Last Call for Republican Conventional Warfare

North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is not going to allow the GOP to hold their convention in Charlotte in August without COVID-19 precautions, including limited capacity and social distancing.

North Carolina's Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, on Tuesday rejected the GOP’s plans for a full-fledged convention in Charlotte, telling Republican officials the only way the event would move forward is with proper health protocols in place.

“The people of North Carolina do not know what the status of COVID-19 will be in August, so planning for a scaled-down convention with fewer people, social distancing and face coverings is a necessity," Cooper wrote in a letter to the Republican National Committee.

The letter is a rebuke of the fully-attended convention that the RNC and President Trump have been pushing for despite concerns about spread of the coronavirus. In previous meetings with the Democratic-led state administration, GOP officials made clear the president’s desire for a 50,000-person convention without social distancing or mask-wearing measures and full-capacity hotels, restaurants and bars.

In a tit-for-tat that has dragged on for weeks, each side has pressed the other for answers on how the convention would be carried out safely — to no avail.

North Carolina Health and Human Services secretary Mandy Cohen sent a letter to RNC officials on May 27 in response to a series of tweets from President Donald Trump that threatened to pull the convention out of North Carolina. She requested a contingency plan from Republicans for how they would carry out a safe convention in line with CDC guidelines, saying the Coca-Cola 600 race held in Charlotte in late May was required to provide the same guidance.

In a written response, GOP officials outlined their convention safety protocol that included a list of measures they planned to take, including extensive sanitation measures and daily temperature checks for all who enter the Spectrum Arena.

On Friday, RNC Chair McDaniel told former Republican North Carolina governor Pat McCrory that they would wait until Wednesday for Cooper to further outline health and safety measures complete enough to “guarantee” the convention’s path forward.

Cooper's latest letter is sure to disappoint national Republicans again. “As much as we want the conditions surrounding COVID-19 to be favorable enough for you to hold the Convention you describe in late August, it is very unlikely,” Cooper wrote. “Neither public health officials nor I will risk the health and safety of North Carolinians by providing the guarantee you seek.”

The Republican response is to continue to threaten to move the convention to friendlier confines of a state with a Republican governor who will bend the knee to King Donald the Orange.

Republican National Committee officials are considering Nashville and other locations as potential sites for the GOP convention amid a standoff with North Carolina over whether it will allow the party to hold it in Charlotte as planned.

Party officials are expected to make a trip to Nashville later this week, likely Thursday or Friday, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.

Nashville is one of several locations in which Republicans are expressing interest. Others include Las Vegas; Orlando, Fla.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Georgia. All of the prospective sites have directly expressed interest in hosting the convention, and party officials say it’s likely they will visit several of them in the coming days.

“The President and Chairwoman have been clear on our intent to hold our convention in Charlotte. We are awaiting confirmation from the governor that the originally contracted convention can still be held at the Spectrum Center,” said RNC spokesperson Mike Reed, referring to committee leader Ronna McDaniel.

I fully expect the convention to be moved before the end of the month.  Trump will demand it. He will not tolerate anyone standing up to his bullying and performative chaos, and Trump figures it will cost Cooper a second term in November against Cooper's Republican Lt. Governor, Dan Forest (Governor and Lieutenant Governor have always been separate elections in NC, which makes for some weird stuff like this.)

Of course, Cooper has a huge lead in the polls so far, ranging from anywhere from 14 to 27 points, mainly because Dan Forest is an unlikable idiot.

Good luck with that, Donny.

Last Call For Bringing Rubber Bands To An Artillery Duel

North Carolina Republicans remain the worst people in America, as the GOP-controlled state House overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's budget veto while most House Democrats were at the state's 9/11 memorial ceremony this morning.

In a stunning display of contempt for democracy, House Speaker Tim Moore, a Cleveland County Republican, called a surprise vote to overturn Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the state budget just after a session opened at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Democratic lawmakers and the media had been told by Republican leaders that there would be no vote in the morning.

Most Democrats were absent. Enough Republicans, aware of the secret plan, were there. When Rep. Jason Saine, a Lincolnton Republican, made the motion to reconsider the state budget, the handful of Democrats on hand objected strenuously.

"This is a travesty of the process and you know it,” said Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover.

That it was, but with these Republicans a travesty of the process is just business as usual. With only 64 of the House’s 120 members present, the vote to override passed 55-9.

Now it’s up to Democrats in the Senate to follow their conscience — and perhaps for a few Senate Republicans to find theirs — and refuse to follow the theft in the House with the necessary three-fifths vote in the Senate.

