In December 2016, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly convened a special session. The stated purpose was to pass an emergency relief bill in response to Hurricane Matthew’s ravaging of the eastern part of the state and wildfires that destroyed 60,000 acres of land in western Carolina. But after passing the bill and adjourning the special session, the three Republican leaders of the legislature—Speaker Tim Moore, Senate Leader Phil Berger, and Senate President Dan Forest, the state’s lieutenant governor—huddled on the Senate floor. Then they convened a long-rumored second special session . The purpose was unclear, but those reading the tea leaves in Raleigh rightly assumed that Republicans would move to strip power from the governor’s office and the state supreme court before Democrat Roy Cooper, who had won the 2016 gubernatorial election, took control.

The executive branch hasn’t been the only institution to face the wrath of the General Assembly. The legislature has passed a number of laws in recent years aimed at limiting the power of the courts, including one (over Cooper’s veto) that phased out three seats on the Court of Appeals, preventing Cooper from making any new appointments in the case of a retirement. The legislature and the state Democratic Party are involved in ongoing litigation over a law that canceled judicial primaries . Later this year, lawmakers are expected to take up a controversial judicial redistricting project that could have much of the same effect as its other gerrymandering efforts.

Over the course of the following three days, the legislature passed several bills that outgoing Governor Pat McCrory signed into law, including one that required Senate approval of the governor’s cabinet nominees and another that combined and overhauled the state boards overseeing ethics and elections to give the legislature an equal number of appointments to the governor. ( This January , the North Carolina Supreme Court decided that only Cooper could appoint members to the new board, but other parts of the case are still in litigation .)

The Democrats were blindsided. ”We're as stunned as anybody. I don't know what's going on," Democratic Senate Leader Dan Blue told me that December day, immediately after the second special session was convened. "I asked my colleagues in the Republican caucus as well as the Republican leadership, and none of them felt any necessity to let us know.”

Republicans at the state level are increasingly comfortable consolidating power in unprecedented ways. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court implemented new Congressional maps on its own rather than wait for the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic Governor Tom Wolf to come to an agreement, Republican lawmakers filed resolutions to impeach the court’s Democratic justices . In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker refused to call special elections for two open seats formerly held by Republicans in the legislature until his hand was forced by rulings made by three different Wisconsin judges—just before the legislature was able to reconvene to pass a law preventing the special elections from happening .

Twelve months after that fateful special session, Republicans in the US Senate dropped their 479-page tax bill on Democrats hours before the scheduled vote. This kicked off a frenzy of activity, with some changes made in the margins of the bill text itself as it marched toward becoming law; after the Senate voted to pass it on a narrow party-line vote, the House had to vote on it again due to some confusion over a couple provisions. The process was just as chaotic as the one surrounding the secretively written healthcare bill , but where the Affordable Care Act repeal effort faltered thanks to a couple Republican senators voting no, the tax bill was signed into law by Donald Trump on December 22.

These nakedly partisan maneuvers by North Carolina’s Republican party have garnered national attention and been derided by many on the left as a “power grab.” But the type of hard-nosed, domineering tactics pioneered in North Carolina have become standard for Republicans all over the country.

“We have a legislative process that exists mainly as a series of ambushes,” Democratic State Senator Jeff Jackson told me. “At this point it’s a genuine surprise if we’re given time to fully read a piece of legislation.” (Emails seeking comment from Representative Tim Moore and Senator Phil Berger, the GOP’s leaders in the General Assembly, went unanswered.)

But even among those examples, North Carolina stands out for how often the legislature has wielded absolute power in recent years. “If you’re looking to make our federal government more divisive and less transparent, it’s hard not to look at NC’s legislature and be inspired,” Jackson said. “It feels like our legislature is running an experiment in how to torch our credibility. We’re a 50/50 state that’s run by the 10 percent of people who vote in Republican primaries, which means 90 percent [of North Carolinians] aren’t being heard.”

“The typical Republican’s philosophy, be it a state legislator or a congressman, is to get the bill done regardless of methodology,” Congressman G.K. Butterfield, a veteran House Democrat who previously served on the North Carolina Supreme Court, told me. “And if it means introducing a bill at 11:59 PM and fast-tracking it the next day, they will do it.”

North Carolina has been a one-party state for essentially its entire post-Civil War history, and until relatively recently, that party was the Democrats. After Democrats took control of the legislature in 1898 essentially via coup, they implemented Jim Crow and disenfranchised black voters, which helped them dominate the state for a century. Since 1901, there’s been a grand total of 16 years where North Carolina has had a Republican governor.