If you thought North Carolina GOP lawmakers might balk at the economic calamity known as HB2 that is slowly draining their state dry, you were sadly optimistic.
The NCAA Board of Governors may threaten to pull 20-some scheduled championship events (not to mention all future ones) from the state, cancellations might already be hobbling the state’s $21 billion tourism industry, and the federal government could cut billions in aid, and yet Tar Heel State Republicans haven’t even flinched but for one exception: Gov. Pat McCrory.
Why just McCrory, you ask, when the state clearly stands to suffer major economic damage of yet-to-be-determined proportions? Because McCrory is apparently the only lawmaker who’s worried he might lose his seat in the face of near universal outcry from those outside the state and from some who reside within.
After Democrats introduced the HB2 repeal bill at the outset of the week, it was met with resounding indifference from Republicans. By comparison, when Indiana’s GOP lawmakers faced a similar situation last year, they at least sought to put a bandaid on the gaping wound that was ailing their economy. But in North Carolina, Senate Leader Phil Berger had already declared repeal DOA the week before.
"My job is not to give into the demands of multimillionaire celebrities pushing a pet social agenda, liberal newspapers like The New York Times or big corporations who have every freedom to set whatever policies they wish under this law," said Berger, R-Rockingham. "My job is to listen to the people who elected us to represent them…”
Berger’s defiant tone was echoed this week by Sen. Tom Apodaca, who told local station WLOS he’d prefer to give voters the chance to enshrine HB2’s discrimination in the state constitution.
"If it were up to me, I'd just put it out to a vote of the people. Let them decide what they want to do," Apodaca said exclusively to News 13.
And GOP Sen. Buck Newton wed his statewide attorney general candidacy to the bill when he embraced his Democratic challenger’s labeling of HB2 as “Buck’s Bill.”
“You know what? I say, ‘Bring it on!’” Newton told a pro-HB2 rally that took place outside the state house on the same day that more than 50 people who oppose the law were arrested protesting inside the state house. Newton told the crowd that people who “wave the rainbow flags and things like that” were very upset about how things are and that all those flag wavers were “bound and determined to try to change it.” But Newton made his biggest media splash when he revealed the true nature of the measure, which shockingly isn’t about protecting women and children at all.
"Go home, tell your friends and family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we must fight to keep our state straight," he said to applause.
But what’s most stunning here, though perhaps unsurprising, is how willing state Republicans are to put their state’s economy at risk over a bill that has nothing to do with protecting anyone. The so-called “bathroom” provision is so ill-conceived that it’s literally unenforceable, as multiple police departments admitted from the outset.
Last week I noted that Ted Cruz had chosen to back bathroom policy over jobs in North Carolina’s HB2 debate.
He would bleed an economy dry in the name of demonizing LGBT Americans in order to win elections.
But North Carolina isn’t his economy. The people who will lose jobs and lose incomes because of HB2 aren’t his neighbors. For Cruz, it’s nothing but a political calculation about what posturing and pandering will gain him the most votes—a calculation that he’s all but lost to Donald Trump, btw.
But it’s incomprehensible that local lawmakers are exhibiting such nonchalance as they drive their state’s economy over the cliff in the name of “protecting women,” most of whom don’t feel any safer than they did before the law was enacted.
Apparently there’s only one job these lawmakers are concerned about protecting—their own. And as long as that job’s safe, they don’t mind putting everyone else’s livelihood in jeopardy for the sake of some misguided sense of moral superiority.