Well, it's that time again: The N.C. General Assembly (NCGA) meets for a "long session" every other year, when it deals with the majority of bills that have budgetary implications. Our last long session was 2013, after a complete takeover of the state government (legislative and executive) by extremist conservatives. That session was a doozy, replete with the infamous Motorcycle Vagina bill, the Yee-Haw-Guns-EVRAWHERE! bill, the We Don't Needs No Education bills, the Lady Parts Have Vaginal Organisms that Are More Life-Threatening than Man Parts concerns, and sooooo many others.
We still have a Republican super-majority in the NCGA, but we did make a few significant inroads in the November 2014 elections. And on Tuesday (Feb. 24), I ventured out in what we here in the Tar Heel State call a "snowstorm" (those of you from wintery climes, please don't laugh; snow is rare in this part of the country and irrational exuberance runs amok whenever it even looks like it might snow) to do some citizen lobbying.
Originally, I'd intended to participate in Women's Advocacy Day, sponsored by NC Women United. However, because of the snow, the event had to be cancelled. But some of us needed to be there to let folks know about the last-minute cancellation, as so many attendees came from out of town and might want to do some talking with lawmakers despite the weather.
MsSpentyouth in front of a veritably empty NCGA. For those of you in snowy climes, don't laugh, but this is considered a raging snowstorm in Wake County, North Carolina, where such rainbow-unicorn events close down everything while people rush out to buy eggs and then celebrate snow days with irrational exuberance.
The General Assembly was pretty sparsely populated, of course, so those of us hardy Rosie-the-Riveter types who did get to GA had unique access with lawmakers on all sides of the aisle. In fact, there were so few lobbyists and constituents and general public on the campus that lawmakers were literally roaming the hallways and indoor courtyards looking for hands to shake and business cards to hand out. It was a spectacular opportunity to get face time with our senators and representatives.
It was my first opportunity to talk with Sen. Jeff Jackson (D-37th District, Mecklenburg Co.). You may have heard about Sen. Jackson, who was the only legislator to brave last week's snowstorm and live-tweeted his February 17 utopian reformation of the General Assembly using the hashtag #JustOneLegislator.
Some of what he accomplished that day:
- "Went ahead and got rid of puppy mills. Not sure why that took so long..."
- "We just invested heavily in wind and solar energy. I'm moving onto education reform."
- "Just had a big debate over cutting the university system even more. Decided not to, because obviously that's a bad idea."
- "As a former prosecutor, I made fixing our absurdly outdated judicial technology a priority. And ... it's done."
- "Hey Charlotte - it's your airport." [In 2013, the GA took over control of the Charlotte airport.]
- "Our jails are filled with the mentally ill and chemically addicted. Just expanded mental health care for them."
Take a few minutes to read about all he accomplished that day. It's a Twitter manifesto of good governance.
Pete the Cat, my grandson Hasan, Sen. Jeff "#JustOneLegislator" Jackson, and my granddaughter Leyla discuss alternative energy possibilities, push-up competitions, Medicaid cuts, public education, and ... well ... Pete the Cat.
My daughter Yasemin and grandkids Hasan and Leyla survived a four-hour bus trip from 30 miles away (I'm telling you, snowstorms are
different here; they're just
different) to take part in Women's Advocacy Day, and they loved meeting Sen. Jackson. Yasemin is a US Navy veteran who was injured in 2005 and Sen. Jackson is a member of the US Army National Guard who served in Afghanistan, so the two of them talked about using military PT exercises as parental discipline methods and all kinds of arcane military jargony things. Sen. Jackson invited 7-year-old Hasan to engage in a friendly push-up competition but quickly forfeited the game when Hasan demonstrated he could probably out-push-up the senator.
We talked about economic self-sufficiency, how the new state voter-suppression law impacts NC women in particular, and how underfunding adjudications of child-support-deadbeats results in increased state spending over time.
From Sen. Jackson's office, we moved on to the office of Yasemin's state senator, a staunch Republican. I won't name him, because when Yasemin brought up an issue she would like her senator to address, his legislative assistant subtly intimated that Yasemin might want to bring that issue to another senator -- and named three Democratic senators who might be more receptive.
