The NC General Assembly has overridden five of Governor Cooper’s vetoes. Here is what you need to know.

The NC General Assembly (state legislature) last week voted to override five of Governor Roy Cooper’s legislative vetoes. In so doing, they weakened state environmental laws and clean energy standards, seized power to name majorities of key state regulatory boards, made voting more difficult for many citizens, and rigged state and local election boards in ways designed to further reduce voting opportunities and give more power over elections to the state legislative supermajority.

Most of the veto overrides were along party lines, with Republicans voting to override and Democrats against. However, on one key environmental bill, House Bill 600, five House Democrats joined Republicans in voting for one of the most pro-polluter bills of the 2023 session. The five House Democrats voting to weaken clean water laws governing hog and poultry farming and stormwater runoff, and to build a major fracked-gas pipeline, were Representatives Carla Cunningham (Mecklenburg), Nasif Majeed (Mecklenburg), Garland Pierce (Scotland), Shelly Willingham (Edgecomb), and Michael Wray (Northampton).

House Bill 600

HB 600 represented this year’s version of the recurring “regulatory reform” package, which typically provides a vehicle for some of the legislative majority’s most anti-environmental legal changes. In the words of Governor Cooper in his veto message for HB 600, “This bill is a hodgepodge of bad provisions that will result in dirtier water, discriminatory permitting and threats to North Carolina’s environment.”

As NCLCV pointed out in more detail, HB 600 will “expedite the Mountain Valley Pipeline Southgate project. Despite having been denied permits twice because of its impacts on water quality, Republican lawmakers are trying to circumvent these protections for North Carolinians so that they can fill their own pockets. Additionally, HB 600 threatens our clean water by rolling back stormwater laws and regulations which will threaten water supply, natural filter systems, and erosion prevention areas. These rollbacks come even as big-monied corporations and their paid politicians are claiming flooding won’t increase because of these stormwater regulations.”

The other bills which saw Cooper vetoes overridden last week were SB 678, SB 747, SB 749, and SB 512.

Senate Bill 678

Senate Bill 678: The bill changes the requirement for state utilities to provide a minimum percentage of their electricity from “renewable” energy and energy efficiency to “clean” energy—and specifically defines “clean” as including nuclear power (despite its production of deadly radioactive spent fuel, for which there is no treatment and no accepted method of permanent storage).

In his veto message for SB 678, Governor Cooper said, “North Carolina is on a bipartisan path to removing carbon from our electric power sector in the most cost-effective way. This bill attempts to diverge from that path by trying to put construction of traditional power plants, and higher profits for the utility companies, over lower-cost solutions like energy efficiency. North Carolina should consider all pathways to decarbonize, rather than putting a thumb on the scale in favor of building new conventional generation.”

Senate Bill 747

Known by voting-rights advocates as the “Jumbo Jet of Voter Suppression,” SB 747 includes a collection of changes designed to make voting more difficult for many citizens, including those who use early voting by mail. “This legislation has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans keeping and gaining power,” said Governor Cooper in his veto message. “It requires valid votes to be tossed out unnecessarily, schemes to restrict early voting and absentee ballots, encourages voter intimidation and attempts to give Republican legislators the authority to decide contested election results.”

Senate Bill 749

This companion bill to SB 747 changes the structure of election administration at the state and county levels in ways that encourage partisan deadlocks on setting early voting sites and hearing challenges to election outcomes, ultimately leaving decisions in the hands of the current pro-polluter legislative leadership. Among other provisions, the bill guarantees that any time a local board cannot agree on an early voting plan (how many locations to open and where), then the chance to vote early falls back to a single early voting site with limited hours. Currently, early voting in most counties is open over two weeks at multiple voting sites in each county. A large majority of NC voters now take advantage of early voting.

“The legislative takeover of state and local elections boards could doom our state’s elections to gridlock and severely limit early voting,” said Governor Cooper in his veto message. “It also creates a grave risk that Republican legislators or courts would be empowered to change the results of an election if they don’t like the winner. That’s a serious threat to our democracy, particularly after the nation just saw a presidential candidate try to strongarm state officials into reversing his losing election result. Courts have already ruled the ideas in this bill unconstitutional, and voters overwhelmingly said no when the legislature tried to change the constitution.”

Senate Bill 512

SB 512 takes away the governor’s authority to appoint majorities of key regulatory boards, including the Environmental Management Commission, Commission for Public Health, Board of Transportation, Coastal Resources Commission, and Wildlife Resources Commission. The appointment authority in each case was shifted to the pro-polluter legislative leadership, and in some cases to other elected executive positions currently held by their allies.

As bleak as the results of the legislature’s veto override votes are, they are not all yet the final word. Lawsuits challenging several of the bills in court are already underway.