North Carolina lawmakers have finished the session they began in January, four months late. Republican leaders said last week they don’t plan to hold any more votes this year. If that’s the case, this session will go down as one of the General Assembly’s most unproductive, depending on the metrics you look at. Reporter Bryan Anderson did look at some of the metrics and wrote about it for his Anderson Alerts Substack newsletter. He joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: You call it the “sleepy session.” Just how sleepy has it been, by your assessment, and what are you measuring?
Bryan Anderson: There's no way you can measure productivity in a way everybody will agree with, and there's not one single metric that says everything. We basically looked at the number of session laws by long session since Republicans took control in 2011.
What I found was that there were 97 laws passed this year so far. If it holds up, that will be the fewest amount of session laws under GOP control, and it's not even close. We also saw the sharpest long session over long session decline since Republicans took control in 2011.
Terry: The glaring bill missing is the state budget. Weren’t Republican leaders in the House and Senate optimistic at the beginning of the year they’d be able to get one done? What happened?
Anderson: You had a new House Speaker with Destin Hall compared to Tim Moore from the past, who's now in Congress. Because there's this new dynamic between Speaker Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger, there was a lot of optimism that maybe this time will be different, maybe there will be a timely budget, maybe there will be some more harmony among Senate versus House Republicans and maybe more things will get done.
I think ten months later it's fair to say that hasn't played out, and a reason for that is there have been disagreements on some big things and frankly some little, small things.
Terry: What does it mean to not pass a budget? What are the effects throughout the state and how long can we go?
Anderson: First, unlike what's happening in Washington D.C., North Carolina does have government funding still continuing at existing levels in the absence of a budget. But what a lack of a budget means is that there's no Medicaid funding, there's no teacher and state worker pay raises.
There's a whole bunch of priorities, things Democrats and Republicans agree on, that are left out. Stein did sign a mini budget plan that does include some extra Helene funding, some security funding for the General Assembly. But it's not a sweeping two-year bill that includes Medicaid funding, state and teacher pay increases, and some other top priorities.
Terry: Despite the general lack of bills passed, they did some pretty significant things though, right?
Anderson: Yeah, chief among them redistricting. They redrew two congressional districts. What the effect of that's going to be if they stay in effect and survive legal challenges is that Congressman Don Davis, a Democrat in eastern North Carolina, may very well lose his seat. That could give Republicans an extra seat in the U.S. House, and that could make or break the power in Washington D.C. and the effectiveness of Donald Trump's last two years in office.
There were some immigration bills. There were some gun legislation. There were some big things Republicans did.
The numbers don't say this was a complete waste of time, the past ten months. What they do say is that a lot less happened than usual, but the stuff that happened, we shouldn't minimize that.
Terry: How do Republicans, who have the majority in both chambers, view the session this year? Do they agree with your assessment that it was “sleepy?”
Anderson: I'm not sure any lawmaker publicly is going to say, ‘yeah, we didn't do anything big and important, and this was a waste of time.’ But what they will say is that they don't have a supermajority. That might impact their ability to do things. I've not heard a lawmaker really make a strong, forceful case that this has been a happy and productive session.