The decision will be up to individual members. Senate leader Phil Berger was no doubt aware of Moore’s plan to end run Democratic opposition. It’s a grim reality that there are likely no Senate Republicans who — however they may feel about the budget — would turn away from participating in this act of subterfuge. In a sense, the budget that comes before them to be made into law is the legislative equivalent of stolen goods. So what, they’ll figure, our side stole it; Democrats shouldn’t have been so trusting. Tough.

But this isn’t a case simply of hardball politics and sly legislative maneuvering. This is a case of breaking faith with the people of North Carolina and with all who strove and sacrificed over generations to protect and advance North Carolina’s political system as one based on a true representation of the people’s will, a true democracy.

And the legislation at issue isn’t a bill of limited scope. It is the state budget. It is how North Carolina defines itself by the priorities it sets in spending. And it’s being held up by a dispute over a major issue that involves billions of federal dollars and ultimately affects everyone in the state, Medicaid expansion.

North Carolina's Medicaid expansion is on the line, plus billions in other cuts that the NC GOP wants to make to the budget that Cooper vetoed.  They would need a three-fifths vote in the state Senate to complete the override, but Republicans only have a 29-21 majority and would need 30 votes.  Unfortunately, odds are pretty good they can get that single vote, because North Carolina. And if they can't, Senate President Phil Berger pulls the same move that the House GOP did.

This is horrific, but the NC GOP won't pay a price at all for this.

JUST IN: @JasonSaine97th (R-Lincoln) responds to @ABC11_WTVD question about his motion to call for a veto override vote this morning on 9/11. At least one @nchousedems, @RepGPierce1 (Hoke), attended #September11 memorial. @ABC11_WTVD @JTHVerhovek @ABCPolitics #ncga #ncpol pic.twitter.com/ZAssb0e1Wh

— Jonah Kaplan (@KaplanABC11) September 11, 2019

Rep. Saine's excuse for going ahead with the vote?  If we stop the business of America for memorials, the terrorists win.

You thought 9/11 was a somber day of reflection?  Screw you, hippie.  We've got people to kick off Medicaid.


Democrats are still bringing rubber bands to artillery duels and they will keep losing to Republicans who don't give a damn every time.

How To Steal An Election, Con't

North Carolina's 9th Congressional District seat is still empty in the House after evidence that Mark Harris stole the election with an absentee ballot scheme, and with a new state Board of Elections now appointed, the two Republicans on the board say they will block any new election and insisted Harris must now be seated.

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, appointed new members to the board of elections on Thursday, but Republican members could block a vote to hold a new election in the 9th District. The previous election board was dissolved after a court found that the Republican-controlled Legislature had unconstitutionally stripped Cooper of the power to appoint a majority of its members. Democrats now have a 3-2 majority on the new board, but it takes four votes to order a new election, giving the Republican members veto power.

Democrats have accused a consultant hired by the Harris campaign, McCrae Dowless of Bladen County, a rural area in southeastern North Carolina, of illegally tampering with absentee ballots that he collected from voters. Harris—who has acknowledged hiring Dowless—won 61 percent of Bladen County’s mail-in ballots, even though just 19 percent of those mail-in ballots came from registered Republican voters. Dowless stands accused of not submitting absentee ballots that may have been marked for McCready, while filling out some ballots for Harris without voters’ consent. In a razor-thin election, this may have changed the outcome of the race. Dowless, a convicted felon, has also drawn scrutiny for his handling of absentee ballots in previous elections dating back to 2010. North Carolina officials asked the Justice Department in January 2018 to investigate Dowless for absentee ballot fraud alleged to have occurred in 2016.

North Carolina Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse told the Raleigh News & Observer that the GOP members would resist calls for a new election. “Our team are confident that our nominees…will come to the only reasonable conclusion, that is (the) race should be certified because Dr. Harris won more legal votes and we believe no evidence can possibly show otherwise,” he said. Woodhouse had told CNN in December that his party would support a new election if the evidence of election fraud proved that Harris did not rightfully win the race. Despite hyping discredited claims of voter fraud for years, Republicans have said little about the election fraudthat allegedly occurred in North Carolina. 

One of the new board members is a long-time GOP suppressor of black votes, the other less so, but both have their marching orders from Woodhouse.  Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Cooper could get the opportunity to hold a new election anyway and I hope they do.

We'll see.

Drain Your Own Swamp For Once

Back in October, Hurricane Matthew tore up Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba as a Category 5 storm, killing more than 500, and then dumped feet of rain on the Carolinas and killing 50 more before stumbling into the Canadian Maritimes and setting rainfall records.

