Getting a lot of questions on how it's possible to pull this move with the budget. Let me show you how the sausage is getting made.
I've attached a screenshot of the legislative history of SB 99. The bill itself is just a short, two-pager dealing with auto insurance. #ncpol
What you can tell from this image is that SB 99 passed the senate last year, then passed the house in a slightly different form.
When that happens, a conference committee is appointed to work out the differences between the two bills and then issue a conference report.
That's what started to happen last year. You can see that the house and senate appointed members to a conference committee to work out the differences.
But then nothing happened. The conference committee took no action.
The next thing you see is from this week when the old conference committee members were dismissed and new conferees were "reappointed."
Those new conferees are going to swap out the original language of SB 99 with the budget for the year - which is still being written in secret.
As soon as they do the swap, they're just a few feet from home base. No committee meetings, no amendments.
And they are very much counting on you not noticing.
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Not sure why this isn’t a bigger story. Cite for me a bigger power grab than passing a constitutional amendment that creates a loophole that allows the majority party to circumvent any governor’s veto at will. #ncpol
This isn’t an ‘absurd legal theory’ - it’s the plain reading of the text *and* the judgment of our independent legislative analysis department.
Folks - I don’t want *my party* to have this power. If we create this weapon, we all know that one day it will be regularly used. We can’t let that happen.
The surprise session on constitutional amendments *now also includes* a bill to retroactively change election rules in order to help the GOP win a state Supreme Court election. It makes one of two R's run as Unaffiliated.
Two Republicans and one Democrat are running for the state Supreme Court. This would retroactively change the rules in a way that would result in one of the Republicans (the non-incumbent) being listed as Unaffiliated.
This bill became public within the last 90 minutes and has already passed through committee. I'm now being called to the floor to vote on it. They are going to steamroll this.
UPDATE: Legislative leadership just invoked the nuclear option with respect to the budget. 1/8 #ncpol
For the first time in modern history, it appears our budget will be passed as a conference report instead of a regular bill. Why does this matter? Because a conference report gets to skip the committee process and isn't subject to any amendments. 2/8
That means that whenever we see the budget - and it's still being written behind closed doors - it's essentially final. And we're hearing the budget vote will be as soon as next week, so without having seen a single line of it, it's basically done. 3/8