A week before the promised end of this legislative session, Republican leaders remain at odds over major issues, including whether they’ll rework the existing state budget to give bigger raises this year to North Carolina teachers and state employees.
Both the House and Senate also have plans to expand Medicaid in North Carolina, one of 12 states remaining that has declined billions in federal tax dollars to provide health insurance to hundreds of thousands of people. But they remain far apart on those plans, one of which was just released Wednesday.
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What happens next is hard to say. This legislative session could close with a number of high profile issues unresolved.
A limited legalization of medical marijuana passed the state Senate, but it seems to be a nonstarter in the House. The House and Senate are fighting, too, over hemp, marijuana’s nonintoxicating cousin, which could become illegal to grow at the end of this month if the two sides don’t strike a deal.
Farmers in what once was a growing industry are worried.
It looked like lawmakers were set to legalize mobile sports betting statewide this session, but that effort fell apart this week, leaving supporters to hope they can put a consensus back together in the session’s waning days. The governor and key Republican leaders, support the move, but bipartisan opposition took down crucial legislation on the House floor Wednesday by a single vote.
Uncertainty is not unusual at this point in a legislative session, but this session lawmakers have an abnormal number of high-profile disagreements as the days tick away. It’s not a partisan matter: Both the House and Senate have Republican majorities.
Much of the budget has been hashed out, including raises for teachers and state employees. Top lawmakers haven’t said what those increases will be, but negotiators for the House and Senate said this week that they reached an agreement above the 2.5% increases already planned if no new budget passes.
Whatever those new raises are, though, they’re dependent on the much broader budget plan passing each chamber, and there are other parts of the spending plan still in question. Those issues got kicked up to Speaker of the House Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, who have been meeting one-on-one and with staff for several days now to hash out details.
The two Republican leaders met Friday, and their spokespeople said they didn’t expect an immediate announcement on agreements. State Rep. Jason Saine, a House budget writer, said Thursday that budget conversations were “kind of breaking down,” in part because of House-Senate disagreements on so many other issues.
Berger and Moore both took a more optimistic view.
“We’re still talking,” Moore said. “As long as we’re talking, it’s good. … We generally always get this done. It’s not our first rodeo.”
But Moore, R-Cleveland, has also made it clear: There’s not much the House wants from this session with any immediacy, and the legislature will be back in session in January, after the November elections. Berger, R-Rockingham, has said much the same thing, though both men say they’d like to see a budget rewrite pass next week.
“There literally is nothing that we absolutely have to do,” Berger said this week. “Except maybe deal with that hemp issue, and hopefully get a budget.”
As for Medicaid, after a decade as a nonstarter for the legislature’s GOP majority, both chambers are now on board, but they have significantly different approaches. The Senate paired its expansion with a number of health regulation overhauls that House Republicans declared dead on arrival.
On Wednesday Moore released a House plan, but it would require another vote in December to actually expand Medicaid, something Berger immediately shot down as a needless delay. The Senate leader has repeatedly said that, once this session adjourns, which both sides plan to do on July 1, that’s it for this year’s lawmaking.
“Unless something outside happens that requires us to take some action, I don’t anticipate us doing anything,” Berger said. “Any kind of health bill or redistricting or anything like that, that’s not something that we are pursuing [after next week].”
Legislative deadlines, though, are sometimes made to be broken, and the House’s announcement this week on Medicaid was, if nothing else, a change.
L.T. McCrimmon, Gov. Roy Cooper’s lead lobbyist at the General Assembly and a veteran of this sort of back-and-forth, smiled Thursday when asked about expansion prospects.
“Now we’re at the starting line,” she said.
WRAL Sports Investigative Reporter Brian Murphy contributed to this report.