North Carolina Republican switches party affiliation: ‘I guess being American just isn’t good enough’ for the GOP anymore

By Scott Kaufman/Raw Story

Yesterday, a North Carolina Republican congressional candidate switched his party affiliation to Democrat, saying that he “refuse[s] to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line.”

In a statement posted on his website, Jason Thigpen criticized the establishment candidate, Walter Jones, saying “[t]he GOP leadership has such little regard and faith in the more than 1 Million people whom live in NC’s 3rd Congressional District that they don’t believe even one of us are good enough to represent OUR District. So they sent a lobbyist who’s lived in Washington, D.C. for the last 15 or more years. What an insult.”

Earlier this year, Thigpen attacked the strict new North Carolina voting law, writing that “[y]ou can paint a turd and sell it as art, but it’s still a turd.”

Thigpen is a six-year Army veteran and,according to his website, a recipient of the Purple Heart. “I didn’t go to war to defend the liberties and freedoms of one party, race, sex, or one income class of Americans,” he writes of the Republican attempt to suppress the vote.

“So, to come home from serving our country and see North Carolina legislators using their super-majority status to gerrymander districts and pass a law to deliberately suppress and oppress the voting rights of Democrats but more specifically minorities and college students, is absolutely deplorable.”

Thigpen is challenging Walter Jones in the 3rd Congressional District. Jones, a Republican, is also facing a far-right challenger with Tea Party affiliations.

GOP Official Resigns After Saying Purpose Of Voter ID Is To Suppress Votes Of Democrats, ‘Lazy Blacks’

BY IAN MILLHISER/Think Progress

Until Thursday, Don Yelton was a precinct chair in the Buncombe County, North Carolina Republican Party. That ended after a Daily Show interview riddled with racism and candid admissions about the purpose of a voter suppression bill enacted by Republican lawmakers in his state. Over the course of the interview Yelton admitted that he supports requiring voters to show ID, in addition to the other, many voter suppression provisions included in the North Carolina law, because “the law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also denied that the law is racist during the course of an interview where he both used a particular racial slur that begins with the letter “n” and claimed that he is not racist because he “one my best friends is black.” Watch it:

Yelton also offered several other reasons why he supports the voter suppression law. Among them, “[i]f it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus [sic] and get a photo ID, so be it,” and “if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.”

In the wake of Yelton’s confession that a Republican voter suppression law will suppress Democratic votes, the Buncombe County Republican Party asked him to resign his position within the party, and the country GOP chair says Yelton did so. The party also claims that Yelton was “recently reprimanded and removed from his position as a precinct chair in Buncombe County for a period of time in 2012 through 2013,” though he was reelected at a very sparsely attended party convention.

North Carolina On Cusp Of Passing Worst Voter Suppression Bill In The Nation

By Scott Keyes/Think Progress

Voting in North Carolina may soon change, much in the same way a wrecking ball changes a building.

The highly-conservative North Carolina legislature just released a new voter suppression bill that would enact not just voter ID, but a host of other new initiatives designed to make it more difficult to vote. A significant roadblock to the legislation was removed last month when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it easier for states with a history of racial discrimination like North Carolina to enact new voter suppression laws.

The Senate will consider substituted language for HB 589 on Tuesday afternoon. Among the dozens of changes, these are the most onerous for North Carolina voters:

• Implementing a strict voter ID requirement that bars citizens who don’t have a proper photo ID from casting a ballot.
• Eliminating same-day voter registration, which allowed residents to register at the polls.
• Cutting early voting by a full week.
• Increasing the influence of money in elections by raising the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 and increasing the limit every two years.
• Making it easier for voter suppression groups like True The Vote to challenge any voterwho they think may be ineligible by requiring that challengers simply be registered in the same county, rather than precinct, of those they challenge.
• Vastly increasing the number of “poll observers” and increasing what they’re permitted to do. In 2012, ThinkProgress caught the Romney campaign training such poll observers using highly misleading information.
• Only permitting citizens to vote in their specific precinct, rather than casting a ballot in any nearby ward or election district. This can lead to widespread confusion, particularly in urban areas where many precincts can often be housed in the same building.
• Barring young adults from pre-registering as 16- and 17-year-olds, which is permitted by current law, and repealing a state directive that high schools conduct voter registration drives in order to boost turnout among young voters.
• Prohibiting some types of paid voter registration drives, which tend to register poor and minority citizens.
• Dismantling three state public financing programs, including the landmark program that funded judicial elections.
• Weakening disclosure requirements for outside spending groups.
• Preventing counties from extending polling hours in the event of long lines or other extraordinary circumstances and making it more difficult for them to accommodate elderly or disabled voters with satellite polling sites at nursing homes, for instance.

