From abortion law to taxes, how NC lawmakers might change your life in 2023
There are about 10.7 million North Carolinians. And they are governed by state laws passed by just 170 people.
The North Carolina General Assembly is back for its long legislative session, which is held in odd years and is longer because lawmakers’ primary task is to pass a state budget to spend billions of taxpayer dollars. But there’s much more they can and will do that could change your life this year.
Republicans have a supermajority in the Senate, which means enough votes to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and are one vote short of a supermajority in the House. The majority political party controls what bills are up for a vote.
Democrats won’t have much of a say on what bills move ahead in the legislature, though they have more power in the House because Republicans cannot override a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper without at least one Democrat voting with them.
Here’s the latest on where things stand on key issues impacting your life that are likely to come up this session.
Abortion
Current state law bans abortion after 20 weeks, with some exceptions for medical emergencies. Both Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore have said they want to move legislation that tightens restrictions earlier than 20 weeks. After the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 gave control of abortion laws to the states, Republicans plan to pass a new law.
“Our law does not allow an exception for rape,” Berger told reporters when lawmakers gathered this month to be sworn in. “It does not allow an exception for incest. And I think we need to change that. I also think that 20 weeks is, in essence, five months into a pregnancy. I think if you look at where the people of the state of North Carolina are, they think that that’s too long. And I think we will need to have to take a look at it.”
Berger added that he’ll still have to see where the Senate Republican Caucus stands on the issue. Moore, too, said that Republican caucus discussions will determine what bill moves forward. Moore said House Republicans have a working group to talk about it. Caucus discussions take place in private meetings.
Moore told reporters after this month’s swearing-in ceremony that he’s hearing support from House Republicans for a bill that would ban abortion after 13 weeks, which is the start of the second trimester, and exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother and if the child will not live.
“And also I want to talk about things like improving the way adoptions are done, reforming that, improving access to health care for expectant mothers as well as children,” he said.
By and large, Democrats, however, support abortion rights and want to codify Roe v. Wade.
Education
The total amount of education spending is a long-running issue tied to the Leandro court case. This year, after court rulings that lawmakers failed to adequately fund education and can be forced by judges to spend more, Democrats are likely to push for compliance.
But Republicans argue that courts have overstepped their authority in that case and others, and reduced the pressure on themselves by winning control of the Supreme Court, The News & Observer previously reported.
Control of the court flipped from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority after the 2022 midterms.
Lawmakers are likely to pass education bills beyond those related to money. In particular, now that Republicans are one vote away from a supermajority, leaders have said they want to revisit legislation that Cooper stymied in the past.
That includes a bill Cooper vetoed in 2021 that would regulate how race is taught in schools, and a 2022 Parents’ Bill of Rights that would regulate how LGBTQ issues are discussed in schools, which passed one chamber. Both proposals could turn up again separately or in one bill. Democrats across the board have opposed the legislation.
Raises for state employees and teachers
The state budget, a two-year spending plan, determines the amount of raises for tens of thousands of state employees, university system employees and community college employees, and the base rate of pay for teachers and others who work in public education.
Top education officials want school districts to experiment with paying teachers based on their performance instead of their years of experience, The N&O reported.
Berger said recently that Republicans have talked about basing educator pay more “on outcomes,” though the problem has always been how that is measured, he said.
“Ultimately the schools are there in order to provide opportunity for education for our kids — so it makes sense, to the extent that we get better outcomes that we’d be willing to pay more money,” Berger said.
As of December 2022, the job vacancy rate across state government is 23.2%, according to the Office of State Budget and Management. That’s a slight uptick from earlier in 2022.
The rate for individual state agencies varies: higher in the Department of Corrections, for example, where jobs have been targeted in the past for higher raises than other state jobs.
In general, the House favors higher raises than the Senate. When the General Assembly convened Jan. 11 for its swearing-in ceremony, Moore told reporters that he didn’t want to give a specific target for a pay raise amount, but noted that some jobs are harder to fill.
The N&O asked Moore if raises for state employees and teachers this year would keep up with inflation in 2023. The budget process starts in the House this year.
“I don’t know if anything’s keeping up with inflation right now. But we’re going to, we want to continue to raise those, we’ve made that clear that we want to continue to raise salaries. There’s some real recruitment and retention issues, all across the spectrum,” Moore said.
He said they have to balance raises with the amount of taxes the state collects, saying raises will be “whatever we can afford.”
Redistricting, again
Following yet another court loss in a gerrymandering lawsuit last year, Republican legislators will get another chance this year at redrawing the state’s political maps.
It could mean Democrats losing several seats in Congress.
