North Carolina Fails to Repeal Bathroom Law That Prompted Boycotts
RALEIGH, N.C. — After more than nine hours of closed-door meetings, jawboning and complicated legislative stratagems, North Carolina legislators went home in frustration Wednesday after failing to repeal the state law that has prompted economic boycotts, lawsuits, political acrimony and contributed to the defeat of the Republican governor.
Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, could not agree on a way to repeal the law, commonly known as House Bill 2. The legislation curbs legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and requires transgender people in public buildings to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificate.
The failure to reach a deal in a one-day special session, even after Charlotte, the state’s largest city, fully repealed the ordinance that set the law in motion, was yet another moment of political dysfunction in a state that has become accustomed to it. The session comes just days after Republicans stripped significant powers from Governor-elect Roy Cooper, a Democrat, who is to be sworn in on New Year’s Day.
It also foreshadowed what could be four acrimonious years of governance here.
“We came here to solve a problem that apparently nobody had any clear idea as to how it was going to be solved,” said Senator Daniel T. Blue Jr., the chamber’s Democratic leader. “It’s one thing if, during the regular session, we waste time and do this kind of stuff.”
The fallout from the law, which the General Assembly passed in March, has been impossible to miss. The National College Athletic Association stripped North Carolina of its right to host seven championship events this academic year. The Atlantic Coast Conference pulled its football championship from Charlotte, and major companies, including PayPal, abandoned or paused plans to expand in the state. Cultural figures like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr canceled concerts, and the United States Department of Justice brought a civil rights lawsuit, which is still pending.
This week, there was a widespread expectation that Wednesday would be the day when lawmakers would find a way to put the controversies in the past.
The departing Republican governor, Pat McCrory, called a special session, and Republican leaders in the General Assembly said they would “take up the repeal of H.B. 2.” Democrats, as well as Republican skeptics of the law, said they were optimistic.
Then a split along the same lines that led to the law in the first place — a bitter clash between Republican lawmakers and local officials in Charlotte — emerged when Republicans accused Charlotte leaders of breaking their end of the bargain.
Republicans said they had proposed a clean swap: Charlotte would back down from the changes it made to its anti-discrimination ordinance in February, including new protections on the basis of gender identity, and the General Assembly would repeal H.B. 2.
But when Charlotte leaders met on Monday, they did not approve an absolute repeal of the ordinance they passed in February. Instead, to the ire of Republicans in state government, they left in certain provisions, including a part of the ordinance that empowered Charlotte’s community relations committee to “approve or disapprove plans to reduce or eliminate discrimination” with respect to familial status, gender expression, gender identity, marital status and sexual orientation. Charlotte officials met in an emergency session on Wednesday, before the legislature convened, to complete the repeal.
Charlotte officials insisted they had no intentions of derailing their agreement — Robert E. Hagemann, the city attorney, said, “We’re not dumb enough to try to trick them or trap them” — but the dust-up offered some Republicans a new talking point that they seized with glee.
“Governor McCrory called a special session for repeal, based on good faith when Roy Cooper and Charlotte Democrats announced to the world a full repeal of the Charlotte ordinance,” Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, said in a statement posted on Facebook early Wednesday. “However, they lied. The H.B. 2 blood is now stain soaked on their hands and theirs alone. What a dishonest, disgraceful shame by Roy Cooper and Charlotte Democrats.”
That was all before midmorning. By late afternoon, the debate in Raleigh had shifted away from H.B. 2 and toward a Republican proposal to resolve the impasse: a repeal of the maligned law and the imposition of a “six-month cooling-off period” in which local governments would be barred from approving or amending any “ordinance regulating employment practices or regulating public accommodations or access to restrooms, showers or changing facilities.”
“This is the right thing to do for our state,” said Senator Phil Berger, the Republican leader in the Senate, who added that the measure “gives everyone the opportunity to start over.”
Yet it was time for Democrats and their allies to balk.
“As much as has been stated this is pushing a reset button, it only pushes it halfway,” said Senator Floyd B. McKissick Jr. “The problem is, after today, we won’t be fully back where we were before H.B. 2 was passed. Before H.B. 2 was passed, any city, any town, any community in this state who wanted to enact an anti-discrimination policy was free to do so.”
Mr. Berger’s proposal, Mr. McKissick argued on the Senate floor, “doesn’t get us quite back to where we need to be. It doesn’t put us back on the same standing, on the same solid ground.”
Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, which opposed H.B. 2 and helped to organize the economic backlash to the law, said on Twitter that Mr. Berger’s measure “doubles-down on discrimination, and makes clear that NC is still closed for business.”
Republicans in the House had spent the day meeting, again and again, in closed-door caucuses.
There was some expectation that the Senate would approve the bill with the six-month cooling off plan and send it over to the House for a vote.
But the bill never came. The House moved to adjourn. The Senate considered a last-ditch effort to salvage the session after a Democrat complained that Charlotte was “getting shoved one more time,” and a Republican condemned the city for orchestrating “the worst political stunt that I’ve ever seen.”
But eventually senators, too, voted to go home.
As the Senate neared its adjournment and lawmakers exchanged holiday greetings, Mr. Berger complained that Democrats had not acted in good faith. His frustration, laced with apparent disgust, rose in his voice.
“I cannot believe this,” he said.
Democrats said the state had been left in an embarrassing position.
“We’ll continue to be the butt of national and international scorn,” said Representative Darren G. Jackson, a Democrat. “We’ve been sitting here in the chamber all day long, and in the end we did nothing.”
Outside the viewing galleries, in the place where many liberal protesters had been arrested last week, a crowd again chanted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
In a news conference, Mr. Cooper, the governor-elect, said Republican legislative leaders “failed to live up to their promise” to fully repeal the law — a promise they made to him, he said, as he and his staff hammered out an agreement for repeal over the course of the last week.
The toxic fight over H.B. 2, for now, seems destined to leech into 2017.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/us/north-carolina-fails-to-repeal-bathroom-law-that-prompted-boycotts.html
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