Premier Week at Legislature: Which Bills Live or Die?

Legislative News by Nelda Holder –

May 13, 2021 is the crossover deadline in the NC Legislature, when most bills in the House must win passage to the Senate or die.

We know, however, that some zombie bills will reappear by capturing the title of another bill that met the deadline, which makes for some head-scratching when you try to relate substance to title. But that’s another matter….

In this column, we’re scrutinizing some of the bills that have already jumped the fence and some that are in the running for immediate action to do so—but which you might still have time to lobby your representatives about, yay or nay.

Also, looming in the background is this session’s budget battle. Because it is legally allowed to do so, the Legislature—after a great deal of wrangling with the governor—chose to let the official 2019 budget stand because they could not reach an agreement over spending goals for 2020-21. At this point, the weaknesses of that budgeting process in meeting state needs and priorities has seemingly sunk in.

This session, Gov. Roy Cooper and top legislative officials appear more willing to pursue a joint goal of pragmatic compromise. We’ll see if that actually comes true.

Crossed over the bridge

Several “interesting” bills that have already been passed in the House include HB 453 (Human Life Nondiscrimination Act/No Eugenics)—a controversial bill that passed in the House on May 6 on a 67-42 vote, sponsored solely by Republicans. It is a sort of end run around a woman’s right to choose a termination of pregnancy by forbidding what it calls “discrimination of human life.”

Specifically, it cites the federal American With Disabilities Amendments Act of 2010 to outlaw “eugenic manipulation” in abortion, i.e. “discrimination” based on sex or genetic abnormalities. It thus prohibits the practice of abortion for the purpose of “terminating the life of an unborn child because of that child’s race, sex, or the presence or presumed presence of a genetic abnormality like Down Syndrome.”

A number of reports and editorials have seized upon the verbiage of the bill in a state where the term “eugenics” is rife with the history of state-sponsored sterilization in the form of a eugenics program that sterilized thousands of men and women from 1929 to 1974.

The goal of the state at that time was supposedly to sterilize the “mentally defective or feeble-minded” in public-funded institutions or prisons. Statistics indicate a large majority of sterilization cases involved Black citizens. All of these are inconvenient facts the bill’s author(s) seems to have ignored.

A second notable crossover is HB 536 (Law Enforcement Duty to Intervene). Short and straightforward, the bill would make it the legal obligation of law enforcement officers in the line of duty to intervene when they observe another officer use excessive force against another person—provided it is safe to do so. The bill would also require the observing officer to report unauthorized use of force to a superior within 72 hours. If passed, the bill would go into effect on December 1 of this year. Notably, this bill carries bipartisan sponsorship.

A third bill, HB 755 (Academic Transparency), which passed in the House on May 5, would, I confess, give me nightmares if I were a schoolteacher in this state trying to dedicate my time to teaching children.

This “transparency” has to do with requiring all teachers (unless in a school of fewer than 400 students, which might give one pause—or unless, it would also seem, in a school that receives state-funded academic scholarship money for private education) to file and display a list of all instructional material and lesson plans used during the prior year. Lesson plans must identify all instructional materials with a brief descriptor and an online link to the material (if publicly available), or instructions for obtaining a review copy.

It further requires that any procedures for the documentation, review, or approval of the lesson plans (including instructional materials) be identified, and that review of instructional material not publicly available on the internet be made possible.

This is, again, an all-Republican sponsored bill which is now in the Senate Committee on Rules and Operations.

Then there’s HB 32—the Equity in Opportunity Act—which passed the House earlier in April and is associated with the state’s voucher program, providing Opportunity Scholarship grants for eligible students to attend private schools. As we have written in this column before, these private schools face no curriculum requirement nor teacher certification mandates—much less a requirement to post all instructional materials as is being called for in HB 755 above.

In the current legislative changes, the former voucher amount of $4,200 is changed to a maximum of 80% of the average rate per pupil allocation of the prior fiscal year—a potential increase of over $1,000. Household income should not be in excess of the amount for the student to qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. Sponsors of this expansion bill are, once again, all Republican.