The flooding damage in North Carolina was particularly bad, especially near the border with SC and last month Gov. Roy Cooper and NC House Republicans requested nearly a billion dollars in FEMA aid for the state from the Trump regime to help families in the Fayetteville and Wilmington area. Lumberton, where interstates 74 and 95 cross, was the hardest hit.

This week the Trump regime got back to them on that request and told them to go pound sand.

The State of North Carolina requested $929 million from the federal government to help with costs associated with Hurricane Matthew, but the state will be receiving far less than that, according to an announcement by Gov. Roy Cooper. 

North Carolina will receive only $6.1 million from the Trump administration. That’s 99 percent less than the requested amount. 

In a letter Cooper sent to the president and other officials today, he expressed “shock and disappointment in the lack of federal funding for Hurricane Matthew recovery efforts.”
The governor had worked with Sen. Thom Tillis and Representatives David Price (D) and Rep. David Rouzer (R) in April to come up with a request to Congress to help cover the costs associated with the destruction left by Matthew. 

The $929 million requested would have been used to “help communities and families fix homes, repair businesses and recover from the historic flooding,” Cooper said. 

“Families across Eastern North Carolina need help to rebuild and recover, and it is an incredible failure by the Trump Administration and Congressional leaders to turn their backs,” said Cooper said in a statement released to the press. “Matthew was a historic storm and we are still working every day to help families return home and rebuild their communities. North Carolinians affected by this storm cannot be ignored by the Trump Administration and Congressional leadership, and I will continue to work with our Congressional delegation to get North Carolina residents affected by the storm the help they deserve.”

Southeastern NC?  Voted big for Trump and the GOP.

Here endeth the lesson.

Last Call For The Difference Between Republicans And Democrats

In North Carolina, under GOP Gov. Pat McCrory, millions of people remained trapped in limbo with no access to subsidies for health insurance and no access to Medicaid. Under Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper however, that has now changed for nearly two-thirds of a million people.

The state moved formally Friday to make changes to the Medicaid program with the aim of adding hundreds of thousands of people to the government insurance plan despite opposition from state Republican leaders.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced earlier in the week he would seek to expand Medicaid as allowed under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The details of the plan were made public Friday evening.

Proposed changes to the state plan must be posted on the state Department of Health and Human Services website for 10 days before a request goes to the federal government office that oversees Medicaid, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS. The state is accepting comments on the proposal.

Republican legislative leaders are already fighting it.

In a letter to CMS, legislative leaders said Cooper was violating the state constitution and three state laws. One of those laws, passed in 2013, prevents Medicaid expansion without legislative approval.

In a statement, Cooper said the 2013 law does not apply to the draft plan.

Expansion is no sure thing, and the statement from Cooper’s office is couched in several conditions.

“If CMS approves a change, if local matching money can be secured, and if state eligibility requirements are changed, then more than a half-million North Carolinians could receive health care beginning in January 2018,” Cooper’s office said.

Note that Republicans are screaming bloody murder over this, and quite frankly there's a very good chance that this expansion will never happen thanks to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump even should this somehow get past NC Republicans with their veto-proof margins to kill this cold.

But Cooper is doing the right thing by getting the process rolling.

That's the difference.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/under-the-dome/article125085989.html#storylink=cpy

The Bathroom Bill Blowback Bomb Blast

I have no idea why incoming Democratic NC Gov. Roy Cooper and Charlotte's City Council decided to trust the NC GOP, but it completely blew up in their faces as Republicans in the state legislature laughed and refused to repeal HB2.

The North Carolina Senate voted down a repeal of House Bill 2 Wednesday after a day of increasingly partisan rancor that pitted conservative Republicans against the Charlotte they so distrust. 

The state House adjourned without voting on repeal of the bill that has cost North Carolina millions of dollars in lost jobs, sports events and boycotts. With that, the hope of compromise between legislators and Charlotte, which enacted the ordinance that gave rise to HB2, dissolved. 

Protesters massed outside the Senate chamber rained down shouts of “Shame!”
After a long and frustrating day, the Senate’s top Republican Wednesday lashed out at Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, blaming the Democrat for the legislature’s failure to repeal the bill. 

“I think Roy Cooper tried to do everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after a more than nine-hour session. 

Berger said Cooper called Democratic senators and urged them not to support Berger’s bill, which would have coupled HB2’s repeal with a months-long moratorium on city ordinances like the one Charlotte passed and repealed. The Charlotte ordinance allowed transgender people to use the public restrooms of the gender with which they identify. 

Cooper had lobbied Charlotte council members for repeal, which they had twice before rejected, saying that in return Republican leaders had promised to “repeal HB2 in full.”

