NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD for Sunday, June 24th, 2018
163rd Weekly Edition
This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this regular 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 as we try to Connect, Unite and Act with our North Carolina Daily Kos community. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.
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
You can help by adding anything from North Carolina that you would like to highlight. Just kosmail me or email at randalltdkos at gmail. Twitter: @randallt
Please jump the fold for bad government news. This week our friends at North Carolina Policy watch bring the goods.
Thanks for reading and contributing, have a great week!
Would that North Carolina lawmakers had been so direct as “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a virulent white supremacist from South Carolina who, in February 1900, told his colleagues on the U.S. Senate floor that the South’s methodical disenfranchisement of African Americans was, in fact, some sort of triumph.
“We have done our level best,” Tillman boasted. “We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate every last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”
No chance of hearing such transparently abhorrent rhetoric from House Speaker Tim Moore or Rep. David Lewis, so we’re left to parse the impacts of these powerful Republicans’ efforts to, yet again, dilute the voting power of North Carolina minorities, particularly Black voters.
(For more sickening information, there is an in depth bonus article on Tillman at the bottom of the diary.)
GOP lawmakers want North Carolinians to make sweeping, permanent changes to the state Constitution and trust them to sort out the details of it all later.
The legislature considered four constitutional amendment proposals yesterday and voted to move along two of them and continue discussing the other two.
The House Rules Committee voted first along party lines to pass a constitutional amendment that would protect people’s right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife. There was no debate.
Next up: an amendment to enshrine a voter identification requirement for in-person voting in North Carolina.
“I’m speechless.”
So began the heartfelt lament of Rep. Verla Insko (D-Orange) late last Friday afternoon as the veteran representative—a rare lawmaker of deep intellect and genuine compassion for the less fortunate in our society—rose to address yet another backroom deal on a matter of complexity and importance that would make life appreciably worse for mentally ill prisoners.
Some cynical wags in the Capital Press Corps sought to make cheap fun of Insko’s choice of words to commence a speech on the floor of the House, but her opening words were, in fact, wholly appropriate.
For many of those who spend their days immersed in the day-to-day goings on at the North Carolina General Assembly, it’s easy to lose sight of just how far things have fallen in what is supposed to be a great deliberative body. Whether you’re a lawmaker, a lobbyist or a journalist, the action sometimes comes at such a fast and furious pace—particularly near the end of the legislative session—that it’s easy to forget what day it is, much less keep in mind the remarkable fact that dozens of new laws are being made for 10 million people.
Viola Williams has been crunching numbers and working out possible solutions since last week, when the General Assembly fast-tracked a controversial bill that makes sweeping changes to early voting.
As elections director of Hyde County, Williams was already making early voting plans for the November election. In one of the state’s smallest counties (population about 5,800) that means just two early voting sites — the board office on Main Street in Swan Quarter and one at Ocracoke, the small island that lies two hours and forty-five minutes away by ferry.
When Williams heard that the new law would mandate all early voting sites open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for 17 days, she knew what it meant for her office. They would no longer be able to afford the Ocracoke site.
“It’s absolutely crushing,” Williams said. “We have about 700 registered voters there and we typically see two to three hundred turn up for early voting. It would cost me somewhere around $3,000 to open up the site for those hours, that many days. How can we justify that?”
The N.C. Senate approved a controversial early voting bill 23-11 Friday afternoon, sending it to Gov. Roy Cooper. (8/16)
The fast-moving bill was introduced close to midnight Wednesday as a last-minute replacement for a gutted, unrelated bill. It saw fierce and lengthy debate in the House Friday morning. But the Senate debate was fairly short, with Republicans offering little in the way of defense of the bill and just a few Democrats raising the alarm about it.
Several Black Senators did speak up as to how the new law would continue what they call a pattern of disenfranchising minorities through voting laws.
Removing the final Saturday before the election as an early voting day, as this bill does, looks like another swipe at Black voters, they said. That is traditionally the most popular day for Black voters to come to the polls. Senator Gladys Robinson (D-Guilford) spoke passionately about the struggle of Black people to secure the vote in America.
BONUS READ: Ben Tillman
I first encountered Benjamin Ryan Tillman in my South Carolina history class in seventh grade. We used the textbook of Mary C. Simms Oliphant, who held the franchise on South Carolina history books in the public schools from the 1920s to the1980s. Oliphant was the daughter of a Confederate general and the grand daughter of South Carolina romantic novelist and Southern nationalist William Gilmore Simms. She clearly considered it her mission to indoctrinate 20th-century South Carolinians — black and white — in her 19th-century social and racial attitudes.
Like millions of South Carolinians, I was exposed to Oliphant's strangely moralist and romanticized narrative of South Carolina, from the first European exploration up to the 1950s, a story of courageous white people battling to create a colony, then a state, then a Confederate state in a hostile, unforgiving world. Part of that narrative — little more than a few paragraphs,really — was the story of Ben Tillman. There Tillman was presented in heroic terms as a reformer, who led the Agrarian Revolt to take state government away from the wealthy and powerful and give it to "the people."
A few year slater, as a high school student visiting Columbia, I met Ben Tillman in the form of his eight-foot bronze image on a granite pedestal in front of the Statehouse. The inscription on the pedestal confirmed what I had been led to believe. There it described his "life of service and achievement, home loving and loyal, to the state steadfast and true for the nation." Even at that impressionable age of approximately 15, I had a love of history and my native state, and I felt a surge of satisfaction at discovering the bronze figure of the great man. Seeing the inscription there confirmed all that I had read.
It was not until I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia several years later that I began to discover that almost everything I had learned in the first 18 years of my life was a lie……..
(This is a long and worthy article, I learned a lot. As far as I can tell, the statue is still there. If you know differently, please let us know. There are thousands of column inches on the issue but I don’t see anything recent.)
Thanks again.