While the moves to limit the governor directly may be the splashiest, the changes to the state boards are worthy of note. North Carolina’s somewhat idiosyncratic structure for the boards reached national consciousness this year, as Governor Pat McCrory and his allies challenged his narrow loss to Democrat Roy Cooper, the current attorney general. The election ended only in early December, with McCrory’s concession. Currently, every county election board consists of three members, two belonging to the governor’s party and one belonging to the minority party. The State Board of Elections has five members, three from the governor’s party and two from the opposition party.

Under the bill offered Wednesday night, the state board would be overhauled into an eight-member panel, with four representatives from each party—two of each appointed by the governor, and one from each party appointed by both the speaker of the house and the president pro tempore of the senate. The board would also require six votes to move on anything, likely ensuring frequent deadlocks. Moreover, the opposition party would chair the board in even-numbered years—in other words, Republicans would control the board during congressional-election years.

County boards would expand from three people to four people, two from each party. The bill would also merge the State Ethics Commission with the elections board.

It’s an ingenious political maneuver, because it allows General Assembly Republicans to paint the overhaul as bipartisan. That’s not exactly wrong, but it is extremely cynical, a critique that can be extended to many of the bills. If bipartisan boards of elections are a good idea, they were presumably an equally good idea in 2013, when McCrory took over the governorship. The same is true of Senate approval for Cabinet appointments, or reducing gubernatorial appointments. It’s also true of the appeals process, before Democrats won control of the state supreme court.

Seeking precedent, Woodhouse reached back to a 1976 power grab by Governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat. The chairman of the House Rules Committee, Representative David Lewis argued it was simply a rebalancing.

“I think to be candid with you, that you will see the General Assembly look to reassert its constitutional authority in areas that may have been previously delegated to the executive branch,” he told reporters. But Lewis also admitted, “Some of the stuff we’re doing, obviously if the election results were different, we might not be moving quite as fast on, but a lot of this stuff would have been done anyway and has been talked about for quite some time.”

Democratic Representative Darren Jackson was having none of it: “This is why people don’t trust us. This is why they hate us,” he said.

North Carolina Republicans have taken every opportunity they can to tinker with the state’s voting rules. In 2013, they passed a sweeping overhaul of voting laws, described by some experts as the most aggressive in the nation. It required voters to show ID when voting, cut back sharply on early voting, and eliminated same-day registration, among other measures. They cited the threat of voter fraud, though repeated efforts have failed to show widespread fraud. But a federal court struck most of the law down in July, saying the law had been designed to disenfranchise minorities. When McCrory came up short in November, Republicans insisted that fraud was to blame, and mounted a series of protests—most of which were rejected by Republican-led county elections board. The state did order a recount of votes in Durham County, which produced little change in the final tally.