Charlotte repealed the ordinance that led to HB2 on Monday. It voted again Wednesday morning, wiping away all action taken in February, after legislative Republicans said they hadn’t rescinded it all.

The bottom line is that the NC GOP refused to vote on a repeal of HB2 until Charlotte eliminated the city's protections for LGBTQ community because no Republican considers a gay person to be human anyway, just a bundle of ambulatory oozing sin.  Repealing HB2 without getting rid of the protections would actually consider people with sexual orientations other than "1950's sitcom" to be actual human beings, and Republicans were not going to stand for that nonsense. The Charlotte City Council then happily sold out the LGBTQ community completely in order to get the NC GOP to the table.

Then the NC GOP tacked on an amendment that would prevent Charlotte from reenacting those protections long enough for Republicans to force through a new measure over a Cooper veto that would make the moratorium on local ordinances like that permanent.  The deal disintegrated after that, and the Bathroom Bill remains law into next year.

The reality is that Republicans in my home state are such gay-hating assholes that they're fine with the state continuing to take tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in financial boycotts and tourism damage just to stay true to their barbaric beliefs that they can "cure sexual deviancy" with the power of an invisible sky dude.  It's clinical mass insanity.

Not as insane as Democrats like Charlotte's knuckleheads in city council and Roy Cooper, who really should have known better, to trust the NC GOP for a picosecond however.  That is stupidity bordering on dereliction of duty and gross negligence on their part.

So off we go into 2017 with HB2 still doing the Damocles thing over the state, and Kentucky still being a slightly better place to live than North Carolina.  Who'd have seen that one coming?

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

How To Steal An Election, Con't

The massively immoral and anti-democratic power grab in North Carolina by Republicans bent on permanent one-party rule despite voters electing a Democratic party governor is just a preview of the GOP in the age of Trump, says Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen.

Republicans, having barely lost the governor’s mansion, have launched an anti-democratic legislative coup. In a hastily called emergency session — and with little deliberation or public review — GOP state legislators have proposed a series of antidemocratic measures that would fundamentally erode the power of Roy Cooper, the newly elected Democratic governor. The goal is simple: to use the authority of state law to ensure continued Republican political dominance.

The GOP’s power grab is both terrifying and comical in its breadth. Proposed legislation would force Cooper’s cabinet picks to be confirmed in the state Senate. Previously they were appointed without Senate confirmation.

It would reduce the number of political appointees that Cooper can chose, from 1,5000 to 300. This would reverse the Legislature’s earlier decision, when Cooper’s Republican predecessor, Pat McCrory became governor, to expand the number of appointees. It would also allow McCrory’s partisan picks to keep their jobs and become career state employees.

Cooper would be stripped of the right to appoint members to the state university’s boards of trustees — and that right would be transferred to the state Legislature, which, not surprisingly, has a Republican supermajority. That huge GOP advantage was obtained by a discriminatory and unconstitutionally drawn legislative map. A federal court has in recent weeks overturned the map and demanded it be redrawn, while also mandating a new election for the state Legislature to be held next year.

But since, apparently, North Carolina Republicans feel they haven’t done enough to rig the state’s voting system, they are now trying to radically erode Cooper’s control over state and local election boards. In perhaps the GOP’s most creative move, proposed legislation would also mandate that the board of elections be rotated between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats having the chairmanship in odd-numbered years and the GOP in even-numbered years. Guess which years most elections in North Carolina are held?

Just in case you think that state courts can reverse these decisions, the Legislature is also considering a bill that would make it more difficult to bring cases to the state Supreme Court, which — and you guessed it — is now controlled by Democrats.

The GOP’s actions fit a familiar pattern. This is the same group of legislators that in another emergency legislative session passed HB2, the so-called transgender bathroom law, which also prevented local jurisdictions from putting in place antidiscrimination laws to protect the rights of LGBT North Carolinians.

Together with McCrory, North Carolina Republicans cut unemployment benefits and funding for early childhood education. They gave generous tax breaks to the state’s wealthiest citizens while scrapping the earned-income tax credit. Perhaps most famously, the GOP passed the most onerous voting restriction law in the country, one that was overturned by a federal court because of evidence that the legislation “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

I’ve had my hair on fire for months now about the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. We’re already seeing evidence of his authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for democratic norms in the five weeks since he won the presidency. But what’s happening in North Carolina right now is the real deal. This is a frontal assault on democracy.

McCrory signed these measures into law last night and there's nothing Democrats can do right now.  He'll get to re-appoint nearly all of his state board choices for a four-year stint starting December 30, and Cooper will not have the ability to fire a single one of them, meaning that McCrory will get to appoint all of Cooper's picks.

