When it comes to North Carolina politics, there’s not much left to say, and yet there is everything to shout.

Tuesday night, right-wing Republican Dan Bishop claimed the 9th district over moderate Democrat Dan McCready in a heavily watched special election for the House of Representatives. The seat remained vacant after the 2018 midterms due to revelations of GOP-backed ballot fraud. The loss was not particularly surprising—McCready, a centrist to the core, was not an invigorating candidate, droning on about crossing the aisle and failing to offer policy proposals that could be described as exciting to voters. But Wednesday morning, state Republicans made sure that whatever hot takes had been written about a Democrat nearly winning a seat that’s been red since 1963 were cold by breakfast.

Around eight-thirty in the morning, North Carolina Speaker of the House Tim Moore, a Republican, introduced a vote on a bill to override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the GOP-penned state budget. This unforeseen action prompted a round of objections and shouting by the few Democrats present in the chamber, though it was all for naught. With the chamber only half-full, North Carolina House Republicans voted 55–9 to override Cooper’s veto. The shouting from the nine Democrats in the chamber and the ensuing press conference underscored the fact that the absent Democratic leadership—erroneously reported to be at a 9/11 memorial event—had no clue any legislation would be considered in the morning session.

In sitting outside the Republican caucus meeting and can hear applause. Just before he went inside, Speaker Moore said he'd talk to reporters after. — Dawn B. Vaughan (@dawnbvaughan) September 11, 2019

In a vacuum, this action by the GOP would be outrageous. A strike against the core of democracy, and some other nice taglines. And it is, but more than any of the negative descriptors that have been muttered by North Carolina Democrats in the wake of the override, the GOP’s massive middle finger to their counterparts and the governor was entirely predictable to anyone who’s paid a lick of attention to the conservatives in the Tar Heel State, or Washington D.C., or anywhere in the nation, for that matter.

North Carolina has long served as a microcosm for national politics. Its governing power is a careful balance between a handful of liberal urban areas and hundreds of conservative rural communities. The conservative leadership is several long steps to the right of your typical North Carolina Republican, while the brain trust atop the Democratic Party is stuck in the same moderate pattern it’s been in since the 1980s. And despite there being a fairly even split of ideological beliefs among the citizenry, there is only one party that has been willing to unrelentingly wield power this past decade, thanks to circumstances that might feel eerily familiar to those outside the state.