The Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly is shameless. They used their numbers to pass a bill that strips the newly elected Democratic Governor, State Attorney General, and State Superintendent of Schools of many of their powers.
Outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans overturned his veto.
The Republican power grab was embedded in a bill that shortchanged the victims of Hurricane Helene.
When will voters in North Carolina wise up and start voting for Democratic legislators? The ones they have now are not working on behalf of their constituents.
They are using their power to protect their power and perks. The public be damned! Vote them out!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
GOP has the money and the media . To combat that disadvantage – Dems need to get back to local , well designed inexpensive marketing that focuses on the economic and health needs of voters and that aims to make candidates names and ideas -well known .
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Republicans continue to prove they don’t give a damn about the voters.
And the idiot voters let them.
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Time to invest in a start-up company selling T-shirts with the front slogan ‘Toldja’ and the back one ‘But You Didn’t Listen. Didja?’.
70,000,000+ potential customers
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Why am I not surprised?
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What is ironic about this is that for all the hand wringing going on here about the the GOP stripping the power of Democratic officials, no one seems to remember or care that for 75 years, the Democrats did the same thing to the GOP in North Carlolina. See this storry published on December 11:
North Carolina Exposes the Truth About Swing States | TIME
So in response, the public did exactly what you are calling for, they voted the Democrats out. If the GOP over reaches, which is most likely will, the voters may decide to vote them out.
Emotionally charged hypocritical rhetoric is exactly why our nation is in the mess it is in. This is why our national elections come down to bad candidates like Biden/ Harris or Trump. I have many colleagues from other nations who keep asking me what’s going on in the US? I keep telling them, it didn’t used to be like this. Sadly, social media, and blogs like this encourage nasty rhetoric that pits us against each other, while the ruling class keeps laughing and depositing our money into their bank account.
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Our Nation truly is in a mess. The problem is that politics has become a miserable heavy weight fight, blue team vs red team , yet they forget that most everyone being fought over/about are “purple”. I live in a solidly blue state and we have lots of services and lots of good social programs, but there is a price tag associated with that….high taxes and lots of silly nanny rules….which irks a lot of purple people as well as enraging a lot of the reds.
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I could not agree more. For decades what made America “America” was that it was not a Euro-nanny state. Now, especially in blue-states, there seems to be a race to become more European.. more cosmopolitan. It would be wide for those in power in those deep red states to look at Germany, the UK, or even France, and ask if we really want to end up that way? Their economies are in shambles, and have become largely anti-immigrant. Unfortunately, too many of our public schools don’t teach students that we fought a war about 240 years a go to not be like that.
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I wish we would become more like the Scandinavian countries, where education and healthcare are available to all, at low or no cost.
Health and education should be considered human rights, not consumer goods.
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Diane, I’m totally with you on the value of following the Scandinavian model.
(And no one had free health care or education 240 years ago that our founders were fighting against, so I fail to see any correlation between what happened then and the supposed “nanny-state” in Europe today.)
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The people who complain most about the nanny state are well-heeled. They don’t need anything although they are probably subsidized in many ways by government programs. Will they refuse Medicare and Social Security?
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Ms Ravitch….that statement is THE reason that team blue lost in every which way shape and form. I’m an Independent centrist and what you just stated made my hackles rise! Team blue likes to tell everyone how to live their lives according to team blue rules and they aren’t afraid to throw around the fact that they are “well educated”….which is just code speak for “listen to me because I’m smarter than you”.
Yep, the Scandinavian nations have it correct, but they are small compared to the US. Yet the Scandinavians come here and talk about how restrictive it is and how many rules there are to follow and how we mistreat our children, the elderly and the infirm and that our food is unhealthy and our lifestyle is unhealthy? Where DO our tax dollars go?….hmmm
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LisaM,
I used to be quite conservative, but my views changed as I got older.
I realized that I don’t want to live in a country where people starve or die on the street because they can’t afford food or medical care.
Those who object to government programs seem to have no qualms about using Medicare or taking Social Security. Or using highways paid for by the federal government or taking air safety for granted, thanks to the feds.
It all depends on what kind of society you want to live in.
I don’t want to live in a society where life is nasty, brutish and short.
Republicans are very happy to be the nanny state when it comes to the books you are allowed to read, the medical care you are allowed to access, the decisions you make about procreation.
They love to police your personal behavior, but not to assure you access to good healthcare and education.
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The US is the richest most powerful nation, so far, we can afford Medicare for all and affordable higher education. We have Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and some other social programs and they work. We are far richer than the Scandinavian countries which have all these great social programs: universal healthcare, affordable or free university education. WE can do it here, too.
Nanny state is a RIGHT WING SLUR that is bogus, wrong and untrue. Is having public roads a nanny state thing?
