time To Turn To North Carolina

It took North Carolina just one legislative session to do the kind of damage to state government that took South Carolina lawmakers about 20 years to achieve.
Republicans took over the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010, but had to wait until the state had a Republican governor to avoid Democratic vetoes of legislation intended to erase the progress for which the Tarheel state has long been proud.
In one legislative session, North Carolina lawmakers rolled back an impressive — and scary — set of laws. They made it tougher for people to vote by requiring photo identification at the polls. They allowed guns to be taken into bars and onto playgrounds. They imposed tougher restrictions on abortion, which is causing some clinics to close. They cut taxes across the board, which caused $600 million less in education and other funding. They cut teacher pay raises. They relaxed environmental laws, required drug testing for some welfare recipients and increased the allure of special interest money.
Kind of sounds like what South Carolina Republicans have been pushing for years, doesn’t it?
North Carolina’s pent-up list of conservative legislation, seemingly copied directly from the playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council, has so set back the state that late night comedian John Oliver poked fun at it August 5 at South Carolina’s expense: “Your move, South Carolina. You thought you had ‘craziest Carolina’ all sewn up, didn’t you? … You may be about to lose the war of Northern regression.”
Longtime North Carolina political observer Ferrel Guillory says there’s been pushback with the firestorm of conservative legislation, such as the hundreds of people who marched weekly on the Capitol on “Moral Mondays.”
“Overall, this is still a purple state in the sense that the general electorate is very narrowly divided,” said Guillory, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Obama won in 2008 by 14,000 votes. Romney won by 90,000 in 2012. You had five consecutive Democratic governors before [Pat] McCrory won.
“We’ve had a very red Republican legislature and governance imposed on a purple state and they’ve solidified it through redistricting,” he said, adding that the tide could turn. More North Carolinians voted for Democratic congressional candidates in 2012 on the whole than for Republicans, even though Republicans hold nine of 13 seats, he said.
“I tell my friends, ‘Don’t give up on North Carolina’ when you’ve looked to North Carolina for leadership.”
But what’s worrying is the possibility that South Carolina Republicans will become roosters with new confidence to push things that passed in North Carolina that still haven’t passed here — more abortion restrictions, guns in bars, more education cuts, laxer environmental laws and more.
Now with North Carolina acting more like we’ve acted for years, let’s not, for a change, turn to North Carolina as the example. Instead of both parties in South Carolina looking at their narrow platforms, let’s take a look at what’s good for everybody. Instead of playing the blame game and trying to nationalize state politics, let’s focus on things like comprehensive tax reform to make taxes fairer for everyone. Let’s have more accountability and transparency in government, create more opportunity to reduce poverty, cut the violent crime rate and improve education.
In the scathing political wars in the state and nation, the concept of the common good — once such a vital part of our democracy — has been shredded in favor of a culture of individual needs and greed. But it is exactly the common good that helped to forge our Constitution.
As Christian writer Jim Wallis wrote in Time magazine in April: “A commitment to the common good could bring us together and solve the deepest problems this country and the world now face: How do we work together? How do we treat each other, especially the poorest and most vulnerable? How do we take care of not just ourselves but also one another? The common good is also the best way to find common ground with other people—even with those who don’t agree with us or share our politics.”
 
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.