NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD Sunday, February 27, 2022
354th Weekly Edition
This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this weekly platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we work on taking back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation. Please join us every week. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.
If you are interested in starting your own state blog, weekly to occasionally, we will list your work below.
Colorado: Mondays, 7:00 PM Mountain
Michigan: Wednesdays, 6:00 PM Eastern
North Carolina: Sundays, 1:00 PM Eastern
Missouri: Wednesday Evenings
Kansas: Monday Evenings
Something you want to highlight? kosmail or email at randalltdkos at gmail. Twitter: @randallt
POSTED COVID data 2/27/2022 1:00pm EDT
Click here for Covid-19 data from Worldometer Real Time World Statistics.
Numbers below listed on 2/27/22
USA
NC |
Total
Cases |
New
Cases |
Total
Deaths |
New
Deaths |
Total
Recovered |
Active
Cases |
2-27-22 2,585,404 22,500 2,490,831 70,073
Please jump the fold for links to stories I hope you find interesting and useful.
I hope you have a safe week, the floor is yours.
NC Policy Watch, Lynn Bonner, 2/24/2022
A panel of Superior Court judges on Wednesday replaced a new map for North Carolina’s congressional districts with their own, while deciding that the state House and Senate plans the legislature adopted last week meet constitutional standards set by the state Supreme Court.
Republican legislators and all groups challenging their plans asked the Supreme Court to stay the trial court decision. The Supreme Court denied all their requests. Candidate filing under the revised maps starts this morning. Lawyers for Republican legislators – the defendants in the case – objected to the trial court decision to replace the congressional map, saying the judges overstepped by substituting their judgment for that of the legislature.
The three-judge panel appointed three retired state jurists as special masters to help evaluate the legislature’s latest redistricting plans.
“The trial court was not tasked to use retired judges and mathematicians to create the most fair map in all the land; rather, the trial court was tasked by this Court to adopt or approve a constitutionally compliant maps,” the Republicans’ lawyers said in court papers filed Wednesday afternoon.
NC Policy Watch, Lynn Bonner, 2/25/2022
Republican legislators are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court the state court decisions that led to their maps for new congressional districts being thrown out.
Republican lawmakers are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put a freeze on use of the court-ordered congressional plan. The request for a stay says the state courts usurped the legislature’s authority. Candidate filing started Thursday under new congressional districts drawn by a state trial court with the advice of special masters.
The state Supreme Court rejected Republicans legislators’ first set of plans for legislative and congressional districts earlier this month, saying they were pro-Republican partisan gerrymanders that violated the state constitution.
The legislature created three new redistricting plans last week. A three-judge panel accepted the plans for state House and Senate districts but replaced the congressional map.
In a radio interview earlier this month, House Speaker Tim Moore said Republicans were considering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Charlotte Observer, Commentary, 2/25/2022
The fight for fair maps in North Carolina will not be won easily.
The state’s newly redrawn legislative maps are acceptable, but the congressional map is still unconstitutional, a three-judge panel of two Republicans and one Democrat ruled Wednesday. A group of outside experts appointed by the court drew a new congressional map, which will be in place for the 2022 election only.
The ruling was met with recriminations and appeals from all sides, but the North Carolina Supreme Court shot those down late Wednesday night and ruled that the maps will stand. Candidates have already been scrambling to decide if and in which redrawn district they’ll run.
It’s chaos, and one party is to blame.
Republicans in the General Assembly have had ample opportunities to draw maps. Each time, they’ve refused to do so fairly. The result has been a flurry of maps and lawsuits, which have confounded voters and eroded public confidence in an increasingly politicized judicial system that’s become a battleground for democracy.
NC Policy Watch, Lisa Sorg, 2/25/2022
The brookies were in danger of dying.
Last June, after the spring thaw and a hard summer rain, a torrent of mud, dirt and rock, in some spots 2 feet deep, had gushed into Ramey Creek and its tributaries, potentially suffocating the fish or destroying their home.
Upstream, Bottomley Properties, a company based in Alleghany County with operations in several states and a long violation history, had been timbering on 360 acres of mountain forest to expand its cattle grazing operations. Until then, trees had been absorbing rainwater and stabilizing the soil. But Bottomley had clear-cut right up to the stream banks, leaving them unstable. Now there was little left to counter the force of the rain.
The state Wildlife Resources Commission had been concerned about the health of the brookies – a term of endearment for the Southern Appalachian Brook Trout – in Ramey Creek for nearly a year. A fragile and precarious species, they live only in the pristine, cold headwaters of mountain streams, where no other fish can thrive. Every stream is home to its own genetically distinct line of brookie. And every line of brookie is significant.
“If you lose genetic line or a stream, that population is gone forever,” Robby Abou-Rizk, president of Blue Ridge NC Trout Unlimited said. “They don’t survive any other way.”