As Hozier might have said at that moment, "That's a fine-looking high horse."
(Pardon the gratuitous link to the Sergei Polunin interpretation. I have a thing for bad-boy Ukrainian ballet dancers who flee the Royal Ballet for the vast creative freedom available in Russia, a performative expression of such supreme irony that its universe could not possibly be more boundless and unlimited when one places it within the context of Hozier's original video for this song.)
(But I digress. Sue me. It's a snow day in a place that embraces an outrageously phobophilic ideology in its relationship with precipitation of the icy-flaky type.)
It was a lengthy discussion including the senator's legislative assistant, an intern, and the four of us. Something that wouldn't have been possible on a regular snow-free day. So even though it produced utterly no hope that my daughter and her family will ever be well-represented or even considered human by their senator, we got a lot of useful information and some regular-people face time with his less-arrogant staff members that yielded some "next steps."
Maybe it was something in the (hot)air during those minutes, because on our way to our next stop, we passed Gov. Pat McCrory in the hallway. We heartily congratulated ourselves for our restraint in not tripping him or saying, "Good morning, Gov. One-Term," in a Bart Simpson voice.
But that moment passsed, and soon we came upon a gaggle of lawmakers talking with Patsy Keever, our newly elected N.C. Democratic Party (NCDP) chair. Such was the wintery mix of exuberance of the day that Chair Keever (well, ok, I just call her Patsy) noticed Hasan carrying Pete and Cat and immediately drew us into the gaggle so she could instruct the legislators present about the cultural significance of contemporary children's literature paired with merch licensing. Hasan was so excited that she knew all about his favorite topics. Leyla is a preteen, so she was more interested in getting home to play MineCraft -- something Patsy also knows about.
Newly elected NC Democratic Party Chair Patsy Keever demonstrated her ultra-youth-pop-culture uber-skillz by talking Pete the Cat with Hasan while 12-year-old Leyla demonstrated her wonkiest preteen attitude ever.
Patsy also asked me to take a knee (for realz, yo) so that she could tap my head and officially deputize me with putting together a task force to interview Democratic candidates from the 2014 election cycle to ask what the NCDP can do better for candidates in the 2016 campaigns. And so, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities heretofore and forthwith accorded in perpetuity until the November 2016 elections, I'll spend a few weeks/months collecting data and doing qualitative analysis to present to the NCDP in time to help us support next year's crop of (hopefully progressive) candidates. w00t! Can you say "geek love"?
Rep. Carla Cunningham (D-106th District, Mecklenburg County) let me take a seat for nearly half an hour to discuss her fight for parity in the costs of IV-infused chemotherapy and oral chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients. Although she wasn't able to win that battle in 2013, she did get the GOP supermajority to cut the deductible rates for oral chemotherapy medications and believes she can make more headway in this session by working with cancer patients and patient-advocacy groups that are now more informed about what they're up against in terms of being thrown into the ring with pharmaceutical lobbyists who love funding this new NCGA GOP crowd. For obvious reasons.
Rep. Cunningham also has plans to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment before the House next week. w00t! Yes, we're making another attempt to take the United States off the list of 13 of 140 countries in the world that do not have constitutional protections for women.
We met with my state representative, Rep. Duane Hall (D-11th District, Wake County), to talk about whether he would draft and sponsor an amendment to H46, a bill to restore the medical-expense deduction to state income taxes that the GOP supermajority stripped from us starting with our 2014 taxes. Although H46 is written to restore this deduction only to senior citizens 65 or older, I'm bringing several carloads and busloads of senior citizens to the General Assembly in March to officially ask Rep. Hall to sponsor an amendment that would extend the deduction to people living on fixed incomes through SSDI and SSI, as well as low-income earners.
A group of constituents in my Dem. NC Precinct 04-01, who resolved last week to caravan 80-100 senior citizens to the NCGA in March to lobby for reinstatement of the medical-expense deduction, which was eliminated in the GOP-created state budget in 2013.
I talked with more than two dozen legislators about that bill, including many ultra-conservative Republicans who are receiving hundreds of calls and emails now that North Carolinians are preparing their 2014 taxes and realizing they'll have to pay significantly hefty tax increases over what they paid in previous years.