Meanwhile, the locally sponsored bill, HB 400 (Asheville City School Board Elections), also passed in the House on May 6. The bill would permit a change in the Asheville City Board of Education from appointed to elected members and would increase membership from five to seven. Its primary sponsors are Reps. Susan Fisher (D), Brian Turner (D), and John Ager (D).

Waiting in the wings

Additional bills waiting to be passed include bills addressing child marriage, government transparency, and alienation of affection.

More Child Brides: A controversial bill, SB 35 (Maximum 4-Year Age Difference to Marry Under 18 Years), has taken the intention of original bill to set the minimum age to lawfully marry in this state at 18 years and bent it backwards to continue child marriage in this state.

In deliberating on this bill, the state’s Senate decided that banning anyone under the age of 18 from marrying was just too drastic. So under their new proposal, North Carolina would continue to allow a child of age 14 (think eighth-grader) to marry a partner who is four years older or less—although that four years is supposed to be an improvement since the original law specified no such restriction.

The “good news” is that a marriage license procured by fraud on the part of any person under 18 could face action for annulment—if a parent or a person or agency with legal custody or guardianship brings such action. The less good news is that whether this bill passes or not, this state will remain a participant in what the U.S. State Department has declared a human rights violation (child marriage). See companion bill H41 in the House.

Open Personnel Records: SB 355, the Government Transparency Act of 2021, comes with all Republican sponsors, while being praised by a number of newspapers and press associations from around the state. It is a tricky bill that does offer transparency by providing for increased access to public-personnel hiring, firing, and performance records for “each department, agency, institution, commission and bureau of the State.” This would include state, city, county, and other government employees, such as UNC system employees (80,000-strong) and members of the NC Sheriffs’ Association.

Access would be given to each employee’s name, age, date of original employment or appointment, terms of contract, current position/title, current salary, date and amount of increases or decreases in salary, date and type of each promotion, demotion, transfer, suspension, separation, or other change in position classification, date and general description of the reasons for each promotion, demotion, dismissal, transfer, suspension, separation, or other change in position classification (unless prohibited by applicable law).

Alienating Affection: HB 485 sought to amend the state’s alienation of affection/criminal conversation law, but someone seems to have sidestepped the bill out of the running. That means you’ll still be able to sue a third party for having an affair with your spouse, so breathe easy.

A tie vote in a House judiciary committee kept this bill from moving forward. It would have ended a century-old provision giving either spouse the right to sue a third-party paramour, leaving North Carolina among six states with such a law on the books.

Timing may be everything; this bill surfaced after a former Republican legislator, Sen. Rick Gunn, was sued for alienation of affection by the husband of his assistant, Karen Johns. According to a news report in the Raleigh News & Observer, the lawsuit was expected to be settled for an undisclosed sum.

What would Apple do?

Finally, this past month saw a big sidestep by legislative leadership to principally avoid another egregious state economics error (to say nothing of moral errors)—whether or not that was their conscious attempt. The proposed “Save Women’s Sports” bill (HB 358), with four primary sponsors (all Republican) and 44 co-sponsors, would have declared athletic teams or sports “designated for females, women, or girls” closed to “males, men, or boys”—with an individual’s sex classification “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth” (emphasis added).

This controversial bill was being discussed as a shadow version of the intensely destructive “Bathroom Bill” in North Carolina several years ago—with the potential to wreak havoc on the state’s economy. But for some reason legislative leadership made the bill go “poof” for lack of need, ostensibly.

Timing being everything, many newspaper eyebrows were raised when that decision took place immediately prior to the huge economic announcement that Apple would be bringing $1 billion and 3,000 jobs with a new North Carolina campus, to be located in the Research Triangle Park (a short drive from the Statehouse). Appropriate legislative disclaimers were voiced. You decide.

Nelda Holder is the author of The Thirteenth Juror – Ferguson: A Personal Look at the Grand Jury Transcripts.