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Saturday, December 7, 2013
In North Carolina, a wingnut shift hits a roadblock
A crowd of thousands cheer in support
during a speech by Rev Dr. William Barber II, president of the North
Carolina NAACP in Asheville, NC's Pack Square Park during Mountain Moral
Monday on Aug 5, 2013.
By Zachary Roth
During an appearance at The Heritage Foundation in Washington,
D.C, a key center of power for the conservative movement, North Carolina
Gov. Pat McCrony portrayed himself as a business-minded policy wonk,
earnestly extolling the benefits of infrastructure development and
government-efficiency measures. He might as well have been describing
someone else.
For the last year, McCrony has engineered a hard-right shift in North
Carolina that has crippled millions in his state. His 2012 election
gave repugicans control of all three branches of the state’s government
for the first time since Reconstruction and they took advantage of it.
In 2013 alone, North Carolina has said no to expanding Medicaid under
Obamacare, approved a tax plan that redistributes wealth from poor to
rich, cut education by half a billion dollars, instituted perhaps the
toughest voting restrictions in the country, weakened campaign-finance
laws, and passed its own version of Texas’ controversial abortion
measure.
Herbert Grant cheers in support during a
speech by Rev Dr. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina
NAACP in Asheville, NC’s Pack Square Park during Mountain Moral Monday
on Aug 5, 2013.
In short, the repugican cabal has turned America’s 10th-largest state
—traditionally known as a rare bastion of southern moderation—into a
massive testing ground for pure wingnut ideology. The hard-wingnut
lurch has already inflicted hardship on countless North Carolinians. And
it has offered a real-world glimpse of the playbook that many wingnuts—including McCrony’s hosts at Heritage—would like to use
across the country.For McCrony—and his audience at Heritage—his extreme red-state
experiment was supposed to deliver a success story that wingnuts
could be proud of. Instead, a growing backlash against the
overreach—laws affecting women, minorities and the poor—is starting to
cause real pain for the governor and his allies. His approval ratings
have declined sharply, as have those for his repugican legislators.
The pushback against McCrony’s harsh brand of governance began with
home-grown progressive protests known as “Moral Monday” events. The
campaign has been spearheaded not by state Democrats, but by a coalition
of activist groups including the NAACP, labor unions, environmental
groups, abortion-rights advocates.
A summer protest in Ashville, a lively college town in the state’s
mountainous western region, drew a passionate, racially-diverse,
overflow crowd heavy on teachers, students, volunteer activists, and
young families.
“Don’t make any mistake, America,” William Barber III, the state’s
NAACP president and Moral Monday’s most prominent spokesman, told the
crowd. “This is no momentary hyperventilation and liberal screaming
match. This is a movement. And we intend to win.” “That’s why I go every Monday and fight”
For all the attention that the state’s regressive voting law has
rightly received, it’s the cuts to the jobless benefits program that
have had perhaps the greatest human impact so far—as Terry Johnson can
attest.
Laid off last November from her customer-service job at Allstate,
Johnson relied on the $320 a week she got in unemployment benefits to
support herself and her two kids as she searched for work from her home
in Rowan County, North Carolina. But on July 1st, the state cut off
jobless benefits for nearly 70,000 struggling North Carolinians,
including Johnson.
That left her unable to afford school supplies for her 10-year-old
son, Coty, unsure if she’ll be able to pay the electric bill, and
without even enough money for gas to get to job interviews, Johnson, a
personable 41-year old with a round, open face and long brown hair, told
MSNBC as she sat at a Charlotte Starbucks. She had just interviewed for
a part-time Post Office position—only 13 hours a week, but better than
nothing—a trip for which she’d borrowed the $9 from her sister to fill
up the tank.
“It’s hard,” Johnson said, her upbeat demeanor cracking as her eyes
welled with tears. “I know that I’m going to make it somehow, because
I’m determined to. But it would make it a lot easier if they had not
taken my benefits away.”
Terry Johnson, 41 at her home in Rockwell, NC
on Aug 23, 2013. Johnson lost her unemployment in July as a result of
recent North Carolina legislation and takes part is protests and
political rallies in the area. “They took the fight to my front door”
Says Johnson.
McCrony has said the cuts were needed to help pay back more
than $2.5 billion that the system had borrowed from the federal
government in order to cover benefits during the Great Recession, when
the jobless rate went as high as 11.3% in North Carolina. But by making
the cuts, the state was knowingly rejecting over $700 million in federal
money meant to be used for extended jobless benefits, the only state in
the country to reject the federal money. That’s because that aid is
contingent on a pledge by states not to cut benefits too sharply. Some 70,000, including Johnson, were cut off at the start of July.