Each of these changes, on their own, would be a significant step away from increasing voting rights. Taken together, this is the voter suppression magnum opus.

Republicans currently hold strong majorities in both legislative houses and control the governorship, leaving Democrats with little recourse to block HB 589. In the last few weeks, Republicans have passed conservative legislation on a range of issues, from a major anti-choice bill to tax cuts for the rich paid for by the poor.

If passed, HB 589 will almost certainly have a disastrous impact on voting in North Carolina. As Ari Berman notes, 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012, including a disproportionate number of minorities. In addition, more than 155,000 voters registered to vote at the polls last year. And with 10 percent of North Carolinians — 613,000 people, a third of whom are black and half of whom are registered Democrats — lacking photo ID, it doesn’t take Encyclopedia Brown to figure out which party will be helped by HB 589.

In December, the Center for American Progress released a report detailing 11 specific pieces of legislation state lawmakers could enact to strengthen voting rights. This North Carolina bill is what you would get if you looked at that report, then did the exact opposite.

North Carolina Lawmakers Ram Through Plan That Would Increase Taxes On Poor People

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

North Carolina lawmakers rammed throughmassive tax reforms on Tuesday that would disproportionately benefit higher-income earners, bringing the measure to a vote in the House after approximately 25 minutes of debate. The legislative compromise, which was formally unveiled on Monday, represents some of the biggest most regressive changes to North Carolina’s tax code in eight decades. The Senate will take up the measure on Tuesday afternoon, both chambers will hold final votes Wednesday, and Gov. Pat McCrory (R) is expected to sign it by the end of the week.

“Those with average incomes of nearly $1 million would receive a total tax cut of nearly $10,000,” the North Carolina Justice Center estimated, while the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers “would experience an increase in their taxes on average.”

The package will “reduce the number of individual income tax brackets from three brackets to one while raising the standard deduction and capping deductions on mortgage interest and property taxes. The current income tax rates of 6, 7 and 7.75 percent based on income would be reduced to a flat rate of 5.8 percent in 2014 and 5.75 percent in 2015.”

The tax rate corporations pay would fall from 6.9 percent “to 6 percent in 2014 and 5 percent in 2015″ and could drop to 3 percent in 2017 “if tax revenues grow at a strong enough clip.” The estate tax is also repealed. As a result, revenue would fall by $500 million in two years and $2 billion over five years, laying the groundwork for additional cuts to government spending.

Meanwhile, sales taxes on manufactured homes, modular homes, and electricity sales would eventually increase, disproportionately impacting lower-income residents. In 2014, the state would also end its sales tax holiday weekend in August and the Energy Star appliance sales tax holiday weekend in November.

The state’s tax system already favors the wealthiest, as the bottom 80 percent pay between 9 and 10 percent of their income in combined sales and income taxes compared to just 6.5 percent for the top one percent of earners. The plan passed Tuesday would exacerbate that inequity. The North Carolina Justice Center warns that lower income North Carolinians would see their tax burden increase under the plan, while the very rich would experience a tax reduction of up to 1.1 percent of their earnings:

In March, the legislature repealed a tax credit for 900,000 working families in the state and had initially proposed eliminating the state’s income tax outright.

The Decline of North Carolina

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD from New York Times

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damagethat a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.

The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.

The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program.

At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled childrenare being chopped.

“We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters.One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build.

NC Senator Nesbitt busts GOP for sneak attack in war on women

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North Carolina Prepares To Suppress Black Voters, Now That The Voting Rights Act Lost Its Teeth

By Aviva Shen/Think Progress

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is moving forward with a host of bills to roll back voting rights. Republican lawmakers are accelerating a new agenda to eliminate early voting, Sunday voting hours, and same-day registration provisions. GOP leaders also vowed to move quickly to pass a controversial voter ID law that would make it much harder for minorities, seniors, students, and low-income voters to cast their ballots.

The court’s conservative majority decreed last Tuesday that the formula used to identify states with a history of using election law to discriminate against minorities has “no logical relationship to the present day.” Many of the covered jurisdictions celebrated the decision by promptlyadvancing voting restrictions that disproportionately target minorities and low-income voters. Texas enacted their previously blocked voter ID law mere hours after the ruling.

