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Ongoing NC GOP debacle thread

wakephan09 said:
Holy god, is JHMD really on the NC State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement? Nine members (eight Republicans, eight democrats, one unaffiliated).

Dissolved by court order at noon today.
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I really hoped you were joking. Wow.
 
Just got the following "legislative update" from Phil Berger with the headline Democrats Seek to Reduce Influence of Rural Voters in Redistricting Lawsuit. The whole thing is an exercise in incredible hypocrisy, but the first paragraph is truly laughable. Since you have run the state for the past 6 years, what have you done to help rural folks with those "basic needs", Phil? Stonewalled Medicaid expansion, which puts rural hospitals out of business, and pass laws refusing to allow counties and towns to establish their own broadband service to compete with the monopolies who refuse to serve rural areas. It would be funny if it wasn't so brazen.

Legislative Update
Rural North Carolinians already face a number of challenges in their day-to-day lives including access to basic needs like medical care and broadband. But now they face a new challenge as well: Democrats are waging a war on small towns, trying to take away the value of their vote.
In states across the nation, Democrats face the same problem that they do here in North Carolina: too many of their voters are concentrated in the urban centers of the state, resulting in lopsided victories in a few districts and modest defeats in the rest.
Rather than convincing more voters in rural areas to vote for them, Democrats are pushing a flawed “proportional representation” argument in lawsuits that seek to have liberal judges strip rural voters of their political influence and change 200+ years of geographic diversity in government.
Democrats would love nothing more than to have a system that gives cities outsized influence where they can just ignore rural voters, but our government doesn’t work that way. In fact, our system is specifically designed to protect against that scenario. The votes of citizens in rural areas count just as much as those of citizens in cities.
In November, North Carolina Democrats jumped on this bandwagon, filing a lawsuit asking the Democratic-controlled North Carolina state courts to draw new legislative maps to favor Democrats and reduce the influence of rural voters. They argue that a 50/50 Republican-Democrat statewide vote should result in a 50/50 party split in the legislature.
Democrats conveniently turn a blind eye in instances where this argument would benefit Republicans. Based on their own logic, Democrats should be up in arms about the fact that Wake and Mecklenburg County Republicans have no representation in the N.C. State House despite winning about a third of the vote in each county during last year’s elections. Yet they remain silent.
The fact of the matter is, while Democrats may claim their goals with this lawsuit are just “fair maps” and ending “partisan gerrymandering,” their real goal couldn’t be any clearer: get liberal judges to draw maps to elect more Democrats and reduce the political power of rural North Carolinians.


Senator Phil Berger
http://www.philberger.org/
________________________________________
16 W Jones Street, Room 2007 · Raleigh, NC 27601-2808
This email was sent to . To stop receiving emails, click here.
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LOL. Mecklenberg County Republicans have no representation because that’s how N.C. Republicans planned it.
 
Deacon923 said:
Just got the following "legislative update" from Phil Berger with the headline Democrats Seek to Reduce Influence of Rural Voters in Redistricting Lawsuit. The whole thing is an exercise in incredible hypocrisy, but the first paragraph is truly laughable. Since you have run the state for the past 6 years, what have you done to help rural folks with those "basic needs", Phil? Stonewalled Medicaid expansion, which puts rural hospitals out of business, and pass laws refusing to allow counties and towns to establish their own broadband service to compete with the monopolies who refuse to serve rural areas. It would be funny if it wasn't so brazen.
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Phil Berger is a loathsome toad of a man, and on par with Trump on the political revulsion scale, imo. His contempt for teachers and public ed is well-known, and under his "leadership" teaching assistants have been gutted across the state, extra pay for graduate degrees has been cut, and enrollment in teacher ed programs across the state have plummeted. He's also a huge fan of for-profit charters, and tried to set his son up as the owner/leader of one in Rockingham County (it never even opened). As usual, his statement above is a complete reversal of the actual situation.

It's Berger and the NC GOP that's been waging war against urban NC for the past six years. They've done everything in their power to reduce the political and economic clout of NC cities by forcibly redistricting county commissioner districts (as in Guilford County), and trying to take away Charlotte and Asheville's ability to control their own airports. Berger's claims of poor-victim rural counties is ridiculous, given that rural interests have dominated this legislature since 2011, with Berger being a ringleader. And his claim of healthcare problems is grossly hypocritical, given that it's Berger and his legislature that have refused to accept state Medicaid expansion. I've heard stories from people I know in Rockingham County and elesewhere - including some Trumpite Republicans - about Berger, and none of them have been good. In fact, almost every Republican I know who has met or dealt with him personally despises him.
 
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Republicans have created their own post-factual reality. They have convinced millions of Americans that the real enemy of our country is Democrats, and if you don't believe that, then you are a RINO and not a real American. They consistently use double-speak to generate support by attacking those who don't fall in line. "Democrats are dividing our country. If you are a real American, you vote Republican."
Once they firmly established this tribal premise, then the Republican leadership is free to break moral and ethical norms with impunity.
 
WFFaithful said:
Republicans have created their own post-factual reality. They have convinced millions of Americans that the real enemy of our country is Democrats, and if you don't believe that, then you are a RINO and not a real American. They consistently use double-speak to generate support by attacking those who don't fall in line. "Democrats are dividing our country. If you are a real American, you vote Republican."
Once they firmly established this tribal premise, then the Republican leadership is free to break moral and ethical norms with impunity.
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Agreed. I do believe, though, that reality eventually wins out over fantasy, and even if it takes a long time I think the alt-reality the GOP has carefully constructed over the past few decades will eventually implode. They did the same thing in the 1920s and it eventually collapsed. I think it will likely happen again at some point. Until then, though, it's created a completely dysfunctional government and fragmented American society to a greater extent than even the 1960s, and perhaps since the Civil War.
 
WakeForestRanger said:
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Karma in action. What really makes it sweet is that, thanks to the Democratic gains in the legislature in the midterms, the GOP no longer has a veto-proof majority. So even if Phil Berger & Company want to try and interfere with Cooper's plans, he can now veto any action they take and it will be upheld in the legislature.
 
WFFaithful said:
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LOL. The notion of Religious Right hero Dan Forest as a uniter is a joke. His video also illustrates one of the GOP's favorite talking points - it's only liberals who are dividing the country. If they would just shut up and stop fighting for the things they believe in and exercising their first amendment rights to free speech and protest, we could all unite behind the GOP's glorious rule. Every scary image in that video just happens to show radicals and liberals - not a single conservative, evidently, has ever engaged in violence at protests (Charlottesville, anyone?) I'm sure that whatever polling firm he's hired has told him that polling shows that people are tired of division and want "unity." Too bad he's not the guy to provide it, although I'm sure that, if elected, he'll do his best to exacerbate the divisions in our state, especially against gays, transgenders, and the other favorite targets of the hardcore Religious Right.
 
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Yep. They like to call for civility but don’t you dare air an ad calling for men to stop being shitty.
 
Really glad to see Newby passed over for Chief Justice and proceed to throw a fit like the bitch he is. Hope he enjoys being the only conservative on the court this year.
 
Newby complaining about the governor making the court partisan by complaining about the governor in a partisan way.
 
Some people just have no shame. You would think that even an entitled OWG like Newby would not publicly whine that he got passed over for the top job on a court made up 5-2 in favor of the other party by a governor of the other party. At least let surrogates like Berger do the whining for you. I guess Newby doesn't care too much about even the appearance of impartiality on the court, since he has now basically announced he'll be voting against the governor at every opportunity. He's our little state-level Brett Kavanaugh I guess.
 
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