McCrory's Telling Moment Arrives
Published July 11, 2013
By Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, July 11, 2013.
The big question about Governor Pat McCrory when he was elected in November was which McCrory voters had sent to Raleigh, the moderately conservative former mayor of Charlotte who supported mass transit and other important public investments and didn’t seem too interested in the social agenda of the religious right or the hard right candidate who appeared at tea party rallies against the Affordable Care Act and made robocalls for American for Prosperity.
The answer is still not clear. McCrory has been trying to bob back and forth between the two in his first six months in office, though he’s been governing more from the far right than the right of center from where the traditional, conservative Republicans like former governors Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser led North Carolina.
Not only did McCrory hire Art Pope, North Carolina’s version of a Koch Brother, as state budget director, the legislation he has signed so far includes measures to reject a federally funded expansion of Medicaid that would have provided health care to 500,000 low-income adults, deny emergency unemployment benefits to 170,000 laid off workers and repeal the Racial Justice Act that addressed the compelling evidence of racial bias in the capital punishment system.
Sounds like the hard right tea party Pat.
McCrory has teetered back toward common sense once in a while, most notably with his insistence that any tax reform package be revenue neutral so it does not require even more budget cuts to the already woefully underfunded public schools, universities, and community colleges.
That sounded a little like the former mayor, but it didn’t last long. McCrory recently changed his definition of revenue neutral. Now it apparently means enough money to fund what he thinks ought to be funded, which will apparently allow him to support a Pope-inspired regressive tax shift plan that reduces state revenue by a minimum of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
McCrory’s first six months have also been marked by his struggle to remain relevant while legislative leaders grab most of the headlines with radical proposals that McCrory ends up signing in quiet, private ceremonies out of the public eye.
All that changes now with the unprecedented assault on women’s reproductive rights passed by the Senate last week and by the House on Thursday afternoon. McCrory said during the campaign that he would not sign any legislation that put further restrictions on access to abortion services in North Carolina.
That seems pretty clear.
Yet it took McCrory almost a week to say he would veto the sweeping anti-abortion bill that passed the Senate. His statement prompted the House to pass a slightly different version of the same legislation that House leaders said had been worked out with officials in McCrory’s administration.
But the House bill, like the Senate plan before it, clearly and unmistakably restricts access to abortion services for women in North Carolina.
It forbids local governments from providing abortion coverage in their employees’ health plans, prohibits insurance plans offered by the health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act from covering abortion services and tells state officials to come up with new regulations for abortion clinics that could force all but one clinic in the state to close.
Supporters of the bill disingenuously claim that the goal is only to improve the safety of the clinics for women, but Rep. Paul Stam, a longtime anti-abortion rights crusader, admitted on WRAL-TV that part of the reason for the legislation was to limit access to abortions as much as they could.
That sounds like explicit grounds for a McCrory veto according to the clear promise McCrory made during the campaign.
The claim by House leaders that the administration is on board with the House version of the attack on women’s rights raises the possibility that McCrory will pander to the radical right by either signing the bill or letting it become law without his signature and then say he didn’t break his campaign promise.
That may well be the plan, but it won’t work.
If McCrory signs the House bill or anything close to it, it’s his bill then. His name will be on it and he will be denying thousands of women in the state access to legal medical procedures, something he promised not to do.
And will be definitively answering the “which McCrory was elected” question. All eyes are on the governor’s mansion now.
July 11, 2013 at 6:49 pm
dj anderson says:
Who is the REAL McCrory Chris is asking. While this is his same attack on McCrory restated, today did provide him the spotlight and an opportunity to throw tomatoes. Who is the REAL McCrory? He is going to be the one that has to deal the hand he has been dealt over in the assembly.
Chris is right to point out NC's decline of Medicaid extension. I don't think Republicans will be proven right in the next three years.
I do wish someone would explain the Republican logic in not expanding Medicaid. I understand that the Affordable Care Act is misnamed for it may not be affordable, but are Republicans scared that the Federal government will cut their promised payment of most of the cost, now or later? Is that it? The sequester type actions could lead to such cuts, as they have to those states continuing unemployment payments at the higher level.
Are they afraid NC will bear an ever increasing percentage of the cost of Medicaid if the Feds change rules. This isn't a mandated payment. Republicans have never presented a logic argument that I've seen, have you?
The "Fix it First" notion doesn't fly with me. Do both at the same time!
Couldn't a compromise be worked out so that a bigger than a dollar co-pay would be required, or a $100 deductible added? Did the Democrats bargain at all, or try, where there was room to do so? What's our leadership doing? We have to try.
The ending of extended unemployment six months early seems illogical to me, but maybe lowering the weekly max from $535 to $375 does make sense, yet doing that ended the deal with the feds who would not grant an exemption. We owe over 2 billion. Why not 170,000 x whatever we have to borrow for another 6 months when it all ends? Other states not dropped from the federal program pay less per month than NC. Again, where is the famous political back and forth? We know what Republicans did, but I don't know what the apparently impotent Democrats tried to do inside the Assembly to stop it.
I kinda think the Republicans are not so business-sense-logical, just anti-anything-Obama or democratic, which also seems true in reverse for Chris and others influencing the Democratic party right now. We citizens can't be having that going on forever. Political parties have died before when others are born.
While I don't buy that the Republicans are wanting to ensure the safety of abortions or want to preserve the abortion industry, I don't have a problem with the abortion action because abortion is such an ugly act of ending life, and if I made the laws abortion on demand without extreme or exceptional cause would be murder. I would not license a doctor to perform 96% of those performed.
The denial of an unborn's right to life is the civil rights issue of our time. IF Democrats were the pro-life party, and Republicans the pro-abortion rights party, it would seem more in character and Republicans would not have won the State and probably not be in control of the house in DC. Democrats have this as wrong as they had civil rights in 1900.
My guess is that McCrory will not sign today's abortion bill, not veto it, but let it go into law on its own. He would not gain a vote by vetoing it, do you think?
Three & a half years from now, McCrory's action today won't be much of an issue, just something between commas in the talking points of that time.
Chris is right about the Republicans favoring the rich and cutting taxes. That's their support. As far as educational spending goes, it didn't help the cause when Obama came to Morrisville's little school system and praised it as an example when it is one of bottom in spending and one of the top in scores, plus that system cut teacher jobs, increased class size to get the computers & software off the ground.
Teachers want double the pay, more job security, but face it, they bet on the wrong horse. Same with the NAACP. I imagine millions in grants will be ended.
The Republicans are in total charge for the first time in way over a century. The tale will be told if they can deliver and enough citizens like it. They don't have the experience needed to be in charge -- too many leaders and too few followers in the assembly.
I thank Spin.com for providing me and the few others that comment a forum. I don't understand the economy, the lack of inflation, or the current politics. I do like reading what others think. More people please comment. This is a fine forum.
