Vacation is over for North Carolina state lawmakers, who came back to Raleigh for a whirlwind day of meetings and votes Wednesday after spending the last six weeks doing little public work.
Both the state House and Senate held committee hearings throughout the day, and their late-afternoon voting sessions stretched into the evening. A top priority for GOP leaders is to finally pass a number of controversial bills that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed earlier this year.
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The timing is important since many of them deal with public school issues — including several new restrictions on how schools can interact with transgender children — and most schools are just about to start back up for the new school year.
But it wasn’t just veto overrides that brought lawmakers back on Wednesday.
A number of significant new policy changes also were scheduled for votes in the House or Senate. They deal with weighty issues ranging from energy policy to election law changes and a power grab shifting influence over numerous state boards and commissions away from the governor and toward the legislature or other Republican politicians.
Move over, solar
SB 678 would pave the way for more nuclear power plants to be built in North Carolina. It does so by deleting references to “renewable energy” in existing laws and replacing them with “clean energy” — allowing nuclear plants to be considered in the same legal category as solar farms, wind turbines or hydroelectric dams.
A recent state law requires the state’s main power company, Duke Energy, to hit specific benchmarks for lower carbon emissions by 2030, followed by even stricter ones by 2050. Duke has since announced it will stop burning coal by 2035 and will replace those plants with cleaner sources of energy. The pro-nuclear bill was sponsored by Sen. Paul Newton (R-Cabarrus), the former president of Duke Energy’s North Carolina operations.
Some environmental groups have opposed the pro-nuclear bill. They’ve cited concerns over the largely unanswered questions of what to do with nuclear waste, as well as worries that relying too heavily on nuclear power won’t get the state to the new 2050 carbon-reduction goals. But the bill passed the Senate unanimously earlier this year and on Wednesday passed the House 107-12.
Predatory real estate deals
HB 422 would crack down on what lawmakers have termed deceptive, unfair or predatory real estate deals. It particularly targets service agreements that are written to last for more than a year and creates a lien, allows for future services without notice or consent or would bind future owners of the land, among other prohibitions.
“There are unscrupulous brokers that are preying on the poor and the elderly in this state,” said Sen. Brad Overcash (R-Gaston).
He added that some have been offering to pay unsuspecting homeowners only a few hundred dollars for a deal that gives the broker a 40-year lien on their home. The bill passed both chambers of the legislature with no opposition Wednesday.
Election law changes
A sweeping bill with numerous changes to election laws ahead of the 2024 elections saw several changes in committees Tuesday and Wednesday, before passing the House after a lengthy and contentious debate. It now goes to Cooper's desk; he is likely to veto it.
Two of the major changes would make it more likely for mail-in ballots to be thrown in the trash in future elections — by eliminating the three-day grace period for mail ballots to arrive after Election Day, and by requiring a pilot program of signature-matching software.
Democrats call it a “jumbo jet of voter suppression” in a pun referencing the bill number, SB 747. Republicans say the changes are needed to improve voters’ confidence in elections and make it harder for people to cast fraudulent ballots in the future.
There is little evidence of voter fraud in North Carolina; an audit of the 2016 general election found only two allegations of voter impersonation out of 4.5 million votes cast that year. On the other hand, critics of the bill estimate it could lead to thousands of legitimate voters' ballots being thrown out in future elections due to the new stricter rules.
"We should all be ashamed," said Rep. Robert Reives (D-Chatham), the top Democrat in the House of Representatives.
Republicans shrugged off accusations that their changes will disenfranchise thousands of voters.
"This bill protects voters and protects the integrity of the vote," said Rep. Grey Mills (R-Iredell), chairman of the House elections committee.
The bill would also make a number of other changes, like to tighten up the rules for same-day voter registration and to loosen the rules governing political parties’ poll observers. But the bill doesn’t go as far as many Republicans wanted; for example it does not cut down on early voting at all.
Republicans lost a federal lawsuit over a 2013 law that cut down on early voting. It was ruled unconstitutional for racial discrimination after evidence showed GOP lawmakers intentionally wrote the bill to target the days of early voting Black people were most likely to use.
By passing a less aggressive bill this time, GOP leaders are hoping it will survive any legal challenges and can be in place for the 2024 elections.
State board power grabs
A recurring theme within the GOP-led legislature, ever since Cooper defeated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016, has been to pass new laws taking power away from the governor’s office.
Those types of bills had stalled for the last few years, after Democrats had broken the GOP supermajority. But Republicans regained that supermajority earlier this year and a new power grab bill, SB 512, passed both chambers Wednesday on party-line votes.
It would take away Cooper’s power to appoint or remove members of multiple state boards and commissions. Instead the influence over those boards would shift, in many cases, to the legislature or other Republican politicians.
CBD, Kratom regulations shot down
One bill that passed one committee Wednesday, before seeing its momentum slam to a halt, was a proposal to crack down on the sale of Kratom and CBD products.
CBD, often used for pain relief or as a sleep aid, is made from hemp, a relative of marijuana. North Carolina law only allows it to be sold if it has basically no THC — the chemical in marijuana that can get people high. Kratom, which users often drink in a tea, has been used for pain relief or as a stimulant. It’s made from a tree in the coffee family.
CBD products were only recently made legal in North Carolina, and efforts to make Kratom illegal have fizzled out in the past. The bill that had been advancing Wednesday wouldn’t ban either substance but would make it harder for stores to sell them.
Supporters said they were worried about kids getting access to them, potentially as a gateway to using marijuana. But the North Carolina Department of Agriculture had a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the bill, some lawmakers said, noting that farmers have fought hard in recent years to legalize hemp and hemp-based products.
The bill did not make it to the floor for a vote Wednesday, amid the flurry of other bills that did move forward.