NC Senate Democrats walk out before vote on surprise bill that could benefit GOP candidates
A Republican-crafted bill meant as a compromise on changing North Carolina’s mask law would also change campaign finance law to allow more dark money donations.
All state Senate Democrats walked out in protest ahead of the vote on Thursday.
The measure passed 28-0 in the 50-member Senate. Republican Senate leader Phil Berger called out each Democratic senator’s name during the vote, but they had all left the chamber. Republicans have a supermajority in the Senate, and the House as well, so have the votes to pass any legislation they want and send to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to sign, veto or let become law without his signature. Sometimes that has meant adding new policy to unrelated bills.
Democrats painted it as a way to benefit the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
“What we’re really concerned about is out-of-state billionaires flooding money into our state, without any accountability,” Sen. Mary Wills Bode told The News & Observer later Thursday.
The campaign finance part of the bill eliminates some rules about reporting campaign contributions put in place by the State Board of Elections. It also eliminates the requirement that a political group’s assistant or deputy treasurer reside in North Carolina.
Berger said the changes were made because Republican lawmakers felt they “needed to be done as a way to level the playing field in terms of money” coming to candidates from four partisan political groups, the Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Attorneys General Association, Republican Governors Association and Republican Attorneys General Association.
In May 2020, the State Board of Elections issued an advisory opinion to the Democratic Governors Association saying that certain federal political committees that get money from corporations can’t give money to state political-party committees, because that would go around the ban on corporations giving directly in North Carolina.
Berger told reporters after that the law still prohibits corporate contributions and the bill “just makes it an equal situation as far as those types of organizations bringing money into North Carolina.”
Berger described the majority-Democratic Board of Elections decision as enabling money from the Democratic governors and attorneys general groups to come directly into state parties in unlimited amounts, but preventing the same for Republicans.
Asked if the change is to benefit the campaigns of Robinson and U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, who is running for attorney general, Berger pointed to the board’s action.
“If you believe that the dollars raised by those outside groups are dollars that were being prevented from coming into North Carolina as a result of the ruling of the Democratic majority on the Board of Elections, then folks can draw that conclusion. I think the need was to make sure that we did not allow to continue a disadvantage that was created by a partisan Board of Elections,” Berger said.
Shortly after the Senate adjourned Thursday, Senate Democrats held a news conference outside the Legislative Building in downtown Raleigh to explain why they left.
Senate Democratic Whip Jay Chaudhuri said the bill “allows for undue influences of millionaires now to give money to candidates without any disclosure under state law.”
Asked about Berger saying it “evens the playing field,” Chaudhuri said he sees it differently.
“I don’t read it that way,” he said. “So I don’t know the complexities of what he was talking about. I mean, I find the whole process suspect to be honest with you, because they just introduced this language here today without any notice to us whatsoever.”
“They’re certainly changing the rules in the middle of an election, a gubernatorial election,” and doing so to benefit the Republican candidate, Chaudhuri said.
“It is absolutely about Robinson,” he said. “I think the Republicans are probably running into limits as to how some of their larger donors could give money. That’s my sense. And this frees that up.”
Walkout and protesting the process
Berger said Senate Democrats walked out because he doesn’t “think they had any way to defend what the State Board of Elections has done. And so they decided to leave and not say anything on the floor about it. I also think that they abandoned their constituents by not registering their votes.”
Bode told The N&O on Thursday that what is ringing Democrats’ “alarm bells is the continuous theme of unaccountability.”
“This pay-to-play politics and lack of transparency has just been a theme throughout the supermajority, this biennium. And this is just a continuation of that.”
Bode said it’s also about the process.
“We cannot have a robust, thriving democracy if the people who are supposed to understand and vote on a bill, get it within minutes of walking onto the floor.”
Adding unrelated sections to bills happens from time to time, Western Carolina University politics professor Chris Cooper noted.
“Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that masking and campaign finance changes aren’t exactly the same kinds of issues. This will put legislators in a quandary and calls to mind the infamous motorcycle bill from a few years ago that was amended to add provisions on women’s reproductive health,” Cooper said.
House Minority Leader Robert Reives, a Chatham County Democrat, also took issue with the process and its timing related to the governor’s race.
“This new campaign finance legislation has never been seen before, but Republicans have attached it to an unrelated conference report that cannot be amended. This eviscerates individual campaign finance limits and allows billionaires from out of state to funnel unlimited money into a committee,” Reives said in a statement.
“They are changing the rules in the middle of an election that is already underway in an attempt to buy the governor’s mansion in North Carolina,” Reives said.
Democratic Sen. Michael Garrett told reporters that if lawmakers were “really trying to make campaign finance stronger and strengthen it, and increase transparency here at the General Assembly, we have a process that bills follow. It should go before a committee, we should have experts testify before committee, we should hear from the public.”
“But this bill was dropped on us while we were in session. So if the Republicans are really interested in strengthening campaign finance laws, we all would welcome that conversation and love to be a part of it. But that’s not what this is,” Garrett said.
Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of North Carolina For the People Action, told The N&O in a statement that there is one connection between campaign laws and masks.
“It’s safe to say that the changes put a bigger mask on the flow of money into N.C. politics — the changes create new ways for mystery money to corrupt elections. So more hypocrisy jammed into a bill alleging to unmask threats to the public,” Kromm said.
This story was originally published June 6, 2024 at 3:18 PM with the headline "NC Senate Democrats walk out before vote on surprise bill that could benefit GOP candidates."
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