The Destructive Power of the Supermajority

There is an ever growing sense that our democratic process is broken, that it's impossible for an average voter to have her voice heard, that no matter how he votes or how loudly he protests the politicians in power are going to take whatever actions they want, the will of the people be damned. This is why voter turnout is so low and why people feel like voting just flat-out doesn't matter. The Republican members of the General Assembly this week seemed hell-bent to show the voters of North Carolina that the impotence of public opinion is not simply a "feeling," it is absolutely a fact. The GOP showed us precisely how broken our democratic process is.

Our General Assembly meets for regular sessions once per year. The "long session" in odd years runs from January-July and the "short session" in even years from April-June. These are the only times that your elected representatives are generally called upon to pass laws. This year, the General Assembly met in 4 special called additional sessions. The last time the general assembly held that many special sessions was 1898 as it moved to cement the passage of Jim Crow Laws, not exactly a proud moment in our state's history and certainly not a time we should seek to emulate now.

Special sessions allow the Legislature to respond to public emergencies, events like the historic flooding in coastal communities following hurricane Matthew in October. The Governor's special called session to pass a disaster relief bill was the ordinary and proper use of that constitutional provision. What happened next was anything but ordinary or proper.

On Wednesday after both houses passed the disaster relief bill, the Republican members of the assembly shocked their Democratic colleagues by adjourning the special session called by the Governor and immediately convening a new special session called by the General Assembly itself. The Democratic members of the assembly were given no notice that the session would be called, or afforded any opportunity to contribute to the formulation of the bills to be drafted and considered. Introducing legislation in a special session called in secret deprives the public of the opportunity to fully vet, understand and respond to new laws. It was a move carefully designed to ensure that as few people as possible would have as little time as possible to understand and comment on the impacts of the new laws.

Over the following 2 days, the Republican's introduced and passed legislation that made drastic changes to state government.

SB 4 completely redesigns the state's election oversight system. It combines the current Ethics Commission and State Board of Elections; changes the composition of the county board of elections in all 100 counties; changes the terms and operations of the Industrial Commission; adds an en banc review procedure to the state Court of Appeals; and makes our appellate court judicial races partisan.

HB 17 strips the State Board of Education of virtually all power to run the state's education system, vesting its previous authority in the newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mark Johnson. The bill also strips the incoming Governor of nearly 1,100 appointments he would have made to the administrative agencies he oversees. This bill hasn't been signed yet by the Governor and if you are itching to make your fury heard, calling the Governor at (919) 814-2000 and urging him to veto the bill would be an excellent way to do that.

Look, I'm not saying that all of these measures are bad just because they were introduced by Republicans. I'm saying they are bad because they did not follow a process that allows for Democratic representatives to contribute to the formulation of important state policy and they deprived the public of the opportunity to offer meaningful input. It would have been really nice to have had an opportunity to consult with the State Bar about the impacts of changes to the appellate review process, for instance. With super majorities in both houses, Republicans were unwilling to have thoughtful, deliberate discussion about these measures with their Democratic colleagues, simply because they didn't need to. Those Democratic colleagues represent millions of North Carolinians. Refusing to engage or compromise with them essentially tells those 3.5 million North Carolinians that the GOP really doesn't give a rip about their opinions, and that is just wrong.

As the public got word of what was going down in Raleigh, they flooded the General Assembly with thousands of phone calls and emails and they showed up in person to let their representatives know they did not have the support of their constituents. But the response of Republicans on the house floor was to discount the emails by saying the vast majority were from out of state (they weren't), and that protestors didn't deserve to observe the proceedings because they were not being properly decorous. None of the Republican comments responded to the outpouring of citizen opposition. Instead they cleared the chamber and began arresting the public and even the media for trying to be present to make their opposition heard. The protestors were not from out-of-state and they weren't paid to be there. They were North Carolinians who were furious with the heavy-handed governing of a general assembly completely unwilling to engage with them or respond to their concerns. Instead, our state government arrested elderly women, a mother who had her child with her, a combat veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a member of the press, and even Santa.

