NC Senate passes bill shifting power from governor to General Assembly
Senate Republicans passed a bill Thursday to take a wide range of appointment powers from the governor, pushing the measure past Democratic opposition some three days after the bill was announced.
Senate Bill 512 tinkers with appointments on nine boards, including the N.C. Utilities Commission, which sets electricity rates, the Board of Transportation and the Environmental Management Commission, which sets pollution standards businesses must follow.
The measure passed on a party-line vote, 29-18, and it heads to the House of Representatives for more debate. It also could become part of legislative budget talks; the GOP majority often inserts policy changes that Gov. Roy Cooper and other Democrats don’t like into the state budget, forcing them to accept the policy or vote against the budget in full.
Senate Republicans said shifting key appointments from the governor to the General Assembly will yield a better, more balanced mix of qualified appointees and encourage diversity of thought. Many of the boards targeted make major regulatory decisions, and their membership is dominated by gubernatorial appointments.
In voting the bill through Thursday, Republicans rejected a Democratic proposal to forbid lawmakers from appointing lobbyists and recent campaign donors to these boards. The proposed amendment also would have forced the GOP majority to appoint some Democrats to these boards.
“If diversity of views matters to you, I hope you will support this amendment,” Sen. Lisa Grafstein, D-Wake, told her Republican colleagues.
The GOP majority tabled the amendment, which removed it from consideration without debate.
The Senate did approve one change for the bill Thursday, shrinking the state's Utilities Commission to five members. Currently the commission has seven members. Senate Bill 512 as introduced would have taken that to nine.
The nine affected boards currently have 66 gubernatorial appointments, according to Sen. Warren Daniel, the bill sponsor. Cooper, or the next governor, would keep 42 of those. No current appointees will have their terms cut short, said Daniel, R-Burke.
And while the General Assembly’s influence, and thus the legislature’s Republican majority, would see its influence increase significantly on each board, only on two of these boards would lawmakers appoint a majority of seats: the Board of Transportation and the state’s Economic Investment Committee, which decides job creation grants.
“This bill is about good shared government,” Daniel said.
The measure is the latest in a line of legislation seeking to strip the governor of power. The effort has prompted a number of lawsuits over the years, including McCrory v. Berger, which dealt with the division of appointment powers between the governor and General Assembly.
The executive branch won that case and Democrats, including Cooper, say this new bill is unconstitutional under that precedent. Daniel, who is a lawyer, said the bill’s changes “comply with existing case law or are distinguishable because of other factors.”
If this bill becomes law the state Supreme Court may ultimately decide that, and Republicans took a 5-2 majority on the court in November’s elections. Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, was the lone dissenting justice in the high court’s 2016 McCrory v. Berger decision.
