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It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon -- but things haven't been quite as quiet in North Carolina. In fact, things haven't been quiet here since January 2013, when a tea-party-supermajority took office in the General Assembly Building and a stealth tea-party-puppet governor, Pat McCrory, claimed his spot at the N.C. State Capitol under the tutelage of his appointed deputy budget director, Americans for Prosperity king Art Pope (aka "The Third Koch Brother").
For the first time since 1870, partisan balance in N.C.'s government had been overturned. A state that had long been purple, then blue in 2008, suddenly turned red as blood after bizarrely gerrymandered districts whose boundary-drawings were overseen by Art Pope brought a Republican landslide in the 2012 elections. When the dust settled, Democrats composed only 39% of N.C. House of Representatives members and a mere 28% of N.C. Senate members. Add a governor and (deputy in name only) budget director hell-bent on enacting the policies of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and we were in for a bumpy ride.
Within a few days of their taking office, our new state government was making headlines by ripping apart the foundations of North Carolina's laws and even our state constitution. No longer were "the people" permitted to meet with our elected General Assembly lawmakers in what we call "The People's House." Laws were being drafted to suppress the right to vote, force married couples to pay for two years of "spiritual" marital counseling before they could divorce, allow concealed-carry firearms in schools and churches, develop a state currency based on the gold standard, allow for the creation of a state religion (guess which one?), decimate public education, restrict reproductive health choices for women, and a list of other bills that would curl your toes.
More than 2,000 of these odious bills were rammed through the legislative pipeline in just a matter of weeks. Many of them were copied verbatim from the ALEC handbook on "suggested" legislation. Others ... well ... who knows where they came from?
Further, Gov. McCrory and his (deputy in name only) budget director refused to accept federal Medicaid expansion funds to accommodate implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which meant the state lost millions of dollars in federal funds for health care, food and nutrition assistance, Medicare supplements for those too poor to afford medication copays, and much more. More than 700,000 North Carolinians were to be left without assistance to purchase health insurance, and tens of thousands of elderly and disabled citizens were to be turned out of their Medicaid-funded nursing homes and other care facilities.
Something had to be done.
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