Updated 6:40 a.m. Tuesday
The fight among state Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly over an unexpected veto-override vote of the state budget continues.
House Minority Leader Darren Jackson, D-Wake, insisted to reporters yesterday that Republican Speaker Tim Moore's top lieutenant told him no votes would be taken the morning of Sept. 11.
"They were a deliberate dishonest assault on the democratic process and the integrity of this chamber on the morning of 9/11, which makes this shameless act even more tasteless," Jackson said in a press conference recorded by WRAL-TV.
Jackson said he's taken a lie detector test and invited Moore and others to do the same. Moore, R-Cleveland, responded with his own news conference saying that he will release a video showing no wrong-doing during the regularly scheduled voting session.
“If there was a plan to override a veto, don’t you think I would have had us at full strength? Don’t you think I would have had a quorum presence of Republicans? Look if the Democrats had walked off the floor that would have shut the thing down,” Moore said.
Later that day, Moore’s spokesman showed reporters a video from a camera mounted in the House chamber. According to the News & Observer of Raleigh, it did not contain audio – and some members in the back were hard to make out.
Most of the House Republicans were in the chamber that morning when the override vote occurred, but only about a dozen Democrats. The override isn't complete. The Republican-controlled Senate still would have to vote to do so.