North Carolina’s newly unfettered attack on voting rights has three main prongs:

• Require ID at the polls. North Carolina’s voter ID bill could pose problems for 1 in 10 voters, according to an analysis by the State Board of Elections. About 613,000 North Carolinians lack the required government-issued ID. Nearly a third of these voters are black, while over half are registered Democrats.
• Penalize college students for voting. Republicans are also pushing a bill to raise taxes on families with college students who choose to vote at school rather than at home, effectively discouraging college students from voting.
• End early voting and same-day registration. Other states that restricted early voting, like Ohio and Florida, needlessly created mammoth lines on Election Day, forcing some voters to wait until 1 a.m. to cast a ballot. The backlash in Florida has been especially strong, prompting Gov. Rick Scott (R) to reverse his own voter suppression laws. In North Carolina, black voters make up 29 percent of early voters and 34 percent of voters who took advantage of same-day voter registration at the polls.

The Republican-dominated legislature and new Republican governor will likely do all they can to speed along these restrictions. However, polls show that North Carolinians overwhelmingly oppose these new voter suppression measures. “Moral Monday” protests are cropping up all over the state to challenge these bills and a slew of other draconian policies targeting the poor, women, minorities, and seniors.

North Carolina Republicans Drastically Cut Benefits For Job Seekers

By Alan Pyke/Think Progress

Life gets tougher as of Sunday for over 400,000 out of work Tarheels as a set of unprecedented cuts to jobless benefits passed by North Carolina Republicans in February take effect. The bill didn’t just shorten the length of state-funded unemployment insurance, as several states have done. It also cut the level of weekly benefit payments, violating a provision of the federal unemployment insurance program and leaving the state ineligible for federal jobless funds.

North Carolina is the first state to be dropped from the national Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which provides funds for eligible job seekers when they exhaust state-level benefit programs. Seven other states have enacted jobless insurance cuts that will mean their unemployed citizens receive fewer weeks of federal benefits, but North Carolina is the only state to have made itself outright ineligible for the money.

North Carolina’s Republicans said their slashing of jobless benefits will “put North Carolinians back to work.” But that’s not what the evidence says. Multiple research findings indicate that unemployment insurance doesn’t cause a substantial increase in how long someone remains without work. Recipients actually work harder to find a job than non-recipients who are unemployed, as active job seeking is a condition of the benefit.

And economist Larry Katz, whose 1980s research on the subject is frequently cited by the right, says his previous findings about unemployment insurance extending the duration of unemployment don’t apply in the Great Recession. “I strongly favor extensions of UI benefits when the labor market is weak,” Katz told PolitiFact in 2009. Booting job-seekers from the support system does nothing to change the ugly reality that there are still three unemployed people for every job opening. That ratio of job hunters to available jobs is down from nearly 7:1 in mid-2009.

The combined safety net of federal and state unemployment insurance programs kept 2.3 million Americans out of poverty in 2011.

Benefits are already very low without cuts. The maximum weekly benefit in the state had been $535, before taxes, but the average benefit was far lower: $299 per week, pre-tax, according to the Department of Labor. The national average hovers around $300 per week as well.

Hundreds Of Faith Leaders Arrested For Protesting Conservative Policies In North Carolina

By Jack Jenkins/Think Progress

Republicans and Tea Party conservatives have long peddled themselves as America’s moral compass, citing scripture as they propose regressive laws and policies. But when a growing coalition of North Carolina progressives descended on Raleigh, N.C., Monday to decry the state’s Republican legislature, they drew support from another source of moral authority: progressive faith leaders.

Throngs of demonstrators gathered outside the North Carolina statehouse on Monday, as they have every Monday since April 29th, to engage in the latest chapter in an ongoing showdown between the North Carolinians and their state government in a movement known as Moral Mondays. A clergy-led grassroots movement, Moral Mondays has brought thousands of North Carolinians from all walks of life to the state capitol to pray, protest, and denounce a series of right-wing laws and proposals currently making their way through the state legislature.

