With no budget, NCGOP is showing kingly entitlement

Most North Carolinians are relaxing in the hot, humid languor of summer. I don’t want to disturb my readers’ respite from the chaos of the Trump era. The Autocrat himself has fairly dedicated his life to tormenting Americans with turmoil and turpitude. So, instead of writing a trenchant piece focusing on the horrors of Trump and North Carolina’s mini-Trumps, I thought I would offer a few impressionistic thoughts about the state of NC politics—and then wish my readers the best as they retreat to the coast, the beach, or the Mountains.

The biggest story in North Carolina politics continues to be our legislature’s failure to pass a budget. Enacting an annual budget is the principal responsibility of the General Assembly. The constitution makes this imperative clear, and the other enthusiasms that occupy the attention of the NCGA are tucked away on the periphery. Yet we do not have a budget. At this point it seems to me that Republican legislators are no longer failing to pass a budget but are simply refusing to do so.

Senate Republicans proposed something quite different, which is to say a budget exactly like the plans that have drained the vitality from North Carolina’s public sector almost every year since Phil Berger’s conquest of the General Assembly.

With priorities this far apart, the legislative chambers’ failure to arrive at a consensus was understandable, if still a policy failure. But the GOP has now decided what it will do: cut taxes for the rich, let teacher pay stagnate, and divert millions more dollars to the state’s corrupt school-voucher program. It’s not surprising that this is where a hard-right, determinedly anti-government NCGOP landed after a year of shadow-boxing. So—why haven’t they passed a final budget?

The answer seems to me that they simply do not feel like they owe their constituents a budget. With kingly entitlement, they are withholding a budget agreement from the state’s citizens in order to noodle around with the elections system, local governments, and Phil Berger’s lifelong passion for cutting taxes. The budget can wait—forever if necessary. North Carolina’s state legislative leadership has come to believe that they own the legislature, that it is their fiefdom and their possession, and that they have a right to keep millions of people waiting in order to go about the business of building conservative utopia. Progressives worry about a king in the White House. North Carolina has kings on Jones Street, and they seem willing to delay the people’s business however long they fancy in order to further solidify their authoritarian dominance in our state.