Rob Schofield, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

It’s been almost seven years since North Carolina Republican lawmakers and then-Gov. Pat McCrory hastily concocted and enacted House Bill 2 – the infamous “bathroom bill.” It targeted transgender people for ignorant, mean-spirited and altogether absurd discrimination, while simultaneously making the state the target of numerous boycotts and countless late-night TV one-liners.

The bill was later repealed but its legacy – as an embarrassment to be forgotten as quickly as possible for most people, and as a proud rallying point for the state’s religious right fringe (and reactionary culture warriors everywhere), lingers on. Across the country, efforts to make life harder for transgender people, and even to criminalize efforts to provide them medically necessary healthcare, continue apace. North Carolina state Treasurer Dale Folwell has been an especially avid and energetic devotee of this brand of discrimination.

Now, however, one of the chief architects of the HB 2 disaster, state House Speaker Tim Moore, is back with a new and very different – but equally absurd – kind of bathroom bill, or to be more precise, bathroom rule. And this one too appears to have been fueled by the never-sated demands of right-wing social crusaders.

As NC Policy Watch journalist Lynn Bonner reported last week, the new House rule makes clear that when it comes to votes in the state House on overriding gubernatorial vetoes – which could well be a frequent occurrence over the next two years – advance notice (of even a single day) to members will no longer be required.

This means, for instance, that should lawmakers pass – oh, just to spitball it – a bill banning abortions, or perhaps a version of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” law, a vote to override a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper could take place basically anytime the House is in session.

In a body in which Republicans and Democrats were relatively evenly divided and in which the state constitution requires a three-fifths vote to override a veto, such a rule might be unfair, but not terribly consequential. But in the current state House, in which the GOP is a single seat short of a supermajority, such a change has the potential to be a very big deal.

As Bonner reported:

House Democratic leader Robert Reives said the rule change is unfair to members who miss votes to attend to family obligations or work, and is unfair to the public, which won’t know when votes are imminent. 'This ends up circumventing a lot of the processes we have in place for public notice,' he said."

As Reives also accurately observed, Republicans could, quite literally and outrageously, call for an override vote when a House member is at a family funeral, or even at the very moment someone leaves the House floor to use the bathroom.

All of which serves to raise once more the perennial question: What is it that Moore is so afraid of?

Thanks largely to the power of the partisan gerrymandering that’s rigged electoral districts in the GOP’s favor in a deeply purple state, the Cleveland County Republican decides when the House meets, which bills are heard, and even plays a huge role in deciding who gets elected to serve under him.

Amazingly, however, in running the House during his years as Speaker, Moore has always behaved more like an anxious autocrat who’s afraid of his own shadow and any hints of democracy.

He’s repeatedly shut down debate and blocked consideration of amendments to bills. He even held a vote on the state budget when nearly all the Democratic members were outside the chamber.

Now he’s at it again.

Moore almost always blithely advances empty non-answers when he’s pressed to justify actions like the new override rule, but as with HB 2, this latest move can be explained, at least in part, as a sop to social reactionaries in the Republican base. With their dreams of imposing new restrictions on reproductive freedom and human sexuality so close to being realized, conservative zealots are clearly willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their objectives. Their embrace of Donald Trump and hijacking of the U.S. Supreme Court nomination process made that clear years ago.

And while Moore, like U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is no religious right true believer – his political objectives have always clearly been driven first and foremost by a quest for wealth and power – he’s usually more than willing to placate the fringe to bolster his own position. And, if, as is the case here, doing so also helps him to consolidate still more personal control over state lawmaking, well, so much the better.

The bottom line: It's a basic tenet of democratic government that votes are taken in public and with adequate notice. Sadly, however, as with so many other similar ends-justify-the-means acts of the modern Republican Party, Speaker Moore’s new bathroom rule is yet another assault on this fundamental principle.

It’s a bedrock principle of American law that average people can vindicate their legal and constitutional rights in courts of law and have those courts compel or prevent acts of other branches of government.