The Moral Mondays movement, which is gaining support from five major Christian denominations, was originally spawned as a response to a regressive tax proposal that threatened to cut taxes for North Carolina’s wealthiest 5 percent while also raising taxes on the other 95 percent. But as the movement nears its third month, advocates are expanding their criticisms to include a growing list of extreme bills and laws endorsed by the Republican-dominated state leadership. These proposals, many of which have already passed through the state legislature, would:

– Block the expansion of Medicaid in North Carolina

– Institute discriminatory voter ID laws

– Cut preschool for 30,000 children and move $90 million originally slotted for public education to an expanded school voucher program

– Allow for hydraulic fracking in the state.

– Repeal the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that allows death row inmates to appeal their conviction if they prove that racial bias played a role in their sentence.

In addition, many of the advocates are expressing concern about proposed budget cuts to stateunemployment benefits, which would deprive 70,000 North Carolinians of much-needed assistance if the law is allowed to take effect on June 30th. Over time, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that if the government benefits are allowed to expire, as many as 170,000 people in North Carolina could lose extended federal benefits.

Eighty four protestors were arrested for civil disobedience in Monday’s action. This brings the total number of Moral Monday arrests to more than 480, many of whom are clergy who have never before participated in political activism.

“When laws are most harmful to the most vulnerable, clergy who are committed to a biblical vision of peace and justice ought to start paying attention,” said Rev. Franklin Golden, co-pastor of Durham Presbyterian Church in Durham, NC and a clergy member arrested at the protests.

With both the North Carolina House and Senate governed by conservative Republican majorities, participants in Moral Mondays don’t expect to win many immediate legislative victories through their activism. Instead, activists and their supporters are hoping their prayers and protests will pay dividends at the ballot box in 2014.

“We’re going to make sure that the contrast is so clear between meanness and immorality and extreme politics and the politics of love and justice and compassion, that when 2014 comes, the people will be able to make a decision.” Rev. Barber told The American Prospect in an interview.

North Carolina House votes to repeal landmark Racial Justice Act

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

Representatives in the North Carolina House voted 77-39 Wednesday to repeal a law that sought to address systematic racism in capital punishment cases.

North Carolina’s Senate Bill 306 would repeal the Racial Justice Act (RJA).

The 2009 law allowed death row inmates to have their death sentence converted to life without parole if they could demonstrate that racial discrimination was a factor in their trial or sentencing. Since the law was enacted, more than 150 death row inmates have filed challenges and four have shown that racism tainted their trials.

“It would be beyond tragic if North Carolina turns its back on that evidence and haphazardly rushes to restart executions, knowing full well that our capital punishment process is plagued by racial bias and other flaws that might very well lead to the execution of innocent people,” American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina policy director Sarah Preston said in astatement.

“Even those who support the death penalty should agree that capital sentences must be handed down impartially and with respect for due process, yet this bill makes it harder, if not impossible, to achieve that goal.”

Republicans have argued the law has acted as a de facto ban on the death penalty and has caused costly delays.

“No one wants actual racial discrimination. What we don’t want also is for race to be used for a pretext – a pretext in order to stop the death penalty,” state Rep. Skip Stam (R-Wake) said Tuesday on the House floor, according to a WRAL.com.

“It’s simply an attempt to get people off death row by arguing that the frequency of the death penalty in one race is more than another. It doesn’t deal with the word ‘bias’ or ‘discrimination,’” state Sen. Thom Goolsby (R-New Hanover) told The Daily Tar Heel.

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North Carolina GOP Wants To Tax The Poor Even More Than It Already Does

By Alan Pyke/Think Progress

North Carolina lawmakers are seeking to shift much of the state’s tax burden off its wealthiest citizens and most profitable businesses and onto its low- and middle-income residents. After initially proposing to eliminatethe state’s income tax outright, Republicans are instead introducing a flat income tax rate across all earning levels. The proposal unveiled Thursday would also expand the reach of sales taxes in the state, which hits low-income families hardest, and comes on top of the March repeal of a tax credit for 900,000 working familiesin the state.

The state’s effective tax rates already favor the rich. The North Carolina Justice Center, a progressive think tank in the state, explains that the richest one percent of tarheels pay 6.5 percent of their income in combined sales and income taxes at the state level, while the lower 80 percent of earners pay between 9 and 10 percent combined. Yet Republicans propose to give that top one percent a tax cut while hiking rates for those already paying more:

NCJC adds that the lost revenue from this plan “could be as high as $573 million” per year. Given that state law requires balanced biannual budgeting, the tax proposal is likely to force major cuts to public services if approved.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. Supply-side economists have pushed for this sort of regressive tax reform in the name of economic growth for over 30 years, at all levels of American governance. Art Laffer, the chronically misleading godfather of this widely discredited approach to tax policy, helped press for the initial repeal proposal from North Carolina’s conservatives. Laffer’s had a prominent hand in the broad wave of state-level supply-side tax reform proposals since last year, and statehouse Republicans seem prepared to continue believing him even after his research for the American Legislative Exchange Council has been shown to be error-riddled.