That is why our current democratic process is broken-because our representatives are no longer willing to engage in debate, find common ground, and compromise with one another. They feel no need to respond at all to dissatisfied constituents. In this year's presidential election, North Carolina broke 50% Republican and 46% Democratic. So, despite the fact that the Republican legislature has managed to gerrymander districts to give themselves a 3/4 majority in the legislature, the citizens they represent statewide are practically evenly divided between conservative and liberal ideologies. We are a moderate state and our elected representatives should represent that moderate make-up in drafting, introducing and considering new laws. The only way they can do that is if the Republican members are willing to reach across the aisle, even when they don't have to, to engage their Democratic colleagues in the process of drafting legislation and directing the future of this state. We absolutely have to stop saying that the other side is wrong, simply because they are on the other side. And if Republican members are truly interested in representing the people of this state, they have a duty to respond to legitimate concerns about their tactics and their proposed policies, to put their policies forward and open them up to public criticism and then defend and justify them, and perhaps even modify them so that they are more reflective of the views of the entire state.

Finally, if you are mad as hell about what went down this week in Raleigh, its time to get involved and stay engaged. Many members of the general assembly are likely to be up for election this year in special elections ordered by the court. Contact your local Democratic Party and sign-up to volunteer. Consider running for office or encourage a friend or neighbor to run. Ladies, if you've ever given even a passing thought to running, contact Lillian's List and attend one of their upcoming trainings. Use NC Megaphone to email legislators about issues important to you. Better yet, figure out who your individual representative is and email only their office. Representatives are far more responsive to emails sent only to their office than to emails sent to all 170 members. Even though its frustrating and you may feel ignored or discounted, its important to keep making your voice heard. The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day is lose it.

Abortion. There, I said it.

Abortion is a dirty word. It simply isn't mentioned in polite company. Quite frequently it isn't mentioned in impolite company! Well, I'm not ashamed to let that one little word and all of the emotional baggage and vitriol that comes along with it slip out of my fingers and onto the page. Every woman in this country has the right to an abortion if she wants one. There, I said it.

This week four representatives in the North Carolina House introduced legislation to further restrict access to abortion services. I read the text of the bill sitting at my desk and fought back tears. This evening, on the comfort of my porch, I wept. I wept for the women who will die if this bill passes, for the women whose already painfully difficult decisions will be made worse by a group of men who cannot begin to fathom what it feels like to be the person responsible for the monumental and life-altering decision of whether or not to bring new life into this world. I remembered having to make that decision and I wept for my fourteen year old self.

Changes proposed by the bill include:

• Increasing the mandatory waiting period from 24 hours to 72 hours
• Requiring procedures to be performed by a certified OB/GYN and prohibiting other physicians from performing them
• Prohibiting NC Universities from teaching physicians how to safely perform abortions.
• Prohibiting two of the best hospitals in the southeast from performing abortions at all
• Requiring physicians to report data, including in some cases an ultrasound image, to the NC Department of Health for every abortion performed

These restrictions, while pushed in the name of increasing the safety of women seeking the procedures, actually have the opposite effect. Limiting the number of facilities and physicians who can perform abortion or medically induced miscarriage only serves to limit women's access to medically safe abortion services and increases the likelihood that these women will seek out unsafe abortions or attempt them on their own, endangering their own lives and future fertility. Making abortions harder to obtain does not make them safer.

I noticed as I read through the bill today that the "counseling" requirements remain unchanged. I hadn't had cause to read those counseling requirements until today. I was struck by the fact that they include a provision that the physician must tell the woman that "medical assistance benefits may be available for prenatal care, childbirth and neonatal care" and that "public assistance programs...may or may not be available as benefits under the federal and state assistance programs," and that "the father is liable to assist in the support of the child." All of these required statements seem to be intended to relieve the woman of the notion that she will ultimately be financially responsible for the rearing of her child and to impress upon her the fact that government resources will be made available to her if she only chooses to give her child life and that the child's father will be made to provide for it. Horsefeathers. The intent of these proscribed statements is simply to make a woman question whether her reasons for seeking an abortion are meritorious. They do not seek to improve the health or well-being of the mother or the fetus, nor do they serve to provide for the long-term well-being of either of them. They serve only to guilt her into changing her mind.

