This year, an effort to regulate cellphone use in schools transformed into an anti-squatter law. A campaign finance bill turned into a mid-decade, more Republican congressional map. Legislation criminalizing the possession and sale of embalming fluid shifted into a Division of Motor Vehicles reform package. Legislation dealing with xylazine and other controlled substances became Iryna’s Law, a wide-ranging criminal justice reform bill. A bill originally limiting wake surfing on Lake Glenville ended up changing how the town of Louisburg’s elections are run.
The list goes on.
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It happens a bit like this. The state Senate files a bill to, say, allow some building owners to rebuild on floodplains after historic flooding events. State senators unanimously approve the bill without any fuss. Then, the bill moves on to the state House. There, lawmakers file a committee substitute, a tool used to amend legislation during the committee phase of the legislative process.
However, committee members do more than amend the bill. They gut it entirely, scrapping the original text and replacing it with something entirely different. In this case, they eliminate a 2034 deadline for Duke Energy to achieve 70% carbon reduction. That change is expected to save the company billions of dollars while soft-launching the end of North Carolina’s clean energy agenda.
Now, the state Senate has to decide whether to agree with the state House’s changes. But senators can’t hold additional committee hearings to discuss the changes or hear from the public. They also aren’t allowed to make further changes to the bill; it’s a simple yes or no vote. Sometimes, the process moves so quickly that lawmakers don’t have time to digest the new, typically much longer bill before it’s time to vote.
The gut-and-amend strategy isn’t new. Since the 1999-2000 session, both Democratic and Republican-controlled legislatures have used it at every turn. Approximately a third of the 2025 session laws began as entirely different legislation. That’s not an outlier.
But it’s not a good government practice, either. The gut-and-amend and related strategies shield the legislative process from thorough public review, often obscure who is driving policy and consolidate power into the hands of a few legislative leaders.
How did we get here?
In the 1970s, lawmakers used to file blank bills at the beginning of session. Later, when they wanted to embark on a big project, they would file a committee substitute with whatever policy they wanted, and skip a few days in the process, said Gerry Cohen, who helped draft North Carolina legislation for several decades.
It was a half measure. The bills still had to pass muster in the House and Senate, and could be amended in both.
Former House Speaker Joe Hackney, a Democrat, opened the floodgates for today’s propensity for gutting and amending legislation around 2007, Cohen said. At the time, the legislature’s rules required bill amendments to be germane, or sufficiently related to the subject of the bill, to be acceptable.
North Carolina courts had ruled that committee substitutes were a type of bill amendment, and so it wasn’t possible to, for instance, gut a bill originally about dentistry standards and replace it with language concerning disaster recovery and election appointment power, which happened in 2024.
But when a committee substitute came up that did make such a change, Hackney ruled that the germaneness rule didn’t apply to committee substitutes.
“That was sort of a sea change,” Cohen said.
Gut-and-amend is now an everyday practice. Since 2007, about a fifth of bills that became law used some variety of the strategy, according to a Carolina Public Press analysis. Sometimes the original bill intent was scrapped, and other times, it remained in the bill, alongside a plethora of other loosely related or entirely unrelated provisions.
Also since 2007, the North Carolina legislature has passed fewer and fewer laws each session. However, each bill tends to include more provisions. That can allow lawmakers to force members of the opposing party to choose between voting against a bill that they mostly like because of one provision they can’t stomach, or go against their principles for the sake of the broader legislation.
This session, for example, a bill that originally dealt solely with protecting children from revenge pornography was amended to include provisions recognizing only two genders, banning use of state funds for gender transition procedures and giving parents more access to which books their child could access in school, among other provisions Democrats did not like.
In an act of protest against the changes to the original bill and the forced tough decision, most Democrats chose not to vote at all.
Why gut and amend?
For one, it rarely backfires, said Common Cause Executive Director Bob Phillips.
In 2013, the legislature chose to gut a motorcycle safety bill and replace it with an abortion restriction bill. While the move caught public attention, nobody really paid a political price for the legislative process aspect, Phillips said.
Simply put, it’s too “inside baseball” for the public to know and understand it’s happening, and that prevents lawmakers from ever being held accountable for their lack of transparency, he said. They generally pay more attention to the actual content of the legislation, if anything, Phillips added.