The Republican Power Grab in North Carolina

By Melba Newsome/Bloomberg Businessweek

It’s not often that 250 people pack in to see the city council in Asheville, N.C., in the middle of a workday. Yet there they were on the afternoon of April 3, when the city’s elected officials met with citizens to discuss a plan by the Republican-led General Assembly in Raleigh to take control of the city’s water systems. The lawmakers want to hand it over to a new multi-county board that would be appointed largely by the state legislature. Asheville wouldn’t be compensated for lost revenue from water bills, leaving the city of 84,000 with a $3 million shortfall that would force cuts to city services.

The mostly Democratic voters in the audience vowed to stop the bill from becoming law. But that’s not likely to happen. For two years, Democrats who run the largest city in Western North Carolina have been losing to Republicans in the Capitol. In 2012, the legislature stripped the city’s control of Asheville Regional Airport and is currently in the process of appropriating the land. Lawmakers created an independent state agency to run the airport, saying it would provide better service. “We can’t find a valid reason for the taking,” says Asheville’s Democratic Mayor Terry Bellamy. “They have accused us of mismanaging money, but they have no data to back that up.” She points out that the city’s bond rating rose from AA to AA+ in 2010. “Every city in the state should be watching what’s happening in Asheville and supporting us,” she says, “because they could be next.”

Since January, Republicans in the General Assembly have introduced a series of bills that would curtail the ability of Democratic-led cities and urban counties to govern themselves. GOP legislators say Charlotte’s City Council can no longer be trusted to manage Charlotte Douglas International Airport, a major hub. They want an appointed regional authority to run it. “The Charlotte Airport has become a multibillion-dollar effort,” says State Senator Bob Rucho, the bill’s main sponsor. “We’re concerned and want to be sure you have the best minds and most experienced individuals in place to move that forward to get the most economic value derived from it.”

Rucho has cited a variety of reasons for the takeover. He accused Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, now President Obama’s nominee for U.S. Transportation secretary, of planning to divert airport revenue to fund pet projects (not true, Foxx says). He said security costs are up and the airport needs new leadership when its longtime director retires.

State lawmakers also nullified a lease that let Raleigh use state property for a park and enacted changes limiting cities’ ability to annex land. Another bill would take away control of school buildings and construction from the Wake County Board of Education, which oversees schools in Raleigh and surrounding areas, and give it to county commissioners. “No one has come out to say specifically ‘this is political revenge against Democratic strongholds,’ ” says David Swindell, who teaches public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “But these changes amount to an unprecedented attack on the state’s cities, which happen to be home to many of the state’s Democrats.”

There’s not much cities can do to stop the lawmakers. The state constitution grants the legislators broad powers to intervene in city affairs without the approval of the governor, as long as the changes don’t affect more than 15 percent of the counties in the state. Historically the legislature gave local governments wide latitude in controlling their own affairs. That’s changed since 2010, when Republicans took control of the state legislature for the first time in a century. GOP Governor Pat McCrory, the former Charlotte mayor who took office this year, has conspicuously kept his distance from what’s happening in his hometown. “The governor has stayed out of it because it’s a local matter that doesn’t require the governor’s signature,” says his communications director, Kim Genardo.

At least one Republican lawmaker has openly expressed a desire to dilute the power of mayors. “There is a definite feeling that cities have too much power and want to control everything,” State Senator Tom Apodaca told theCharlotte Observer. Mayor Foxx says there’s a certain irony in watching conservative Republicans argue against local control. “I think the legislature would be concerned if the feds started dictating to them,” he says. “Yet they’re doing to us what they claim they dislike.”

The bottom line: North Carolina’s GOP legislature is seeking to use its constitutional authority to strip power from elected officials.

North Carolina Police Arrest Black Preachers For Praying In Protest Of Extreme GOP Agenda

by Stephen D. Foster Jr. /Addicting Info

Apparently it’s now against the law in North Carolina to pray in protest of the un-Christian agenda of the Republican Party. Seventeen NAACP activists, including eight clergymen, were arrested on Monday for praying in protest of the recent GOP agenda that has taken the state by storm in recent weeks.