Last year the North Carolina General Assembly voted to lower the income guidelines for the state's medicaid program which provides "prenatal, childbirth and neonatal care." Currently, in order to qualify for medical assistance, a single pregnant woman must earn less than $23,000 per year, $2,000 per month. A woman earning $25,000 per year would not qualify for Medicaid services and the cost of her prenatal care and delivery is likely to exceed her entire annual salary. It is the height of hypocrisy for the legislature to impose upon a doctor a mandated script intended to pressure a woman into deciding to keep her child while at the same time voting to restrict the resources that provide for that care. The same rule applies to the legislature's willingness to provide for the child you are encouraging her to bring into the world. How dare you claim that a woman is entitled to federal benefits as a means of inducing her to give birth to a child she may not be able to afford to care for while at the same time denying federal dollars to expand medicaid, cutting funding for child care services and failing to invest in affordable housing initiatives. And, until you are ready to take steps to improve a child support enforcement system that everyone knows is broken, don't tell a woman that the child's father is going to be made to contribute to the cost of care.

Our legislators, in their exceeding wisdom, also introduced this week a bill to limit sex education in the state to strictly abstinence only. The bill would prohibit the education of teenage boys and girls about the efficacy of all forms of birth control, including Plan B and IUDs, two extremely effective and safe methods of preventing pregnancy which have been deemed abortifacents by those on the religious right who seek only to motivate their base for political gain and care very little about the health or wellbeing of women and girls. 

There seems to be a movement on the right to force impoverished women to have children they don't want so that they can then hold those same women up as examples of the greedy culture of poverty that wants to live off of the state so that they can vote in further cuts to social programs. I simply cannot understand the thought process that leads one to believe that you should restrict access to birth control and make it harder to afford, limit access to abortions, and then chastise women who seek federal or state financial assistance to raise children they didn't want to have in the first place. On what planet does this train of thought make sense?

You don't have to like abortions. You can believe with all of your might that the person seeking an abortion or performing it is going to burn in hell for all eternity. That is your right. But you do not have the right to prevent a woman from deciding that abortion is the best option available to her. You don't have the right to tell a rape victim that she must bear and rear the child of her rapist. You don't have the right to tell a fourteen year old girl that she must carry a child to term. You don't have the right to tell a woman who has been told her child stands a 99% chance of being born brain-dead that she must bring that child, doomed to a terribly short life filled with suffering, into the world against her own best judgment. You don't have the right to tell any woman that she must become a mother even if her child was conceived in a loving relationship and both parents can afford to provide care. You do not have the right to tell a woman to become a parent. You simply do not have the right.

The hardest thing for me in reading the proposed legislation is the realization that the authors have such an inability to feel compassion or empathy for the women whose lives will be affected. These are real women undergoing serious emotion duress, struggling with a complex decision that you members of our society who possess penises instead of wombs cannot possibly begin to fathom.

If you believe that there is no circumstance which justifies a woman seeking an abortion, that's fine. You are entitled to your belief. But put your powers to use in the service of good, of God. Offer your time and money and energy in counsel and service to young mothers who need it. Find compassion. Buy groceries. Pay for a car repair. Fund child care programs. Don't use those same resources making women less safe.

I grieve for you, my sisters, who will suffer the burden of compensating for these foolhardy legislative actions, and I promise you that I will do everything in  my power to make sure that you have access to safe, affordable abortion services, even if that means I have to drive across the state myself to pick you up, feed and house you. I sure hope it doesn't come to that.

The text of the full bill can be found here. If you are passionate about this issue, I urge you to call or e-mail your legislator. You can find their contact information here.

