North Carolina's recently approved state budget would give legislators investigative powers that Democrats compared to a "secret police force" in Nazi Germany.
The Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations – or GovOps – would have the authority to investigate state and local government agencies, as well as any agency that received taxpayer funding, and public employees contacted by investigators would be required to keep those communications and requests for information confidential, reported WRAL-TV.
“We do not need a legislative spy agency," said state Sen. Graig Meyer (D-Orange), who compared the proposed investigative unit to the "Gestapo." "[It's a] dangerous level of dark and dangerous government."
Gov Ops staff would be authorized to enter any building owned or leased by a state or non-state entity without a warrant, and lawmakers say that would include private residences owned by contractors and subcontractors who run businesses from their homes.
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“If you do business with the state, and your business is registered at your home, then partisan legislative staff from Gov Ops could go into your home without a warrant to get documents from your home, including computer files,” Meyer said. “I am upset because this is a level of intrusion of government that I don’t think the majority of us want whether we are Republican or Democrat.”
House speaker Tim Moore brushed aside Meyer's concerns as hyperbole, saying that lawmakers wanted to investigate state agencies for the government's slow response to Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018, which Republicans have blamed on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
"People three years, four years after the hurricane still didn't have a home, and hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent," Moore said, "and those people were asking why. Their representatives were asking why, and so we asked why, and we got stonewalled a lot, so we need to have the ability to demand and insist that that information be provided.”
But Meyer insisted the investigative powers could easily be abused for partisan purposes.
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“I don’t think I have ever publicly called the GOP leadership ‘authoritarian’ because that’s not a term I take lightly, but their approach to seizing power and cover up their tracks now fits the bill,” Meyer told Popular Information. “The hypotheticals of how Gov Ops power could be abused are endless. Verbal assurances of restraint are inadequate; we need clear guardrails in law.”
The legislature created the Gov Ops committee years ago to hold government institutions accountable, but unlike most watchdog groups it is dominated by Republican lawmakers, and partisan politics strongly influence its investigations -- such as a recent inquiry into diversity training programs at the University of North Carolina.
“For the life of me, I don’t understand why any government entity needs this much control on a partisan level,” said state Rep. Allison Dahle, a Wake County Democrat. “This is not a way for us to run our government, folks. This is a scary, scary step."