The Sleepy Session
With North Carolina lawmakers not planning any more votes this year, GOP leadership has concluded a historically unproductive long session.
It appears top GOP leaders are content to leave Raleigh for the year without a budget. In fact, it’s been 776 days since lawmakers last passed a comprehensive spending plan.
Gov. Josh Stein last week signed off on a mini budget that included additional funding for security at the General Assembly and minor spending for the state’s ferry system and continued Hurricane Helene disaster relief.
Absent from the mini budget bill: Teacher and state worker pay raises, Medicaid funding, and income tax rate adjustments.
The governor slammed Republicans for redrawing two congressional districts in an effort to net the GOP an additional U.S. House seat, while punting on those big budget items.
“If they can come back to manipulate election maps for partisan gain, why can’t they come back to work to secure your health care?” Stein said in a video posted to X.
House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger entered the year optimistic about their ability to produce a budget. They now find themselves pointing the finger at each other.
Quick reminder: The House and Senate budgets had the same overall spending numbers, but the House wanted bigger raises for teachers and slower income tax cuts than the Senate had in its proposal, among other differences. Then, in separate bills this fall, the two GOP-led chambers agreed on funding to bolster Medicaid, but the Senate also proposed funds for a children’s hospital that House leaders didn’t want to include.
Berger’s office sent a news release last week saying the Senate had offered an updated Medicaid proposal with smaller amounts for the NC Children’s Hospital and a rural health care initiative. Berger said that was less than the House had agreed to appropriate for those programs in 2023, under different leadership.
“The House would not agree to the proposal and ended negotiations,” Berger’s office wrote.
Hall’s office said it favored “a clean version of the Senate’s September Medicaid proposal that removes unrelated capital projects but is otherwise identical to the other chamber’s proposal.”
Hall said last week not to expect any more votes this year, per CBS 17. A Berger spokesperson told the station the Senate expects the same. So now’s a good time to consider how productive the General Assembly has been in the last 10 months.
Historic lows
There are many ways to measure productivity. One metric is the number of bills that became law. If lawmakers don’t hold any more votes this year, they’ll have enacted 97 laws—the smallest annual total of any long session since Republicans gained full control of the legislature in 2011, according to data from the General Assembly.
