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 Restore the Powers of the Lieutenant Governor
by Tom Campbell
August 2, 2006
Not long ago I observed a session of the North Carolina Senate and watched the Lieutenant Governor presiding over the body. While Governor Perdue was very adept at the task, it was quite obvious that the real power broker in the chamber was the Senate President Pro Tem.
It wasn’t too long ago that the Lieutenant Governor held the gavel…and the control. It was the Lieutenant Governor who appointed the committee chairs and who decided which bills would reach the floor and which would die. Regardless of which party won the gubernatorial election or which held the most seats in the Senate, the Lieutenant Governor had the power.
Governance of the Senate changed dramatically when Republican Jim Martin was elected Governor and Jim Gardner won as Lieutenant Governor. The Democrats still outnumbered the Republicans in the Senate, so they just voted to strip the power from the Constitutionally elected Lieutenant Governor. Nobody seemed to mind, except Gardner.
Consider this. We will not allow our Governor or Lieutenant Governor to serve more than two consecutive four-year terms. Why? We don’t want any individual to have too much power concentrated over too long a period of time. While it bothers us for a Governor to serve more than eight years it doesn’t seem to concern anyone that the President Pro Tem of the Senate has served 12 consecutive years as perhaps the most powerful person in state government. In many respects this person has more power than our state’s chief executive and can stay in power indefinitely, as the present incumbent has proved.
A second factor to consider is that the Lieutenant Governor is elected by all the voters in the state. The person who runs our State Senate is elected by voters in one Senatorial district, a very small percentage of the total number of registered voters in the state. That Senator then has to only receive 26 more votes to become President Pro Tem.
Why would the framers of our state constitution feel it was important for our Lieutenant Governor to preside over the Senate? What prompted these visionaries to believe that a statewide elected official should be a power broker in what many consider to be the “upper” chamber of our legislature? There must have been some desire for checks and balances, for finite term limits, and for all the people to have input into the leadership of the body.
As it now stands the Lieutenant Governor has few meaningful duties and responsibilities.
This is especially troublesome since we changed our constitution some years back to make the job a full-time position. North Carolina needs to restore some or all of the powers of the Lieutenant Governor over the Senate and, to ensure another power grab doesn’t once again remove them, a Constitutional amendment to guarantee them. Add this to the reforms our state needs to consider.
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