Your guide to the good and bad bills in the NC General Assembly right now | Opinion
We’re more than a month into the North Carolina General Assembly’s short session, and it’s already proved eventful. While short sessions are typically meant to address unfinished business from the previous year’s session, we’ve still seen a wave of new legislation introduced.
Some of that legislation has already drawn a lot of attention, including a bill that would ban all books with LGBTQ+ content from elementary school libraries and a bill that would classify abortion as first-degree murder (no, it’s not going to pass).
But there are other bad — and good — bills worth your attention.
The bad
Virtually every session, Republican lawmakers find new ways to reduce voting access, and this year is no different. The recently proposed Senate Bill 1084 would cut early voting from 17 days to 10. It would apply to November’s midterm elections if passed. Early voting is the state’s most popular voting method, and past polling shows that North Carolinians believe the current 17-day window is the right length.
A separate bill, House Bill 1231, would eliminate the ability to update existing voter registrations through the DMV. Currently, anyone with a North Carolina driver’s license or ID can update their voter registration online through the DMV, which is particularly useful for people who have recently moved. The bill would make this process harder by requiring changes to be made through county boards of elections, which generally has to be done by mail. There’s no good reason to make things more difficult for voters.
Despite all their talk about small government, Republicans have proposed legislation that would make bureaucracy bigger. House Bill 1214, titled “Make E-Verify Great Again,” would dramatically expand the mandatory use of E-Verify, a federal tool for verifying the immigration status of employees. Currently, North Carolina requires businesses with 25 or more employees to use E-Verify. The bill would expand that to include small businesses with five or more employees. It might seem like common sense, but it would place additional burdens on small businesses without necessarily being effective. The database can produce false negatives, denying job opportunities to candidates who are fully qualified. More importantly, it doesn’t necessarily push undocumented workers out of the labor market — it just pushes those jobs underground. That could disproportionately affect critical industries like agriculture and construction.
The good
While the bad bills suck up a lot of the oxygen, not everything in Raleigh is divisive. Democrats and Republicans have also found ways to work together on legislation that’s good for the state. Already moving through the legislature is House Bill 951, a bill that could help modernize the state’s archaic liquor laws. Currently, even low-ABV drinks like High Noon hard seltzers are only sold at ABC stores because they contain vodka. If it passes, the bill would allow canned cocktails containing less than 10% ABV to be sold in grocery and convenience stores. It would also permit bars and restaurants to run “happy hour” promotions. But getting there might be an uphill battle, as any “loosening” of alcohol laws typically faces opposition from religious conservatives.
Also worthy of optimism is House Bill 1124, a bipartisan bill that could help address the statewide shortage of school psychologists. The bill proposes that North Carolina join a multistate compact that makes it easier for licensed school psychologists to become licensed and work in another state.
Senate Bill 849 also has bipartisan support, and it cracks down on something that everyone hates: shady ticket resellers. The bill would ban speculative ticket sales, which happen when third-party sellers list and sell tickets they do not actually have. It would also make it illegal to use bots to buy large numbers of tickets.
