The Humpty Dumpty state

by Thomas Mills, Politics NC, February 23, 2017.

There’s a new bill in the legislature to repeal House Bill 2, or repeal parts of it. Once again, the only people happy with it are the sponsors. Liberals say it leaves in place discrimination against the LGBT community. Conservatives like Dan Forest aren’t going to support anything that might lift discrimination.

The legislature likes to blame other people for the debacle but they have nobody to blame but themselves. They passed HB2 to override a local ordinance passed by a single city in the state. While the heavy-handed overreach was bad enough, they also packed in a bunch of legislation that restricted the actions of local governments across the state and erased protections for LGBT citizens that were already in place.

The Republicans expected to fire up their base. Instead, they hurt our recovery. They didn’t anticipate the backlash against the bill and now they’re powerless to fix it.

So far, we’ve lost a bunch of high profile sporting events like NCAA championship games and the NBA All-Star game. Yesterday, Bryan Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, said that we’re losing a lot of business and that we can’t calculate the cost because we don’t know how many companies are marking North Carolina off their lists as a location for expansion or conventions.

In response, Republicans keeping talking about how fast our economy is growing and how much better we’re doing than other states. In reality, we’re catching up because our recovery has been so much slower than other places. Our economy is certainly improving but Republicans would have more to crow about if it weren’t for their self-inflicted wounds.

HB2, though, is probably just the final straw for businesses looking for a place to expand or convene. The whole country knows that the voter suppression bill targeted African-Americans and young people to make voting more difficult for them. The country also watched the legislature pass a law of state-sanctioned discrimination that would allow magistrates to opt out of marrying gay couples. Those companies don’t want to do business in a place where their employees would be treated like second-class citizens.

Before the GOP took control of the state government, North Carolina was known as a welcoming and open state. HB2 is really a sinister Humpty Dumpty tale where Humpty is our carefully cultivated reputation. The GOP pushed him off the wall and now all of Berger’s horses and all of Moore’s men (and women) can’t put Humpty together again. What a shame.

http://www.politicsnc.com/the-humpty-dumpty-state/