Let’s call a spade a spade: The N.C. General Assembly is a dysfunctional mess. It’s September, the state budget is 65 dates late and counting, and the legislative leadership is hoping to pass a budget in, fingers crossed, two weeks. That’s just a problem.
Sadly, it isn’t even the biggest public policy debacle of the week up in Raleigh. That honor goes to a proposal that passed the House yesterday to change the date of the state’s primary election from May 3 to March 15. Previously, the legislature had committed to only holding the state’s presidential primary early. Why the sudden change of heart by the House? Well, it seems that it just dawned on them that holding an extra election date would cost local governments millions of dollars. Or maybe they just realized that local officials footing the bill might actually complain. Either way, the issue should have been completely obvious when the General Assembly voted in 2013 to move the presidential primary date and only the presidential primary date forward. So either legislators didn’t grasp the obvious, lack spine, or are playing petty political games. Even if lawmakers thought they got it wrong originally, they could have signaled their intent to move non-presidential primaries earlier rather than have it come up seemingly randomly when it did. If the GOP wants to run as a party of good government, it needs to do a better job than this.