The newly Republican-controlled state Supreme Court is widely expected to give the legislature more leeway to draw maps that will give the GOP an edge in future elections, if a gerrymandering lawsuit makes it to the court, The N&O has previously reported.
In early 2022, the court ruled that all of the political districts Republicans drew following the 2020 Census were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. That ruling — 4-3, with all the Democrats in the majority and all the Republicans dissenting — included the new maps for the U.S. House of Representatives, the N.C. Senate and the N.C. House.
A group of outside experts was hired to redraw the lines for the 14 districts used to elect North Carolina’s delegation to the U.S. House. Their version of the district map led to an even 7-7 split in November’s elections, instead of the likely 10-3 or 11-4 split in favor of Republicans that the legislature had initially passed before the courts shot it down.
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However, state law says that any maps drawn by a court can only be used for one election. So the legislature will go back to work on congressional redistricting.
As for the state legislative maps, the legislature will also need to redraw the N.C. Senate map this year, due to a post-election ruling that found the Senate map used in 2022 was still unconstitutional while the House map was not. In 2022 Republicans won a veto-proof majority in the Senate but not the House.
The governor is banned from vetoing redistricting bills, so whatever maps Republican leaders approve will be used in every election through the end of the decade, unless they’re thrown out in court.
Any lawsuits alleging partisan gerrymandering would likely go through the state courts, while any lawsuits alleging racial gerrymandering could go through the federal courts.
Medicaid expansion
Top leaders in both parties expect Medicaid expansion to pass at some point this year.
But the question remains, as it has for the past several months, about the details. Berger wants Medicaid expansion legislation to include changes to the process for certificate of need, which regulates what services hospitals can provide and where they can be built.
Moore wants what is known as a clean bill, meaning Medicaid expansion only, without other policy changes.
While negotiators seemed optimistic it would happen last summer, the sides dug in enough that they kicked the issue to 2023.
“We’ll see if there’s a consensus to do something on that,” Moore said on the first day of session.
Guns
Any gun bills that pass this year are highly unlikely to add regulations.
That’s the case even though Congress passed new help for states that create what are known as red flag laws or extreme risk protection orders. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican and North Carolina’s former speaker of the House, helped champion a major gun bill that included the red flag provision, McClatchy reported.
According to a June 2022 Quinnipiac Poll, 82% of Americans support red flag laws.
Moore told The N&O in December that he’d need to see more details about potential red flag law legislation, which aims to remove guns from those considered an imminent threat to themselves or others, before taking a position. Asked if he would consider any legislation around red flag laws, Moore said that he would have to see a bill first.
Berger told reporters in December that he has not seen any red flag proposals that “provide a positive benefit without creating a substantial impediment to people’s law, constitutional right, to a weapon.”
However, there is a possibility for action on a bipartisan bill about gun safety storage awareness.
Sen. Bobby Hanig, who was previously in the House, told The N&O in October that he plans to reintroduce the storage bill.
“I absolutely tried my hardest, but the Senate would not hear any gun bills even though this one was 100% good for everybody,” Hanig said then.
Berger said last month that he’d be in favor of a similar bill.
Taxes
Tax cuts were part of the last two-year state budget and are likely to be again this round. The 2021 budget included reducing individual income taxes and phasing out corporate income tax. The personal income tax rate was reduced to 4.75% starting Jan. 1, 2023.
“I would like to see us move forward with further reduction in personal income taxes,” Berger told reporters last month.
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Voter ID
Moore is determined to bring forward a voter ID bill this session.
Voters in 2018 backed a state constitutional amendment mandating voter ID. But the amendment itself and a law laying out the details of the ID requirement have been tied up in the courts.
The state Supreme Court found in another post-election ruling last year that legislative leaders wrote their most recent voter ID law to target Black voters, The N&O reported.
Sports gambling
It’s also a safe bet to expect that a sports gambling bill will reappear in the General Assembly this year.
A bill that would allow mobile online sports betting failed by one vote in the House last year, and this session there are dozens of new lawmakers.
Currently, betting on sports is allowed at casinos but not online.
Medical marijuana
Like sports betting, allowing medical marijuana use garnered a lot of debate but not quite enough support to get passed by both chambers. But it’s on the list to be revisited this session, Berger has said.
Thirty-nine states have legalized marijuana for medical use, The N&O previously reported.
The unknown
What else will rise to the top?
“There will likely be at least a half a dozen, dozen things that nobody today can predict,” Berger recently told reporters.
Bill filing starts on Jan. 25 when lawmakers return to Raleigh.
This story was originally published January 20, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "From abortion law to taxes, how NC lawmakers might change your life in 2023."
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