The state's GOP Lieutenant Governor, Dan Forest, is even more rabidly right-wing than McCrory and will get to make a number of appointments himself, without any oversight from Cooper at all.

In short, this is a coup.  This would be like Congress and and outgoing Republican president signing a bill that would allow the outgoing president to pick all the new president's cabinet members, and a bill that would put Republicans in charge of elections in all 50 states during even-numbered years when federal elections were held.  It would be a disaster.

But that's exactly what will happen in NC now.  It's a banana republic, and I hope that voters throw the bums out.

 

How To Steal An Election, Con't

I've talked about NC Republicans actively trying to steal the election of Democratic AG Roy Cooper to the Governor's seat several times, and when I thought current NC GOP Gov. Pat "Bathroom Bill" McCrory conceded ten days ago that Cooper would be able to take office and move the state towards the light again.

How absolutely wrong I was.

Expanding beyond the disaster recovery legislation the General Assembly approved Wednesday, Republican lawmakers quickly proposed sweeping changes to state government, including proposals that would diminish the governor’s authority to make appointments. 

Lawmakers want to hobble the incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, before he takes office Jan. 1 by making his Cabinet appointments subject to approval by the state Senate and cutting his ability to appoint members to UNC schools’ boards of trustees and the state Board of Education. 

Another proposal in the mix would equally divide election boards between the two major political parties, ending control by the governor’s party. 

Yet another provision would cut the number of employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure from 1,500 to 300, reversing an expansion approved for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the start of his term. 

Of the two dozen bills filed by both Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday night, only a handful are likely to be voted on during this special session. Those that are likely to move forward represent a significant shakeup by the Republican-controlled legislature.

Rick Hasen reads the fine print and discovers that the GOP, having been thwarted in stealing the election, are now trying to steal the office of governor itself.

It is much, much worse than it looks now that the bill is posted. The Democratic party appointees to the election board would chair in odd numbered years, and the Republican party appointees would chair in even numbered years (see page 4 of the bill), meaning that they would chair in each of the years in which there are legislative, congressional, and presidential elections. 

The state supreme court would be limited in reviewing state constitutional and federal challenges, giving the power instead first to an en banc panel of intermediate appellate court judges (who of course are Republican majority) and limiting appeals as of right (see from pages 20 on in the bill). 

If the bill passes in this form, I could see potential Voting Rights Act and federal constitutional challenges here, in part because the legislature would potentially be diluting minority voting power and making minority voters worse off, just at the time that their candidate of choice (Gov. Cooper) is poised to assume power.

Guess how far such a challenge would go in Trump's Supreme Court or Justice Department voting rights or civil rights divisions?

Folks, NC Republicans are essentially transferring all the governor's power to the GOP controlled assembly in an attempt to completely neuter Democrats, for the sole reason that a Democrat dared to win the race.

This is how America works now.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article120832758.html#storylink=cpy

How To Steal An Election, Con't

The sad, strange tale of Pat McCrory comes to an end as the NC GOP governor, now more than 10,000 votes away from beating Democratic AG Roy Cooper for the gubernatorial race, has been forced to concede by mean old reality.

Gov. Pat McCrory announced Monday that he’s conceded the election to Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general, and will support transition efforts. 

McCrory made the concession in a video message posted around noon Monday as a recount he requested in Durham County entered its final hours. Durham officials plan to finish the recount later Monday, but early results from the recount showed virtually no change in the vote tally there. 

“ I personally believe that the majority of our citizens have spoken, and we now should do everything we can to support the 75th governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper,” McCrory says in the video. “The McCrory administration team will assist in every way to help the new administration make a smooth transition. 

“It’s time to celebrate our democratic process and respect what I see to be the ultimate outcome of the closest North Carolina governor’s race in modern history.” 

McCrory’s concession comes nearly a month after Election Day, following dozens of election complaints filed by Republicans with help from the governor’s campaign. The majority of them were dismissed by GOP-controlled county election boards. 

Cooper had a lead of 10,263 votes over McCrory in nearly final election tallies on the State Board of Elections website Monday afternoon. 

With the concession, McCrory becomes the state’s first governor to lose a re-election bid. His defeat followed the nation’s second costliest gubernatorial race and North Carolina’s most expensive ever.

I honestly thought McCrory was going to try to force this into overtime and have the state's GOP-controlled General Assembly install him as Governor, but apparently that's even too much evil for the NC GOP to handle.  There really wasn't any legitimate way for McCrory to have won, either.

For now at least Democrats in the Tarheel State get a victory.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article118942758.html#storylink=cpy