'Government Gestapo' created in NC budget? Democratic lawmakers raise alarms about investigative committee
North Carolina’s new state budget, approved Friday by state lawmakers, has a number of policy changes. One of them has critics making analogies to Nazi Germany.
The change would grant immense new powers to a state oversight committee, authorizing it to investigate state and local governments as well as private companies and charities. People who the committee feels haven't been fully cooperative could be charged with a crime. And anyone under investigation would face strict confidentiality rules — unable to talk to their coworkers, the media or anyone else about the legislature's actions, critics say.
Sen. Graig Meyer, D-Orange, said Republican lawmakers are trying to set up a “new, government Gestapo” that answers directly to GOP leadership at the state legislature, which they could use to carry out retribution against political enemies.
“We do not need a legislative spy agency," he said Thursday, calling it a "dangerous level of dark and dangerous government."
On Thursday, after House Democrats had also compared the newly empowered committee to the Gestapo, House Speaker Tim Moore brushed aside the criticism as hyperbole. Moore said he wouldn't be stepping down as speaker — he has previously said this will be his last term in the top job — if the Democrats' fears were accurate.
"Maybe I need to stick around for another term, if all that stuff's really true," Moore told reporters after the budget vote. "I mean, the reality is that's not what that's about it."
Lawmakers simply want to have more power to investigate state agencies, Moore said, pointing to the government's slow rollout of hurricane relief after Hurricane Florence in 2018, that Republicans have blamed on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration. So that’s why they want new powers for the legislature’s governmental operations committee, often called GovOps for short.
"People three years, four years after the hurricane still didn't have a home, and hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent," Moore said. "And those people were asking why. Their representatives were asking why. And so we asked why. And we got stonewalled a lot, so we need to have the ability to demand and insist that that information be provided.”
Senate leader Phil Berger also defended the change — which had never been publicly announced or debated before showing up in the state budget on Wednesday, about 18 hours before the first vote was called.
"We have a constitutional obligation to oversee what the executive branch is doing, so the GovOps committee is actually being modernized, to actually function," Berger said.
However, the changes wouldn’t only give the committee the power to investigate government agencies. Its investigators could also subpoena people and documents from private companies and charities that receive government funding. They'd also be able to demand access to buildings and even people's private homes, Democrats said.
“This allows grudges to be carried out, backlash for previous actions,” Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake, said.
During the Senate’s final budget debate Friday, Meyer pushed back against claims that Democrats were being hyperbolic.
“If you do business with the state and your business is registered at your home, that partisan legislative staff from GovOps could go into your home without a warrant to get documents from your home, including computer files,” Meyer said Friday.
Cooper, who opposes many portions of the budget, on Friday announced plans to let it become law without his signature in large part because it allows for one of his top priorities: Medicaid expansion, which would give health insurance to hundreds of thousands of the state’s working poor.
Meyer urged Republicans to read the GovOps language and consider revising it through a technical corrections bill at a later date.
“This is a level of intrusion of government that I don't think the majority of us want whether we're Republican or Democrat,” he said.
On Thursday, Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake, warned that legislative leaders could use the new GovOps powers against their political enemies.
“I would love to believe in a world where all people are responsible and would never ever use this commission to carry out their slights and disagreements,” she added.
Around the same time Dahle was making those remarks on the House floor, legislative staffers were clearing out a janitorial supply closet in the basement of the legislature, after Moore decided to force a Democratic lawmaker to move out of his normal office.
The Raleigh lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Terence Everitt, had earlier this year sent a letter to Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman asking that she consider a criminal investigation into Moore. Everitt cited reports that a woman Moore had been dating had received a combined 50% raise at her state government job, while they were dating.
Freeman, a Democrat, declined to investigate.
On Thursday, Moore wrote that he heard Everitt tried to hide from a member of the Senate recently, and so he was moving his office out of what Moore described as concern for his personal safety.
“All members should be able to express themselves without the need to hide in a staffer's office regardless of how timid they are to avoid direct confrontation," Moore wrote.
Everitt’s new office, LB24, was previously a janitor’s closet.