Another 100,000 jobless North Carolinians are likely to lose benefits by
the end of the year thanks to the state’s rejection of the federal
money, the U.S. Department of Labor has estimated. George Wentworth, a
lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, has called the move
“the harshest unemployment insurance program cuts in our nation’s
history.”
Rather than despair, Johnson has fought back. Since her benefits were
cut, she’s begun volunteering with Moral Monday—motivated in part by
the impact on Coty.
“My son gets locked out of a lot of things because I don’t have a
job, and it’s not for lack of trying or qualifications,” she said.
“That’s why I go every Monday and fight.” “Will take women’s health over cookies”
To have a real chance of reversing the repugican agenda, the Moral
Monday movement will need to unseat McCrony and the repugican cabal legislature.
That’s a long-term goal, but already the protesters have done more
damage than many expected.
Approval ratings for McCrony, who faces re-election in 2016, have
tumbled: One poll earlier this month put him at 39%—up from 35% two
months earlier, but still a decline of 8 points over the last eight
months. Tom Jensen, who runs Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling
firm based in the state, said the Moral Monday protesters have played a
big role in that decline.
“I think they have really had an impact on the governor,” Jensen told
msnbc. “What the protesters have done is really draw attention to the
fact that, yes what the legislature’s doing is bad, but also the
governor is very much complicit in it.”
In short, the repugican cabal has turned
America’s 10th-largest state —traditionally known as a rare bastion of
southern moderation—into a massive testing ground for pure wingnut
ideology.
The repugican lawmakers, too, have taken a major hit. A year before
legislative elections, PPP shows Democratic candidates with a 2-point
edge—a massive swing from 2010 when the repugican cabal retook both the Assembly and
Senate by a ten-point margin.
The state Democratic party hasn’t been at the forefront of the Moral
Monday protests—in part by design—but even they say they’re seeing a
spike in enthusiasm from their supporters.
“We have activists calling up the party wanting to know how they can
get involved,” Robert Dempsey, the state party’s executive director,
told MSNBC. “This is normally the downtime, when we’re making our plans
and coming up with our strategy. People are engaged and they’re
enraged.”
Nowhere has Moral Monday been more effective at tarnishing McCrony’s image as a reasonable guy than on the issue of abortion.
In July, pro-choice protesters angry about the strict abortion bill
McCrony had signed the day before gathered outside the governor’s
mansion demanding a meeting. The bill, quietly inserted into a
motorcycle safety measure, was as far-reaching as the Texas law that
prompted Wendy Davis’ 13-hour filibuster in June.
It mandated that health officials come up with new rules to more
strictly regulate abortion clinics. Pro-choice advocates fear that could
result in the closure of all but one of the clinics operating before
the law was passed, or force them to raise hundreds of thousands of
dollars to meet the new standards, something few will be able to do. It
also eliminated healthcare coverage for abortions for city and county
employees—affecting tens of thousands of women, advocates say—and from
North Carolina’s health insurance exchange under Obamacare.
McCrony’s signature on the bill violated a clear campaign pledge not
to support further restrictions on abortion. But instead of sitting down
with the heavily-female group of protesters, he sent them cookies—which
were promptly returned untouched with a note that read: “Will take
women’s health over cookies.”
“An overwhelming majority of voters in the state thought McCrony’s
actions were inappropriate,” said Jensen, who polled on the incident.
“Even repugicans thought he was disrespectful.” A war on voting
The movement also has done major damage to voting rights. This
summer, the repugican cabal took advantage of the Supreme Court ruling that
invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—which had covered about
half of the state’s counties—to pass a “voting reform” measure that is
breathtakingly restrictive, even by the standards of the party’s recent
all-out effort to create barriers to the ballot box.
It requires voters to show a state-issued photo ID—despite the
state’s own numbers showing that 316,000 registered voters lack such an
ID—significantly cuts back early voting, ends same-day voter
registration, and eliminates a popular program that encouraged
high-school students to pre-register to vote. The law is so strict that
it could disenfranchise a 92-year old African-American woman who
outsmarted literacy tests and braved cross-burnings to vote in North
Carolina during Jim Crow, according to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP
challenging the measure. The U.S. Justice Department has also filed
suit.
Rev. Dr. William Barber II, president of the
North Carolina NAACP speaks to a crowd of thousands gathered in
Asheville, NC’s Pack Square Park during Mountain Moral Monday on Aug 5,
2013.
The repugicans tried hard to keep the focus on the law’s voter
ID requirement, which, in North Carolina as in much of the rest of the
country, is broadly popular. But the protesters quickly turned people
against the bill by highlighting the cutbacks to early voting and the
obstacles to registration, provisions which lacked even the fig-leaf
justification of stopping voter fraud. Barber called the law “the most
comprehensive attack on the right to vote that this state has enacted
since the institution of Jim Crow.”“What the protesters did was sort of create a greater level of
awareness that they’re going well beyond voter ID now,” said Jensen.