If it snows more here in Wake County, who knows? We may get a bipartisan bill or two voted into law!
Which brings me to another lighthearted yet useful encounter -- this time with freshman legislator Rep. Brian Turner (D-116th District, Buncombe County). Rep. Turner defeated Republican Rep. Tim Moffitt in November after Moffitt was slapped with ethics complaints for asking Turner to drop out of the race so that Moffitt could focus on landing the House Speaker position. In exchange, Moffitt suggested he might be able to net Turner a high-paying state job heading public television station UNC-TV. I'm not trivializing the obvious by saying that North Carolinians are getting a lot of value by having replaced Moffitt with Rep. Turner.
Rep. Turner saw my family resting up for another round of discussions in an indoor courtyard in the GA building. He came right over and actually apologized for not spending more time with us earlier when he was meeting with other legislators outside his office. He brought stickers for my grandchildren and asked us which issues we were interested in. Yes! He asked us!
My daughter joked about a bill that would end snowstorms on the NCGA campus, because it seems there are enough flakes there already -- in fact, the NC Senate GOP super-majority had just voted to pass a "Religious Freedom Bill" that, if passed, would allow magistrates to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples because ... well ... it's complicated and involves Pilgrims, the history of our country, curveballs, accommodating sincere religious beliefs (as opposed to insincere beliefs, I guess), and the need to "permit discrimination" because some government officials' religious beliefs are more important than ordinary citizens' religious beliefs.
I'm not kidding. Watch that video. If you thought your head had exploded as much as was possible during previous political cognitive dissonance, you will find that there's still some room for brain detonation.
So. Yeah. Anyway, that vote led to the joke about the snowstorms and the flakes. At which point Rep. Turner launched into a deadpan accusation of my being a climate-change denier. To which I responded that I deny that I'm a climate-change denier; I'm actually a proletariat, anti-neo-re-deconstructivist pseudo-quasi-conservaliberal with liberatarian communist left leanings that have led me to become a climate-change embracer. Much understated mirth and hilarity ensued, to the confusion of my daughter and grandkids, who wondered whether the end of days was upon us and these two people were talking Rapture Argle-Bargle.
Our grand debate drew several other lawmakers, who talked with us about the various bills and ideas for bills and actually asked for our input. I'm totally not kidding. There were eight legislators actually asking regular citizens of North Carolina what we thought about bills coming up before the legislature.
Citizen lobbying is hungry work -- especially for 7-year-old boys. We headed down to the NCGA cafeteria and hobnobbed with politicos and the lobbyists who lobby them while enjoying some "Goodness Grows in North Carolina" deliciousness.
Don't laugh. He ate pretty much all of this and was even reluctant to share his tilapia with his dear ol' Nana.
After taking on some ballast, I took the fam to the Legislative Research Office, where lawmakers send drafts of bills to be researched assiduously to comply with laws already on the books and to bring forward studies and program evaluations that could support or undercut the essence of the bills. The grandkids learned about the process of how a bill is drafted, how it's vetted and edited, how many times it's voted on before it reaches the final version that (if passed) moves to the other legislative chamber for more discussion and votes.
We visited the Legislative Research Library, then we mosied over to talk with Larry Yates, the NCGA's principal program evaluator at the NCGA Program Evaluation Division, which is responsible for studying the efficacy of legislative programs and provides that feedback to lawmakers and committees.
Seven hours of absolutely unprecedented (in my 55 years on this planet) discussions with the people who are fighting an ideological battle between representing North Carolinians and ruling us.
Citizen lobbying. Educational, fun, frustrating, joyful, maddening, challenging, physical, cerebral, spar-worthy. Give it a try. If we don't demand representation, we're going to end up being ruled by people who believe they deserve more than we do and make the "manifest destiny" laws to prove it.
Sigh.
Why can't we have snow days more often? It's snowing again tonight, and I've already put in some calls to hire sled dogs so that I can get back to the General Assembly tomorrow, just in case Sen. Jackson reprises his #JustOneLegislator effort. I want to be there for the sheer joy of retweeting the tweets of a Twitter-based North Carolina Winter Spring Revolution.