GOP legislators outfox governor

This column was published in the Wilson Times Sept. 7, 2019.

North Carolina Democrats are entitled to feel good about themselves after two successful elections. In 2016, their gubernatorial candidate, Roy Cooper, won the governor’s seat, but his effectiveness was stymied by powerful personalities in the state legislature, who held a veto-proof majority and used a lame-duck session in December 2016 to pare away powers traditionally wielded by the state’s chief executive, leaving Cooper as a governor with relatively few executive powers.

In 2018, Democrats set their sights on taking enough legislative seats away from the Republicans to make the Democratic governor’s veto power an actual power. Democrats succeeded in what has been called a “wave election,” and Cooper soon made it clear that he wouldn’t be shy about vetoing legislation he didn’t like. Democrats won nine previously GOP seats in the House and six formerly GOP seats in the Senate, enough to prevent overrides of his vetoes.

But Democratic officials have made some strategic errors since last year’s election. Gov. Cooper misjudged the tenacity of the GOP legislative leaders. As usual this year, the legislature’s budget and the governor’s budget did not match. Among other expenditures that they disagreed on were teacher salaries and expansion of Medicaid.

Cooper found the legislators’ budget unacceptable, so he vetoed it. He called for negotiations with the GOP leadership. Speaker of the House Tim Moore and Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger have essentially told Cooper, “Go negotiate yourself.”

Republicans have done all they can to minimize gubernatorial powers, and Cooper’s adamant demand for negotiations on the budget is going nowhere, adding to the GOP’s aim to make the governor appear irrelevant. That perception won’t help Cooper win re-election next year.

GOP leaders displayed their shrewdness and strategic thinking by introducing individual parts of the legislature’s vetoed budget and bringing these individual bills up for a vote. Piecemeal is a poor way to plan spending, but it can have some political effectiveness. Among the popular bills passed while this stalemate continues is one giving raises to state employees — raises that had been on hold because of Cooper’s budget veto.

Cooper is likely headed for a difficult re-election bid in 2020. President Trump carried North Carolina in 2016, with Cooper’s success (thanks to then-Gov. Pat McCrory taking a more conservative turn after taking office, having campaigned as a pragmatic moderate in 2012). Being out-played by legislative leaders is not Cooper’s only political problem in 2020.

As Hurricane Dorian aims for the N.C. coast, the Cooper administration has spent only seven percent of Federal Emergency Management Agency block grants to aid recovery from last year’s Hurricane Florence. Cooper says the problem is that the feds have not issued rules and standards for spending block grants to help Florence victims. That may be true, but the Cooper administration has done a poor job of explaining exactly what the problem is and how the governor aims to fix it.

Cooper may also come to regret another veto he issued, this one on a bill requiring North Carolina sheriffs to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention requests. Some newly elected Democratic sheriffs, including sheriffs in urban counties have announced they will not do ICE’s work for them, but in a generally conservative state that has been dramatically changed by hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them undocumented, cooperation with ICE doesn’t sound so bad to many voters. Expect this issue to be discussed in the 2020 election for governor.

Cooper has found himself outfoxed by a strategic-thinking GOP while he has focused on playing to the Democratic base.