On Tuesday, North Carolina held a special Congressional election. They had to do this because actual election fraud on the part of Republicans caused state officials to nullify the previous regular election. The Republican party pulled out all the stops, spending lots of money and having both Donald Trump and Mike Pence campaign for the Republican candidate, who won by around 2 points.
That may sound good for the Republicans, but this district elected Donald Trump by 12 percentage points, so the Republicans underperformed by 10 points. The Republicans will not be able to spend so much money nor campaign as aggressively during a general election. Also note that the NC Republicans have had their redistricting maps thrown out not once but twice because of blatant partisan gerrymandering.
Consequently, it should be no surprise that the Republicans honored the memory of 9/11 yesterday by pulling more dirty tricks. That morning many NC legislators attended the North Carolina National Guard September 11 Commemoration. The Republican legislators had promised that they would not do any business that morning because of the event, but they lied. Instead, they made sure that enough Republicans did not attend so that they could override a veto by the governor.
The governor had vetoed the budget because he wanted a Medicaid expansion that would insure an additional half a million people in NC. The Republicans wanted to override the veto, but ironically, they didn’t have enough votes because they lost their supermajority in the state assembly after the first time their gerrymandered maps were thrown out. Note that there are roughly the same number of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.
So with only 53% of the legislators (just enough for a quorum) in attendance— and only nine Democrats — the override passed. Hopefully it will not make it through the State Senate.
And incidentally, Donald Trump gave a speech on 9/11, but he spent almost all of it attacking the Democrats and praising himself. As usual.
3 Comments
… on the bright side, the corporate conservatives running the Democratic party don’t get to use McCready’s NC loss (the district adjacent to me) as a cudgel against center left candidates. McCready lost my respect when he decided to return Rep. Omar’s contribution to his campaign.
Wow, I guess they forgot to never forget. The chicken-hawk party
A correction. PolitiFact says that reports that most of the Democrats were attending a 9/11 event were false. The governor and at least one Dem legislator were at that event, but not “most” of them. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article235162077.html