The NC General Assembly short session ended a few weeks ago. At the conclusion, GOP legislators send a flurry of mass e-mails to constituents and supporters trumpeting all the "achievements".
Here is what the GOP-controlled legislature did:
- Increased spending for public education and various public employees' pay significantly;
- Perpetrated corporate welfare/ incentive schemes that grant benefits to filmmakers to produce cultural rot; to the solar energy industry; and also to technology companies that will use the money to hire foreign (mostly Asian) workers on H1-B visas;
- Provided extra taxpayer funding so that public university students at certain schools will have minimal out-of-pocket expense;
- Funded broadband in rural areas;
- Granted law enforcement automatic access to patients' online prescription drug records without a warrant;
- Increased state funding of day care (or "pre-K") to provide subsidies for certain groups of parents for care of their kids;
- Stopped prosecuting 16 and 17 year olds as adults for certain types of offenses;
- Protected large corporate donors in the agriculture industry from certain types of litigation; and
- Authorized borrowing of hundreds of millions more per year-- totaling billions-- for transportation and education projects.
I would argue that the sum total of these measures does not represent conservatism-- especially limited-government conservatism.
Oh yes, there were also some marginally favorable tax changes. And some mostly-good constitutional amendments were placed on the ballot also.
We could talk about the things that could have been done in Raleigh, but were not.
The Republican Party is now mostly center-left, however. It does not bother fighting for conservatism any more-- excepting Trump on certain issues.
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