“You might think [voter ID] is a good idea, but do you really like all
this other stuff?”
By August, when McCrony signed the bill into law, just 39% of voters
backed it, PPP found. In his Heritage Foundation appearance, McCrony
blamed the media for the law’s unpopularity, saying its impact had been
exaggerated.
In the latest sign of backlash generated by the measure, the man
charged with defending the law in court, Attorney General Roy Cooper, a
Democrat, joined the chorus of criticism. In an op-ed Cooper, a
potential challenger to McCrony in 2016, called the law part of a repugican cabal
effort to “systematically undo 50 years of progress.”
It didn’t help the law’s cause when a local repugican official was
forced last month to resign after saying of the measure, in an interview
on The Daily Show: “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” Rejecting Obamacare
The state’s anti-Obamacare stance, and its deep cuts to education,
have been additional spurs to action for some of those left out in the
cold.
Earlier this year, McCrony announced that North Carolina, like 23
other states, would reject the expansion of Medicaid created under the
law. He cited budget concerns, though the federal government would pay
the full cost of the program for the first three years, and more than
90% of the cost through 2020.
Paula Dinga at the Mountain Moral Mondays in
downtown Asheville on Aug. 5, 2013. Dinga, a teacher, came to protest NC
budget cuts for education. She says that all of the teachers that she
knows, including herself pay for school supplies out of their own
pocket.
Bethany Dalton, an unemployed single mother of two from
Asheville, was one of 387,000 currently uninsured North Carolinians who
would have been eligible for the expansion. Because of child support
payments, Dalton makes a little over the $544-a-month limit—or just
$6,528 a year—that North Carolina currently deems too rich for Medicaid,
she told msnbc. The expansion would essentially have raised that
eligibility threshold. Without it, she’ll continue to go uninsured as
she tries to improve her prospects by going back to school. Like Terry
Johnson, Dalton is now active with the Moral Monday movement.The state’s public school teachers, too, have been mobilized. The
budget passed by repugicans this summer contained over $500 million in
cuts to public education, on top of even bigger cuts that came in 2011,
the repugican cabal’s first year in control of the legislature.
Advocates for public education say it will mean layoffs for as many
as 5,000 teachers, bigger classes, less money for school supplies and
teacher assistant jobs, and no more supplemental pay for teachers to
pursue advanced degrees.
Paula Dinga, a teacher in Asheville who attended the protest, was one
of several educators who told msnbc they’re forced to buy school
supplies for their students.
“I always spend money out of my own pocket,” Dinga said. “Everybody I
know spends money out of their pocket. I provide crayons, markers,
notebooks, folders—anything a child needs.” “The fire’s going to grow and grow”
Despite the success that the protesters have had in damaging repugicans, no one expects the repugican cabal to lose control of either house in
next year’s election. The party’s 2010 victory allowed it to control the
state’s redistricting process the following year. The result: In 2012,
North Carolina repugicans won 54% of votes cast for state Senate
candidates, but over 64% of state Senate seats, giving them
super-majorities in both houses.
“This is one of the most severely gerrymandered states in the
country,” Chris Fitzsimon, the executive director of NC Policy Watch, a
progressive group based in Raleigh, told msnbc. “So they’re taking what
is a small electoral mandate and, because of the gerrymandering, turning
it into a radical restructuring of North Carolina.”
Wingnuts also have flooded the airwaves with outside money.
Three quarters of the spending by outside groups in state races in
2010 could be traced back to Art Pope, the multi-millionaire owner of a
discount-score conglomerate who has forged a reputation as a kind of
state-level Koch Brother. Backed by Pope—who now serves as McCrony’s top
budget adviser—the repugican cabal won both houses of the legislature in that
year’s tea party wave.
But North Carolinians have had enough.
“A big part of what this movement is doing that’s different from last
time is there’s an outlet to continue that beating down on McCrony and
the legislature in a way that there wasn’t two years ago,” Jensen
said—and compared the campaign to another recent grassroots protest
movement.
“The protesters are serving kind of a similar function for Democrats
in North Carolina to what the tea party did nationally for repugicans
in 2009 and 2010,” said Jensen. “Giving people a structure outside the
Democratic party to express their unhappiness with what’s going on.”
Barber, of the NAACP, seems to understand that the challenge will be
maintaining the current intensity into next fall and beyond.
“They say the fire’s going to go out by 2014,” he told the crowd in
Asheville. “But I don’t believe that. I believe the fire’s going to grow
and grow.”
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