Keep Your Grubby Paws Off My Birth Control!

I was only 13 when my mother found out I was having sex. It was a terrible time for us. She didn’t speak to me for a week. Her golden child, the one with the good grades, who got up early and made a fresh pot of coffee every morning, who never got into any trouble of any kind, was doing the unthinkable. But she did the right thing. She took the proactive step to put me on the pill. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent me getting pregnant a mere 11 months later, but that’s a story for another day.

I have been on one form or another of birth control ever since. The pill was never the right answer for me, personally. I have a hard enough time remembering to eat meals every day, let alone remembering to take a pill at a specified hour. So, I’ve tried just about everything, several different brands of the pill, NuvaRing, the patch, DepoProvera, and ultimately the IUD. The IUD is the best thing that ever happened to me. No hormones, no remembering, no thought required, and I’m good for 10 years or more. Yes, please! No babies until I decide I’m ready. And that’s the goal, right? To allow women to decide when they are ready to have children, and thereby reduce the instance of unplanned pregnancies, reduce the number of abortions, reduce the number of single moms dependent upon our social safety network, reduce the number of children in foster care, reduce the entire cost on our overburdened system.

Which is why it is so incredibly difficult for me to understand why, in the 21^st century, we are still have a national debate about the availability of birth control. Why? I thought this was a fight our parents had won. A hundred years ago, you could be imprisoned for counseling women about how to avoid becoming pregnant, and many women were. Margaret Sanger underwent a great number of personal tragedies in her quest to ensure that women had access to birth control. 

And they won. In 1972 the Supreme Court in Eisenstadt v. Biard legalized birth control for all Americans, reversing the Comstock laws that had criminalized the simple act of providing contraception to women. North Carolina was the first state in the country to recognize birth control as a public health measure and to provide contraceptive services to indigent mothers through its public health program. And the rates at which women utilize birth control have been on the rise ever since. A 2013 Lancet systematic literature review found that 77% of women in the United States of reproductive age used contraception.

So, again, I cannot understand why in the year 2014, nearly a hundred years after Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic, we are still having this debate about access to birth control. The requirement for health insurance to provide contraception without a co-pay or deductible was one of the only things the Affordable Care Act got right. Let me say that again, the health insurance company is providing that birth control. Not the government. The right-wing messaging machine has been very adept at selling the notion that the government, that you and I and our taxpayer dollars, are funding the late-night shenanigans of whorish college sorority girls across this great nation by providing them with access to birth control. When the reality is that we all are contributing to an insurance pool that provides birth control to 77% of the women in this country of child-bearing age, probably you, or your sister, or your aunt, or even your mom. And that same insurance pool is unquestioningly providing unfettered access to Viagra, Cialis and penis pumps for men who are very much not of child-bearing age, but want to get their kicks in anyway.

And all of this is what leads me to my present outrage at Speaker Thom Tillis’s plan for providing birth control over-the-counter while removing the mandate for health insurance companies to provide birth control free of charge. Please don’t be fooled folks. This is about money. Insurance companies are none too happy about being required to provide expensive IUDs which can provide 10 years of quality, baby-free life in one fell swoop, for free, when you might easily abandon your plan, and thereby their premiums, leaving them in the lurch. None too happy.

And so we have the present proposed alternative, designed to trick women into thinking that the Republican party is really on their side. That they want women to have access to birth control. But this is not a solution. Not a realistic one. Making birth control available over the counter means that women who would have been able to obtain the pill for free will now have to have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 per year to keep their uteruses zygote-free. That may not seem like much to you, but when you are surviving on less than $1,000 a month, it's might as well be a million dollars. And what does this do to women like me, for whom the birth control pill isn't an effective option? What of my IUD? I’m expected to come out of pocket to the tune of somewhere between $250 and $1,000 or more while my insurance premiums continue to pay for your Viagra? I don’t think so. If I don’t get my little pink pill, or copper "T" as the case may be, covered by my insurance, you don’t get your little blue pill either.