The (sad) state of North Carolina

 

Extremist Republicans are flaunting democracy everywhere in a power bid to take away the power of the vote and the power of the American people. This trend is on display in North Carolina.  The gerrymander map above, upheld by the Republican majority state supreme court, shows why they're getting away with it.

Republicans Are Running Wild in My State

by Frank Bruni, former NY Times opinion writer

"They [Republicans in the NC legislature] They have already relaxed restrictions on firearms. They want to prevent teachers from talking about systemic racism. ... On Wednesday the House also passed a bill that would change the state’s current ban on most abortions after 20 weeks to a ban on most abortions after 12. That’s just a snapshot of Republicans’ agenda.

“They have immediate plans to use their supermajorities to reduce tax rates to levels that the governor’s office estimates would reduce our general fund revenue by 25 percent per year, causing the state to fall billions of dollars short of our obligations,” State Senator Graig Meyer, a Democrat, told me. “Surprisingly to me, they are also pushing all sorts of legislation that chips away at our previously bipartisan efforts to develop a clean tech economy.”

And they may well succeed, because Republicans in North Carolina have used “both skillful political maneuvering and brutal legislative tactics to develop supermajority power in the legislature and complete control of our courts, even though our state is about a 50-50 split politically,” Meyer said. “Policies that the G.O.P. base is demanding are getting farther away from what average voters will tolerate.”

But average voters don’t matter — that’s the lesson of and message in so much of what Republicans are doing in states around the country."

So, the next time you hear a Republican politician say something like "that's what the American people want", you can be sure that's not what the American people want, it's what extremist Republican politicians want.