Campaign Watch: Dishonest, Deceptive Amendments
Citizen conservation groups are highly critical of the proposed amendments to the North Carolina constitution on the ballot this fall, calling them deceptive and dangerous to the environment, public health, and citizen participation in democracy.
For NCLCV’s take, check out our page on the amendments in our scorecard, which assesses them through an environmental, public health, and voting rights lens. The view isn’t pretty.
Clean Air Carolina (CAC) also came out strong against the amendments, joining other citizen groups in suing to keep four of them off the ballot altogether. With only limited success in the courts, CAC is now joining in the efforts to educate voters on why everyone should oppose these power-grabbing, voter-disenfranchising amendments.
Among other severe problems, two of the proposed amendments would take power from the governor and shift it to the already power-heavy state legislature. That would leave our people with even less of a check on the extreme abuses that can result from one-party dominance of the legislative branch. We’ve watched over the past six years as the cadre of extreme anti-environmental leadership running the General Assembly has gutted North Carolina’s once-strong pollution control laws. They went further to deeply cut the staff and resources needed to enforce our laws protecting public health and the environment.
Two of the amendments would also enable this same legislative leadership’s continuing efforts to disenfranchise voters across our state. Let’s be candid: With zero evidence of significant voter impersonation fraud in our state, the only reason legislative leaders have fiercely pushed voter ID laws is to keep voters less likely to support them from voting altogether.
The targeted groups include poor voters, young voters, and communities of color. In fact, the court panel which threw out these legislators’ previous voter suppression laws found that they unconstitutionally targeted African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.” This targeted voter suppression makes it much harder to hold those leaders accountable for their abuses, including their anti-environment policies.
For a more detailed amendment-by-amendment look at the case for voting “no” on the proposed state constitutional amendments, see here and here.
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