Republican lawmakers have spent years shifting the state in their favor. But as the tables turn, they’ve taken aim at incoming Democrat governor Roy Cooper

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A month after what was a smoldering tire fire of an election for progressives, opponents of North Carolina’s belligerent Republican party got a small breath of fresh air when Democrat Roy Cooper emerged as the winner of the governor’s race.

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Cooper’s extremely narrow victory – conceded by sitting governor Pat McCrory after weeks of failed challenges and recounts – ended four years of one-party control in a diverse state long known for political balance in government.

Many of Cooper’s supporters hoped the new governor, seen as a moderate in his long career as state attorney general, would at least be able to slow the barrage of conservative lawmaking that began with a concerted effort by major Republican donors to flip the state legislature in 2010.

Immediately following McCrory’s concession, however, Republican lawmakers called an emergency meeting of the state legislature.

It was initially billed as a special session to pass a year-end disaster relief bill. Instead, they unleashed a wave of laws that wiped out the incoming Democratic governor’s power and crippled the reach of the state supreme court, which voters had also given a new Democratic majority.

Those laws slash the number of positions the governor can appoint, from 1,500 to 400, and hand what had been the governor’s control over elements of state education and information technology systems to offices controlled by Republicans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Citizens vote on a basketball court in the 8 November election, which gave the state a new Democratic majority. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters

The laws also mandate that all state cabinet appointments be approved by the senate, a condition that, while in line with the way things are done at the federal level, had not been in place in the state before.

The Republican lawmakers put themselves in a position to assert such control by spending six years changing election laws in ways that benefited themselves: for example, by redrawing legislative districts to give themselves permanent majorities, despite being the minority party in terms of voter registration in the state.

Following the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the US supreme court, North Carolina Republicans also implemented voter-access rollbacks said to target Democratic and minority voters.

Federal courts have continuously struck down the most egregious legislation. A US appeals court ruled in July, for example, that the North Carolina voting package was meant to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision”.

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Regardless, state Republicans implemented many of the restrictions at county level, in time to give Donald Trump a three percentage-point win on election day 2016. Three weeks after the election, another federal court ordered the state to hold special legislative elections in 2017, a year ahead of time, because it found that 28 districts had been drawn as unconstitutional, racist gerrymanders.

In this week’s special session, though, the Republicans continued their electoral power grab by stripping the governor’s party of its power to control the make-up of county boards of elections – a condition that meant that under McCrory, even staunchly Democratic counties such as Durham, which gave 79% of its vote to Hillary Clinton, had Republican-majority election boards.

The boards will now be chosen by a state commission, most of whose members will be picked by the Republican house speaker and senate president.

‘Moral Mondays’

The irony is that legislative overreach is what probably cost McCrory his job. In March, he signed a law that stripped counties and cities of the right to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens by replacing all local nondiscrimination ordinances with a statewide measure that excluded LGBT people.

The law most notoriously barred transgender people from using public restrooms, unless the restroom in question matched the gender listed on a person’s birth certificate.

Punishing economic reprisals roiled the state’s economy, including the cancellation of job-creating projects by companies such as PayPal and Deutsche Bank and the cancelation of high-profile sporting events such as the 2017 NBA All-Star Weekend, which had been planned for Charlotte.

The controversy made national headlines and McCrory’s status as the face of the law, and the economic backlash that ensued, sapped his support. Even Trump initially came out against the law, although he mildly relented after McCrory promised his endorsement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pat McCrory signed a law that stripped counties and cities of the right to LGBT and trans citizens, sparking a national outcry. Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

An effective protest movement, which included weekly marches and sit-ins at the state legislature, known as “Moral Mondays”, has helped galvanize opposition to Republican actions over the past few years. Hundreds of protesters again moved on the capital during the special session this week, with dozens arrested for refusing to leave public spaces.

It is possible the public pressure helped curtail even more drastic measures, such as a rumored plan to take over the state supreme court by creating more seats to be filled by Republicans – a proposal that the Republican lawmakers now deny ever having considered.

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McCrory, who began signing the bills into law on Friday, appeared at Trump Tower the day after conceding the race. Supporters believe that the former governor, a long-time energy company middle manager with North Carolina-based Duke Energy, will get some sort of position in the new administration.

State legislators have been clear about what they are trying to accomplish. In an email, a spokeswoman for senate president pro tempore Phil Berger offered a long list of justifications for the new moves – for instance, claiming that reducing the number of governor-appointed offices would correct “a bloated bureaucracy whose lack of fiscal discipline contributed to the outrageous $2.5bn budget shortfall legislative Republicans were saddled with [in 2013]”.

But that list ended with a swipe at Cooper, who Berger’s office accused of planning to usurp power.

“Given that Governor-elect Cooper has stated on the record his intention to emulate President Obama and circumvent the legislative process by governing through rule-making and executive orders, why is he surprised the legislature is taking steps to protect its constitutional authority?”

State house rules committee chairman David Lewis was even more direct about Republicans’ motivations, telling reporters: “Obviously if the election results were different, we might not be moving quite as fast.”