So, lawmakers face zero electoral consequences. The strategy also allows lawmakers to skip ahead in line. In many cases, after lawmakers gut and amend a bill, it takes only a few days for it to make it through the remainder of the legislative process. There are no extra committees or amendments to deal with.
Sometimes, though, the second chamber disagrees with the changes, and rejects the entire bill. In those cases, a small group of lawmakers from both chambers comes together behind closed doors to negotiate on a final piece of legislation. These so-called conference committees further shield who is pushing for what provisions in the final bill.
Who benefits from that secrecy? Everyone but the people, Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said.
“It is harder to track and it is harder to understand and it is harder to attribute blame and responsibility, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of the electoral system,” he said.
The majority party’s leadership, including committee chairmen, the House Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tempore, particularly benefit, as they control what proposals live and die in the process. Whoever has influence over legislative leaders, whether it’s lobbyists, donors or key constituents, also profits from the gut-and-amend strategy without having any fingerprints on the final bill.
It’s not always a bad practice, though, Cooper said. Since the legislature has self-imposed crossover deadlines — the date by which a bill has to pass at least one chamber to move on in the process — the gut-and-amend method can be used to address unexpected needs, like disaster recovery. Lawmakers can take a bill that probably wasn’t going to make it anyways and replace it with more helpful language in an efficient manner.
Everyone does it, so what’s the harm?
When Democrats controlled the legislature, they gutted and amended often. When Republicans gained control, they said they wanted to turn a new leaf on some of their predecessors’ less savory legislative practices.
That didn’t last very long.
Republicans took control in 2011. From 2013 to 2016, there were significantly fewer instances of gutted-and-amended legislation. However, Republicans also had control of the governor’s mansion then, and so there was less need to force anyone’s hand, Cooper said.
Undoubtedly, if Democrats regained control, they wouldn’t quit the gut-and-amend practice, Cooper added.
That doesn’t mean it’s not harmful. Whichever chamber introduced the legislation gets the short end of the stick, for one. The legislation that comes back to them is completely different from what they passed, and they don’t get much of a say in the final bill. Minority party members, who often rely on proposing amendments to broadcast their concerns to their peers and constituents, don’t get that opportunity.
Not to mention the public.
Phillips said the motorcycle safety turned abortion bill is a prime example of the consequences of the gut-and-amend process.
“That's a very serious topic that the public certainly had a right to weigh in on, and the way that was done, there wasn't that time, there wasn't that ability for thoughtful debate, public input, media scrutiny before it all happened,” he said.
Is there a way to stop gut-and-amend?
There are certainly ideas for how to reform the legislative process, but all run into one major obstacle: political will.
If there were no crossover deadline, lawmakers could take more time to decide what policy they wanted to craft instead of using gut-and-amend to hijack someone else’s bill. However, Cohen said in the pre-crossover days, hundreds of bills appeared out of thin air in the final days of session, so that’s unlikely to improve matters.
If North Carolina gave the governor a line-item veto, there would be less incentive to pass wide-ranging bills with dozens of provisions to force him to make a tough decision. He could simply veto parts of bills he disliked and approve the rest. But nobody was interested in that when the legislature finally gave the governor the veto power in the 1990s, and it’s unlikely that attitude will shift, Cohen said.
Maybe if North Carolina enforced its germaneness rules, there would be fewer gutted-and-amended bills. But, again, there’s little political will for that.
Some state representatives are getting annoyed, though. This session, the House filed a bill that originally extended mayoral and board of commissioner terms in Kittrell from two to four years. When the Senate got a hold of it, it added provisions making Asheboro’s board of education elections partisan and giving Anson County Board of Commissioners residency districts, among other local, unrelated changes.
Rep. Matthew Winslow, R-Franklin, said it was part of a pattern where the Senate would add “hitchhikers” to the House’s “nice, neat, tidy bills.”
Rep. Abe Jones, D-Wake, expressed his frustration with the Senate.
“We do this, then you go over to the Senate, and they lard it up with a bunch of stuff that we can't even identify now,” he said. “... I doubt many of us have had an opportunity to read the new stuff that's stuck in there. They shouldn't do that to us. It's not right. It's not good government."
What is the answer to gut-and-amend, then? Phillips has an idea, but he isn’t optimistic.
“(The answer) is ultimately for the public to be as informed as they can, and to hopefully elect folks that are accountable and not willing to engage in this,” he said. “But that's a lot of ifs, and that’s a tall mountain to climb.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.