NC lawmakers rushed dozens of bills over the finish line, but failed efforts stand out

The final days of North Carolina’s 2024 legislative session saw what had been a relatively unproductive affair end in a torrent of action, drama and confusion.

The legislature last week passed 33 bills — most of them on Thursday, the final day of votes.

At times, lawmakers appeared to have only a vague idea of what they were being asked to vote on as the House and Senate were quickly amending bills and shuffling them between one another for final approval.

At one point Thursday the Senate sent the House a new version of a bill containing a slew of public health policy changes. Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, asked if one of her Republican colleagues could explain what the new version would do — or if the House could take a three-minute break to let lawmakers read the bill they had just been asked to vote on.

House Speaker Tim Moore declined to allow a break. And the bill’s House lead, Rep. Larry Potts, R-Davidson, declined to answer Harrison’s question about what it would do.

The bill then passed, in a bipartisan 104-7 vote. It’s now on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk to sign or veto. Senate Bill 425 appears to change the rules for county health directors, surrendering an unwanted newborn, trauma assessments of children in foster care, prison inmates and Medicaid benefits, security risk assessments for hospitals, and more.

Once that vote passed following Moore’s refusal to break for three minutes to let lawmakers read the bill, Moore then immediately announced the House would take a 15-minute break so lawmakers could look over and privately discuss a different bill.

Yet another bill removes hundreds of acres of land from Summerfield, a Greensboro suburb, at the request of a real estate developer who has been upset at the town council for not approving his proposed housing project. House Bill 909 passed Thursday without that proposal ever being vetted through any committee in the House of Representatives.

That’s a steep departure from legislative norms. Even several Republican lawmakers spoke out on the House floor to oppose the process, in a rare show of public defiance of GOP leadership.

“The Senate sends a bill over and everybody says, ‘This is just the way we do business,’” said Rep. Ben Ross, R-Richmond. “But folks … let’s do this the right way.”

“It has not been vetted, we have not had a chance to discuss it, nothing,” said Rep. Stephen Ross, R-Alamance, who predicted passing the bill would set a bad precedent for any local government anywhere in the state.

The bill passed, but with a substantial number of members from both parties opposed.

Other bills passed with less controversy, receiving unanimous or near-unanimous support in both chambers:

But as much as the session will be defined by any new laws that come out of it, it was also notable for what lawmakers failed to accomplish. Although Republicans hold a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers, they were unable to pass a new budget — the top priority of any legislative session.

Moore and his counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Phil Berger, each cast blame on the other for the failed budget negotiations. But they also expressed optimism for the Republican-led legislature’s ability to govern in the future, despite the numerous snags they hit this year.

“We continue to grow faster than just about any other state in the nation,” Berger told reporters Thursday. “In the next Census, in my opinion, we’re going to leapfrog Georgia and Ohio [and] become the seventh most populous state. I think anybody that objectively looks at that record would say that this state is well managed, and the policies adopted by this legislature … have been a net positive for the people in the state of North Carolina.”

Moore offered a similarly sunny view of the future: “The good news is, unlike a lot of states, we’re not sitting here looking at a giant hole that we have to fill,” he said when asked about the failure to pass a new budget. “We have a surplus. We have a surplus that is there because we have budgeted wisely. We have cut taxes. We have reduced regulations. And North Carolina is growing at a rate it has never seen before.”

The biggest loss for conservatives this year was the failure of a plan to add nearly half a billion dollars more to the state’s private school tuition voucher program.

Berger and Moore each agreed on that plan, but Moore said he would only pass it with additional raises for public school teachers. His plan proposed spending about four times as much on vouchers as on teacher raises. But Berger was strictly opposed to any further raises. So that deal — and with it, the entire budget process — fell apart.

High-profile bills missed the cut

In addition to failing to pass a budget adjustment to address the state’s $1 billion budget surplus for the fiscal year that begins Monday, the legislature also failed to pass four of the five constitutional amendments GOP leaders suggested putting on the ballot this November.

After some House Republicans failed to show up for the final days of voting, and GOP leaders were unable to win over any support from Democrats for most of their ideas, the only amendment that ended up passing was the citizen-only voting proposal.

Other notable bills also failed to make it across the finish line:

Both chambers also tried advancing last-minute changes to the state’s election laws ahead of this year’s key political races. But the House and Senate identified different priorities, and neither finished its work quickly enough for the other chamber to give potential approval.

But some of the ideas might still be alive. Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, is a top election law official in the Senate. He told WRAL last week that he expected his bill to be looked over by House GOP election law officials this summer, when they would add in their own ideas and send it back to the Senate for a final vote.

His Senate Bill 88 would force more transparency on some — but not all — political ads created using artificial intelligence to make fake images, audio or other aspects of the ad, an idea some House Republicans also back. It would also institute a signature-matching program for mail-in ballots starting in 2025. And critics say a third proposal could give the Republican-led legislature wide leeway to gerrymander the districts used to elect local government leaders on city and county commissions.

Meanwhile, the House on Thursday passed its own set of election law changes but couldn’t get final approval from the Senate. House Bill 1071 would give outside “election integrity” groups the power to purge people from the voter rolls in North Carolina. That earned sharp criticism from Democrats. They said it will spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and could even lead to bad-faith actors wrongfully stripping away thousands of people’s voter registrations.

“This bill sends a message that we don’t have any faith in our voting system,” said Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake. “Our voting system has been a good voting system — until one team lost and got upset. I’m concerned about that. I’m concerned about somebody by the name of ‘Totes Legit’ looking at voter rolls and deciding who can be on them. The other person I know of is Carol Snow.”

Election officials in Georgia conducted a lengthy investigation last year into voter irregularities alleged by an anonymous person calling themselves “Totes Legit Votes,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Georgia’s Republican-led elections office ultimately dismissed those claims. In North Carolina, WRAL reported earlier this year, elections officials conducted a similar investigation into claims made by Snow, who lives in Surry County.

Snow had claimed to have discovered evidence of many North Carolinians voting twice. But elections officials determined she simply made a number of mistakes in her research, such as confusing fathers and sons with the same name as being the same person. The North Carolina Board of Elections, made up of three Democrats and two Republicans, voted unanimously to dismiss her complaints.

Harrison, the Greensboro-area Democrat who had opposed the public health bill, also spoke against the election integrity bill. If Republican lawmakers actually cared about election security and integrity, she said, they would stop under-funding the State Board of Elections — which she said needs at least $4.6 million more just to be at its minimum requested funding levels heading into this year’s elections.

But for Republican leaders, there’s still some hope that the various election law changes and other bills they failed to get across the finish line could be brought back later this summer.

The legislature plans to now come back occasionally, mainly so that lawmakers can attempt overriding any vetoes Cooper issues in the next few days over any of the three dozen bills that just hit his desk.

They could also use those brief returns to pass some of the laws that didn’t quite make it over the finish line this month — and possibly even take a second crack at new constitutional amendments, as long as they don’t wait too long. Voting begins in September for this November’s general election.