12-year-old ‘suffragette’ fires back at NC gov. for voter suppression: ‘I am not a prop!’

By David Edwards/Raw Story

A 12-year-old North Carolina girl fired back at Gov. Pat McCrory on Monday (R-NC) after he called her a “prop” because she had accused him of voter suppression for signing a voter ID law that stripped pre-registration rights for young people.

Earlier this year, Madison Kimrey gained attention for protesting outside the Governor’s Executive Mansion in opposition to the sweeping new law that requires a government ID to vote, cuts the number of early voting days and takes away the right of pre-registration for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds.

The governor’s staff had seemed to mock Kimrey at the time by offering her cake through the mansion gate.

In an August interview, McCrory explained that he would not be meeting with the 12-year-old girl and said that the controversy had been manufactured.

“This is one of the girls that came to our gate and actually asked for food from some of my people,” the governor insisted. “She said she was hungry and we went out gave her food – gave her some cake, and they made it a big political thing. This is very liberal groups using children as props to push a very far-left agenda.”

Speaking to a group of “Moral Monday” protesters in Burlington this week, Kimrey made it clear that she was not a “prop.”

“The elimination of pre-registration was one of the first parts of the new 56-page voting law to go into effect,” Kimrey told the crowd. “Ask yourselves, young people, why? Why do they want to take away our ability to pre-register so quickly?”

“I wanted to meet with our governor to discuss pre-registration but he called my request to meet with him ridiculous and called me a prop for liberal groups,” she continued. “This is not leadership. The young people of North Carolina deserve better.”

“I am not a prop! I am part of the new generation of suffragettes and I will not stand silent while laws are passed to reduce the amount of voter turnout by young people in my home state.”

Watch this video from Story of America, uploaded on Oct. 29, 2013.

North Carolina Governor Signs America’s Worst Voter Suppression Bill Into Law

BY IAN MILLHISER/Think Progress:

On Monday, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a massive voter suppression bill compiling numerous different provisions used to restrict voting in other states. Among other things, the bill includes a strict voter ID law, which will reduce turnout among minority, low-income and student voters. It will cut a full week of early voting, which is likely to depress turnout amonglow-income and African American voters. And it will prohibit certain kinds of voter registration drives, which tend to register low-income and minority voters.

Students, low-income voters and racial minorities, of course, tend to vote for Democrats. McCrory, and the lawmakers behind this bill, are Republicans.

BREAKING: North Carolina Governor To Sign Abortion Restrictions Into Law, Breaking Campaign Pledge

By Sy Mukherjee/Think Progress

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) on Friday promised to sign into law a series of new restrictions that will limit women’s access to abortion coverage in North Carolina and likely shutter all but one of the state’s abortion clinics. McCrory will sign the bill despite a campaign pledge he made last year saying he would not enact any new abortion legislation as governor.

Under the new law, which legislators approved late Thursday night, health insurance offered in North Carolina’s Obamacare insurance marketplaces would be barred from covering abortion. City and county employees would also lose health insurance benefits that help pay for abortions. Furthermore, the law subjects abortion clinics to building code and facility standards akin to those mandated for surgical centers. Of North Carolina’s 16 clinics, 15 don’t meet those elevated standards, leading advocates to fear the law will leave just one abortion clinic open in the entire state.

The anti-abortion provisions were quietly placed into a bill ostensibly dealing with motorcycle safety in the Tar Heel State. Obstetricians and gynecologists have slammed the proposed regulations as unnecessary and even told North Carolina lawmakers to “get out of our exam rooms.”

McCrory oscillated between supporting the measures and issuing veto threats while the North Carolina legislature made adjustments to the bill. He confirmed his intention to sign the law during a press conference on Friday.

North Carolina governor’s latest moves alienate Latino and LGBT communities

By Arturo Garcia/Raw Story

Members of both the LGBT and Latino communities in North Carolina were taken aback by recent decisions by Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) that are seemingly hostile to them.

McClatchy Newspapers reported on Friday that McCrory shuttered the state office for Latino affairs, saying through a spokesperson that his administration would rely on an advisory council to handle issues related to the state’s Latino population.

“We are committed to serving the needs of all of North Carolina’s citizens,” spokesperson Thomas Stith said. “We don’t segment our constituents by race or cultural background any more than we separate them by age or gender.”

McCrory shuttering the office comes on the heels of his recent attempt to brand drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants with a pink stripe and the phrase “NO LEGAL STATUS,” which immigration advocates took as a sign McCrory wanted to perpetuate a stigma against immigrants, even those participating in the government’s Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program, which grants qualified immigrants two-year work visas.

Latino advocates pointed out that McCrory closed the office at a time when the Republican party has expressed more interest in reaching out to Latino communities.

“To close the office of Hispanic affairs only goes to confirm what many people suspect in our state,” said Jess George, executive director of the Charlotte-based Latin American Coalition.“Which is that, despite movement with the Republican Party at the national level towards more bipartisan solutions around comprehensive immigration reform, North Carolina conservatives don’t seem to have gotten the same memo.”

According to The Huffington Post, McCrory also nominated attorney A. L. “Buddy” Collins, who has a record of opposing legislation that would protect LGBT students from bullying, to the state board of education. Collins is currently a member of the board of education for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County.

“Buddy Collins has always been a retrograde voice, inimical to the interests of youth, on the school board,” said Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

In February 2002, Collins opposed efforts by GLSEN to have sexual orientation be covered under the county board’s non-discrimination policy.

“I think it has everything to do with whether people who are gay and lesbian have some sort of special right that everybody else doesn’t,” Collins said at the time. “This request could have been made by people with overweight children or kids with glasses or any other thing that children pick on other children for.”

In an April 2002 column for the Winston-Salem Journal, the Post reported, Collins also accused GLSEN of using public schools “as a place to seek acceptance of its sexual practices” and of using public workshops to expose children to “dangerous homosexual sex acts.”

Collins must still be approved by the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly.

North Carolina Governor Signs ‘Unprecedented’ Gutting Of Unemployment Insurance

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) today signed a law that imposes severe cuts to his state’s unemployment insurance program, a change that will also cost jobless workers in the state access to the federal unemployment compensation program.

McCrory’s signature earned him a rebuke from the National Employment Law Project, which said in a release that the law will result in “the most severe cutsto both state and federal unemployment insurance of any state in the nation”:

These heartless cuts, in the state with the fifth-highest jobless rate in the nation, at 9.2 percent, show a shocking disregard for 400,000 unemployed North Carolinians and their families, many of whom will now go from struggling to barely make ends meet to outright struggling to survive. The immediate pain of these cuts will fall on North Carolinians unfortunate enough to lose work through no fault of their own in a weak economy where jobs are scarce. But the entire state will take a hit from the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in spending at local businesses that would’ve boosted the local and state economies.

The law reduces the maximum benefit allowed from $535 a week to $350 while cutting the number of weeks an unemployed worker is eligible for the program from 26 to 20. As a result, 170,000 jobless North Carolinians will also lose access to $780 million in federal unemployment funds. The average unemployed worker in the United States has been off the job for 35 weeks, meaning many jobless workers will now face the prospect of searching for a new job without access to a safety net program.

Republican state senators have touted the law as “re-employment” program, even though research suggests that workers who receive unemployment benefits search harder for jobs than those who don’t. McCrory, meanwhile, praised the fiscal responsibility of the law, which will allow North Carolina to pay back money owed to the federal government a measly three years earlier than it would have under the old program.