As part of their extreme agenda, the North Carolina GOP has tried to pass a law that would declare a state religion in direct violation of the Constitution. After that effort failed miserably, North Carolina Republicans introduced a bill to make divorce harder and would force domestic violence victims to wait two years and attend counseling sessions with her abuser. But the GOP didn’t stop there, one Republican actually shut down a radio show in violation of free speech because the show was critical of the GOP agenda.

Then Republicans declared war on welfare recipients with a bill that would force them to have mandatory background checks before they could receive aid. This arises at the same time these very Republicans oppose universal background checks that would prevent convicted felons and terrorists of getting guns. And to top it all off, the North Carolina GOP is pursuing a voter suppression effort in the state to limit the impact of African-Americans, women, and young people in elections.

All of these actions and more inspired the NAACP members to protest peacefully at the North Carolina capitol on Monday. NC-NAACP President Reverend William Barber said in a statement that:

“The decision to engage in civil disobedience is not one we take lightly. But the extremists are acting like the George Wallaces of the 21st century. They are pursuing a cruel, unusual and unconstitutional agenda reminiscent of the Old South. What happens in North Carolina does not stay in North Carolina. It has national implications. North Carolina is ground zero in a national struggle to defend democracy for all. This much is clear: the Republican-led legislature is standing in the way of progress and passing laws that violate fundamental constitutional rights. As leaders of moral conscience, we must draw the line somewhere. That is what this direct action is all about.”

An open letter on the NC-NAACP website went even further, declaring that “These policies are similar to those by repressive regimes in other countries, who see their own citizens as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. If we are truly moral leaders, we must expose with our words and deeds these shameful attacks on the poor and working people of North Carolina.”

WRAL TV reported on the protest leading to the arrests. Here’s the video:

The hypocrisy here is that if these praying protesters were gun-toting Tea Party members of the Christian Right, they would not have been arrested at all. And if they had been, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder about religious freedom being attacked. But since these clergymen were black members of the liberal leaning NAACP, Republicans have no problem with police dragging them away in cuffs. It is often said that history repeats itself. And it couldn’t be any more true in the South today. Conservatives are once again waging war against civil rights, and African-American leaders are once again having to stand up to fight for those rights. This time, however, the GOP isn’t just attacking African-American’s civil rights, they’re assaulting everyone’s civil rights except their own. If you’re a conservative white male, your rights are protected, but if you’re not, your rights are threatened. And that’s not just in North Carolina, it’s in every red state in America and the only way to stop it is if the people overwhelmingly oppose Republicans until they are forced to relent or suffer the consequences at the voting booth. That is if Republicans haven’t outlawed voting by 2014.

North Carolina Senate blocks testing themselves when passing welfare drug testing bill

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate on Monday pushed through bill that would strip public benefits like food stamps and job training for people who fail a drug test.

In 35-15 vote largely along party lines, senators passed SB 594. A single Democrat voted for the bill, and no Republicans voted against it.

The bill requires those applying for benefits to pay for their own drug tests. Applicants who test negative would be eligible to have the costs of their tests reimbursed. The policy could cost the state more than $2.1 million.

At the same time, senators rejected an amendment offered by Democratic state Sen. Gladys Robinson that would have drug tested lawmakers, the governor and cabinet secretaries.

“We receive state funds, we represent the law, we institute policy,” Robinson told senators on Monday night. “So, it should not be above any of us to submit to drug screening.”

Republican State Sen. Jim Davis said that he did not mind being tested, but insisted that he would vote against the amendment because it had no mechanism to provide him with a reimbursement for the $100 test.

Instead of voting on Robinson’s amendment, state Senator Tom Apodaca (R) used a substitute amendment as a parliamentary maneuver to kill the the proposal.

“The substitute amendment is offered to have the affect of killing the other amendment,” Democratic state Sen. Martin Nesbitt explained in a floor speech. “You need to know that before you vote because you’ll be killing the one that requires a drug test of the leaders of this state since we want to require it for the followers of this state.”

“And we seem to be getting into a situation where where we’re kind above the people,” he added. “Kind of looking down on them, telling them what to do or telling them to be quiet while we talk, and I just sense that it keeps on going.”

Watch this video from WRAL, uploaded April 22, 2013.