From preventing the taking of private property without compensation, to ordering necessary services for, say, people living with disabilities, or even an incarcerated person, such action can take several forms.

Without such a rule, many basic rights would be rendered as effectively meaningless as they are in countries like Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.

Although there are literally thousands of examples from American jurisprudential history that illustrate this basic premise, a classic example is the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright. In that case, the Court ruled that an indigent criminal defendant has the fundamental right to have the assistance of counsel in order to have a fair trial, and that it is the state’s obligation to provide such counsel for free.

Or take the 1982 case of Plyler v. Doe, in which the court established the basic rule that states must provide free public education to all children – including those who are undocumented.

And then, as noted above, there are the scores of cases – some of them in my home state of North Carolina – in which courts have ordered governments to provide humane and adequate conditions in prisons, jails, and institutions that house people living with mental illness, substance abuse problems or developmental disabilities.

It’s true that the oversight process for enforcing such judgments frequently gets messy and contentious. But the basic premise – that courts have the fundamental power to compel government action (even when it requires the expenditure of public resources) – remains (and should remain) unassailable.

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Without such a basic rule, states would be free to house prisoners in outdoor pens like farm animals, lock patients suffering from mental illness into windowless dungeons, or cram schoolchildren, 70-per classroom, into tiny, unheated, and overcrowded trailers that fail to meet fire or electrical codes. What’s more, the people forced to endure such torturous conditions would be out of luck and without a possible remedy.

Amazingly, however, this is the precise position that state Republican politicians say should prevail with respect to North Carolina’s landmark Leandro school funding case.

Despite multiple judicial determinations that the state’s K-12 schools are unconstitutionally deficient, the Republican politicians – including, last week, a pair of appellate court judges – say that no court can order the legislature to actually fix the problem.

According to the judges in question, state courts have “no authority to order the appropriation of monies to satisfy any execution of [the Leandro] judgment.”

In effect, they argue, 25-plus years of trials, expert witness testimony, findings, rulings, appeals and remedy planning were all just a meaningless exercise in pushing paper. When it gets right down to it, the power to decide whether to make our K-12 schools constitutional remains right where it’s always been – at the whim of state legislative leaders who are the chief authors of the current failed system.

And just in case anyone had any doubts about the complete power they claim to wield (or had any inkling to question it), GOP lawmakers are firing some unmistakable warning shots designed to intimidate naysayers.

In concert with right-wing allies, lawmakers have sent the clear and appalling message in recent days (see item #8 of the recently adopted adjournment resolution) that they are considering the extraordinary (and deeply treacherous) step of impeaching North Carolina Superior Court Judge David Lee – the visionary and courageous jurist who has been seeking to enforce the Leandro ruling and make it real.

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The apparent grounds: They don’t like the idea of him telling them what to do.

It’s difficult to convey what a radical stance this represents. Indeed, the parallels to the infamous “Impeach Earl Warren” mantra voiced by mid-20th century segregationists opposed to the Brown v. Board school integration case are unavoidable.

All that said, North Carolina state Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger has taken things a step further. Not only did he deny the power of courts to remedy the state’s unconstitutional education system, but last week he also blamed the situation in the state’s schools on the plaintiffs in the case – that is, low wealth counties and the kids unlucky enough to attend school therein.

No, that is not a misprint. In response to the court ruling authored by the GOP judges, Berger said: “Rather than accepting responsibility for lagging achievement and outright failure, the Leandro parties insist that the pathway to student improvement is always the simple application of more money.”

Talk about taking victim blaming to a new level.

The bottom line: If the position staked out by Berger and his pals somehow triumphs, it will set a potentially disastrous precedent that will almost certainly harm millions of schoolchildren and, quite conceivably, serve to undermine many other basic individual rights.

The state Supreme Court should stand up for all North Carolinians and definitively reject this absurd and extreme stance as quickly as possible.

Rob Schofield, an attorney, is the director of North Carolina Policy Watch, a sibling site of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, where this column first appeared.

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