Fury From North Carolina Should Come to Washington

By Bartlett D. Cleland Institute for Policy Innovation. Breathless end-of-the-world sounding headlines that bring MacBeth to mind ...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.  But in this case there is significancethough different than what the media would like you to believe. The headlines demonstrate that liberals still do not understand what happened in November and worse do not understand the fury of many Americans. In North Carolina late last week the legislature approved several reforms that will limit the power of the governor and return that power to the legislature. The media response was predictable given what passes for coherent public policy thinking and political discourse. According to the New York Times Protesters in North Carolina spent a second day chanting and disrupting debate as some were arrested and led away from the state legislative building in plastic wrist restraints. The article explains: Democratic lawmakers repeatedly referred to the legislatures move as a power grab carried out by a Republican Party upset that their candidate Gov. Pat McCrory had lost the governors race. Republicans countered by emphasizing that they had suffered similar indignities for many decades when Democrats controlled the legislature here. One senator noted ...that the changes return power that was grabbed during Democratic administrations in the 1990s and some in the 70s. While the timing of these changes immediately gives rise to the thinking that the motivation was purely political the goal is importantreturning power to the people via their representatives in the legislature. Hopefully the new U.S. Congress will do the same over the next couple years. The powers loaned to the federal government by the states and the people were few but the powers provided to the president by the Constitution were intentionally limited even further. The restraint was intended to prevent the president from becoming an autocrat. The fight to constrain the executives power has been underway from the beginning. Congress used to have some notable champions defending the powers of the legislature and thereby the voice of the people. For the last several decades those voices seem to be few and weak. The recent rampage of executive orders is just the latest step in diminishing Congress and merely a hint of things to come. Another example of the shift from the people to an autocracy or even a king: allowing the president to enforce laws that suit him or not enforce them and thereby effectively making whatever was supposed to be illegal legal. Now is the time for Congress like the North Carolina legislature to take back the powers it has ceded to the executive branch over the years. It is time for Congress to reinforce the limits imposed on executive power while preserving the power of the peoples branch of government. Congress should and must make decisions again or ultimately like the presidential election face the voters sound and fury signifying everything. Todays PolicyByte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland research fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation. North Carolinas Legislative Coup Is Over and Republicans Won The Eerily Familiar North Carolina Coup Weve All Forgotten GOPs illegal power grab in North Carolina