In the story: *Agriculture gets a pass for erosion permits *Emergency fish rescue unprecedented *More than 20 years of violations in North Carolina and Oregon
WLOS, 2/25/2022
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission approved opening Panthertown-Bonas Retreat, Standing Indian and Pisgah bear sanctuaries to limited permit-only hunting opportunities.
The areas will now be designated as bear management areas instead of designated bear sanctuaries. Both changes are consistent with the N.C. Black Bear Management Plan. It’s anticipated these changes will go into effect Aug. 1.
The wildlife commission took public input on the plan before voting to move forward with it.
But not everyone approves of the changes. Plan to allow bear hunting in 3 WNC sanctuaries met with resistance.
"The decision to open bear hunting on three bear sanctuaries shows how the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission only listens to the hunters they represent and ignores the wishes of the vast majority of the public," former U.S. Forest Service assistant ranger Bill Lea said.
"The non-hunters and the wildlife of the State of NC are in desperate need of an agency that represents their interests. This decision to kill bears in these three bear sanctuaries is a great victory for bear hunters who are represented so well by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. However, it is a very sad day for the bears and the rest of the citizens of the State of North Carolina.
AP, GARY D. ROBERTSON, 2/24/2022
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation Thursday that would allow K-12 students — with their parents' permission — to opt out of mask-wearing mandates in school that a dwindling number of districts still have in place for COVID-19, questioning its efficacy for public health.
The legislation was approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly last week as the Democratic governor held a news conference encouraging boards of education to end broad indoor mask requirements amid falling COVID-19 transmission rates and rising vaccination numbers.
Republicans who advanced the bill said the opt-out measure was needed to affirm the rights of parents to make health-related decisions for their children and lamented the obstacles masks have caused for learning and social formation in classrooms.
But Cooper, in his veto message, said a 2021 law that left mask-mandate decisions to local school boards received bipartisan support, and “that is still the right course.”
WRAL, Bryan Anderson, 2/25/2022
Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson announced Friday that he would run for Congress to compete in a newly drawn district in the Charlotte area.
North Carolina's14th Congressional District he's seeking includes parts of Mecklenburg and Gaston counties. The state senator and former U.S. Senate candidate announced his decision on Twitter.
"This all happened suddenly, but we’re ready," Jackson wrote. "We have the support, the infrastructure and the experience to hit the ground running. I want to finish what we started by making this a campaign you can be proud of."
He also noted his ties to the community, noting that his current seat in the legislature is in Mecklenburg County and that he used to work as an assistant district attorney in the adjacent Gaston County.
Alternet, Brandon Gage, 2/25/2022
Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida on Friday and offered a vision of the United States that at face value is antithetical to the principles of freedom and democracy.
Cawthorn – a freshman lawmaker embroiled in efforts to bar him from office for supporting the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection led by former President Donald Trump – revealed to the event's right-wing attendees that his ideal commander in chief is an individual who instills fear into the hearts and minds of the global population.
"I want our president to be loved by the American people. I genuinely do, whenever we elect our president," said Cawthorn. "But what I really, truly want in a president is for the rest of the world to be terrified of them."
WLOS, Anjali Patel, 2/25/2022
North Carolina's new voting maps have been finalized and political hopefuls across the state are announcing where they plan to run.
However, one candidate has kept quiet on what he's going to do. He has until Tuesday, March 1, to withdraw as a 13th District candidate and until midday Friday, March 4, to file for another seat.
Dr. Chris Cooper, a Robert Lee Madison Distinguished Professor at Western Carolina University, broke down some of Rep. Cawthorn's options.
"I think his decision is going to be whether to come back home to the 11th, whether to run in the 10th district in between, against Patrick McHenry -- probably not a great idea for most folks -- or to run in the 14th, which is closer to the Charlotte media market, but would be a very democratically heavy district," Cooper said. "We are coming right down to the wire with three frankly not great decisions for Madison Cawthorn."
There's also a chance, too, he doesn't run at all. It's unclear if Rep. Cawthorn will seek reelection back in the 11th District or if he'll try his luck elsewhere, as he'd initially planned to do.
AP, 2/25/2022
RALEIGH, Wake County — A formal examination of whether North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn is disqualified to run for Congress based on the U.S. Constitution won’t occur because redistricting changes have moved the location of the district he sought to compete in, a state election official said Thursday.
But the disclosure doesn’t mean additional candidate challenges this year against Cawthorn are snuffed out, according to a group that helped instigated them. The first-term Republican has been the focus of complaints filed by roughly a dozen voters living in what was supposed to be the 13th Congressional District that Cawthorn had filed to run in back in December.
The voters contend Cawthorn fails to comply with a portion of a post-Civil War amendment to the Constitution pertaining to insurrections. They say Cawthorn’s involvement in the January 2021 rally that supported then-President Donald Trump and preceded the U.S. Capitol riot, along with other information, provides a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that he helped facilitate the insurrection.
Cawthorn said that portion of the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply and that he has “never engaged in, or would ever engage in, an insurrection against the United States.”
Thank you for reading and contributing.