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Joe Jersey….You prove my point yet again about team blue.
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LisaM– Well, I started out typing that I didn’t like your tone, with its broad-brush characterizations. I had to backspace right over that beginning, because I can pick out any number of comments here from the other aisle that do the exact same thing.
So let me try a different way. I do not consider my state, blue-blue NJ, a “nanny state.” One example illustrates the general drift here. In summer ’22, Gov Murphy issued a new sex education standard for public schools. It included that K-2 was to be instructed in gender orientation and identity.
But “issued by govr” in NJ is not like “issued by govr” in, say, Florida. Local control is a big thing here. No gigunda county school districts, e.g.—each town has their own. And a gov’r-issued ed standard has to be approved by school board and signed off by Supt before it is implemented. You can’t just ignore the standard, but there’s a lot of flexibility built in to accommodate local druthers. So for example, Toms River, one of the first districts to review the standard, simply highlighted the section to which they took exception and marked it “to be implemented at home by parent(s) or guardian as age-appropriate.” [In other words: “feel free to ignore.”] (A whole lot of districts did the same; Murphy ended up sending it back to the state DofEd for a re-draft…)
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I think Biden was a great President!!
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There are so many ways in which this is incorrect. First, the Democrats in NC did not do anything nearly as egregious as this blatant power grab by Republicans, and what they did do was now decades ago. None of the current crop of legislators or anyone else in state government was around when this was last an issue with Democrats. No, this is part of a decades-long plan by both the state and nations GOP to seize and maintain power no matter what.
The real problem is the gerrymander, which is now the most extreme in the nation. This is far in excess of anything the Democrats once did. It has locked in a GOP legislative majority with no chance they’ll be voted out any time soon, because they keep updating the gerrymander to keep themselves in their majority. Since the Legislature has sole power over redistricting in NC, only the courts have been able to reign them in, thus their current attempt to unseat State SC Justice Riggs by trying to have almost 60,000 legitimate votes thrown out (which has so far failed, but don’t underestimate their desire to capture this seat.) It’s in this environment that they want to gain control of the state and county boards of election, the most important (of many) power grabs because it’s only been the state BoE that’s prevented them from disenfranchising whole swaths of voters.
If you really want to understand what’s going on, don’t read a national magazine like Time (and especially not one that’s basically center-right like they are.) Read the NC press and you’ll see they treat this very differently. Here, for instance, is a fine article from NC Newsline on exactly why the NCGOP’s excuses for this power grab are bogus. Believe me, those of us who live in NC do not view this as a tit-for-tat play of politics, but as the authoritarian power play that it is.
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DId you read the article? I completely agree that gerrymandering is a problem, but both sides do it equally. Both sides play the same tricks on each other and on us. To say one side does it worse is at best uninformed.
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MjGB3– The article from Time is fascinating, thanks for linking that. I wonder if we would find the same pattern in all our “battleground” states– if so, aptly named.
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Diane, This issue had a very familiar ring to me and now I recall why. At least 10 years ago, you wrote several times about how, as governor, Mike Pence stripped Democrat Glenda Ritz of her powers as the elected State Commissioner of Education…
So there’s a GOP pattern of doing this kind of thing? Hmm. I had never heard of that happening before it occurred in Indiana under Pence and I didn’t know it was even possible until then. I can see where we’re going with this a lot more clearly now and I am not at all surprised. Surely tRump & his MAGA party are trying to do the same thing in the states that they are doing in the federal government. Oh G-d help us!!!
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The GOP did this in Wisconsin when they had a supermajority. They shifted powers away from the newly elected Democratic governor to themselves.
It has happened elsewhere, in NC too. GOP does not accept results of elections they lose.
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Diane, Thanks for reminding me about Wisconsin –and the horrible Scott Walker et al, which I had forgotten but now recall reading about here as well years ago.
The GOP is truly awful and has been, I think, for most of my lifetime. My family could never stand them, even when Eisenhower was POTUS, because they loved Adlai Stevenson so much. But I have to commend Eisenhower for continuing the high tax rate on the wealthy, since that contributed so much to the rise of the middle class. I personally think that party has been really terrible ever since dirty-trickster Nixon (“if the president does it, it’s legal”) became POTUS. Some role model…
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Trump makes Nixon look like a superstar
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So true. Same with off any chart MAGA vs traditional GOP –which you used to be able to expect to adhere to the Constitution at least, but I wouldn’t count on them to do that now.
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Wisconsin just got a big win for labor union rights:
Took ten years, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/08/wisconsin-unions-court-restores-collective-bargaining-rights
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Great news!!
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Christine, That really is good news, so thanks for sharing it! But I think it took a dreadfully long time for justice to prevail.
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