Technician’s staff knows that sometimes — perhaps more often than we’d like to admit — we don’t get it right. However, we’re happy to admit to our mistakes in corrections, and we’re more than happy to give our readers opportunities to correct us in letters and guest columns. Humility is a fine thing — and we think the N.C. GOP could use more of it.
Twice in the last two weeks, state lawmakers have made the news for essentially telling their constituents to (more or less) shut up.
On April 10, the News & Observer reported that Rep. Michele Presnell of Burnsville equated Islam with terrorism in an email exchange with one of her constituents. After her constituent corrected her, Presnell responded, “No, you are wrong. Have a good day.”
More recently – Wednesday – Republican senator Tommy Tucker was in the hot seat for arguing with a newspaper publisher about a failed bill. The bill in dispute would allow public notices to be published only on county and city websites and not in newspapers.
Tucker had been falsely telling Hal Tanner, publisher of Goldsboro’s News-Argus that the bill passed. Eventually, the senator said, “I am the senator, you are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”
Technician has published several editorials in favor of boldness. We’ve asked N.C. State administrators to be bold. We’ve asked Student Government to be bold. We don’t think it’s too bold to say that we love boldness — but we’ve never advocated being boldly arrogant and ignorant.
We wish this quasi-draconian behavior was only coming from Presnell and Tucker. But the rest of the GOP seems uninterested in hearing what we have to say, and that shows in recent Republican-backed proposals to North Carolina voting laws.
Republicans in North Carolina have been scheming — and we mean scheming — to maintain control of the legislature for a few years now. In 2011, the New Yorker published an article about political strategist Ed Gillespie’s trip to Raleigh. During his trip, Gillespie met with Art Pope, presumably about REDMAP — a redistricting project to help Republicans win a majority.
Since then we’ve seen Amendment One pass, despite reports showing that for the first time in history, a majority of Americans support marriage equality.
And now bills to require voter ID, shorten early voting periods, do away with same-day registration and straight-ticket voting have all emerged have come out of right field. These changes, if enacted, will benefit the GOP at the expense of racial and ethnic minorities and young voters. Not to mention McCrory’s proposed budget that would cut more than $135 million from the UNC System.
It’s not likely anyone from the General Assembly is reading Technician today, but someone ought to remind our lawmakers for whom they work. You have the opportunity to do just that in solidarity with the N.C. Student Power Union on May 1. The group will meet at the Bell Tower at 1:30 p.m. and continue the demonstration downtown until 5 p.m.
