Chris Fitzsimon
The 2010 General Assembly session ended at 5:32 Saturday morning and at 5:33 the politicians and pundits began furiously trying to put their spin on it, and the efforts are not likely to let up until the November election.
The session ended as it always ends, with a flurry of activity, late-night and early-morning sessions, committee meetings around desks on the House and Senate floor and bills flying back and forth at a dizzying pace that’s almost impossible to follow even for veteran lobbyists and legislative observers.
When the dust cleared, several pieces of controversial legislation had passed in the session’s waning days, including DNA testing for people charged with violent crimes, an incentive package for businesses and ethics reforms that make significant improvements over the current law, though they fall short of what much of the reform community supported.
A few days before adjournment, lawmakers voted to ban video sweepstakes casinos, the latest version of video poker that the General Assembly banned several years ago.
The bills passed in the final few days make up the bulk of what Democrats will try to sell as accomplishments to voters in the next four months.
Whatever you think of the items on the list, there’s a little for almost everybody: good government reforms, job creation, getting tough on crime and keeping a shady industry from exploiting the poor.
The Republican non-budget message won’t focus much on those issues. Instead, they are likely to talk about what was not passed, issues that appeal to their base: lifting the cap on charter schools, a gay marriage amendment and reform of the state’s annexation laws.
While those non-budget issues may well all play a role in determining who will control the General Assembly in 2011, it will be a small one. November’s election is likely to be decided by how people perceive the state’s overall economy is doing, something lawmakers don’t have much to do with, other than the investments made in the budget they approve.
And it’s the budget that’s likely to dominate the legislative campaigns. Republicans trying to ride the wave of economic anxiety will claim that the Democrats should not have passed a tax increase last year and that the budget spends too much, especially in a recession, when families across the state are cutting back.
Republican candidates and the think tanks working feverishly to elect them will argue that this year’s budget was balanced with temporary taxes and disappearing federal money and did nothing to prepare for next year’s budget shortfall that could surpass $3 billion.
In other words, Democrats should have made even deeper cuts in last year’s budget to avoid a tax hike and made more reductions this year to soften the blow of next year’s crisis. Republicans were careful not to make major suggestions about where to find more cuts. That might alienate potential voters, and avoiding that is the priority of both parties this year.
Democrats trying to hold on to power will claim that despite the cuts they made, they largely protected education and the state’s safety net, even in the worst economic downturn in a generation.
News from the N.C. Budget and Tax Center that per capita spending in this year’s budget will be the lowest in 14 years provides an effective answer to the claims of runaway spending. And as for relying on federal money and new taxes in a recession, the vast majority of states followed the same path, including several with Republican governors and legislatures. The budget hole was simply too large to fill with cuts alone.
The Democrats caution and political compromise came more on non-budget issues, like their unwillingness to confront the homebuilders and other special interests and expand voter-owned elections in local governments that asked for them, and the refusal to put an end to legal money laundering by limiting how much political parties can contribute to individual campaigns.
The money chase will continue and the spinning rolls on.
Chris Fitzsimon is executive director of N.C. Policy Watch.