As expected, the Democratic Party gained some seats in the North Carolina General Assembly in Tuesday’s election – but not enough to overcome the GOP’s veto-proof majority in either house.
It was a foregone conclusion that Republicans would retain their majorities in the State House and Senate; the GOP entered Tuesday’s election with a 77-43 advantage in the House and a 33-17 edge in the Senate, and very few of those 170 total districts were competitive in this cycle. (Many candidates ran unopposed.) But Democrats were hoping to gain enough seats to end the Republican veto-proof “supermajority”: as long as the GOP holds more than 60 percent of the seats in both houses, a united party can override any gubernatorial veto.
According to the State Board of Elections, Democrats did pick up three net seats in the House to cut the GOP’s advantage to 74-46 – but they needed at least three more gains to overcome the supermajority. In the Senate, Democrats actually dropped one seat, giving Republicans a 34-16 edge.
http://chapelboro.com/2014-election-central/dems-gain-ncga-gop-keeps-supermajority/On the national level, Republicans are poised to make some gains in the November midterm election. But in North Carolina, could 2014 be a Democratic year?
Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen says it might. Dissatisfaction with the government is high this year, and that’s good for the opposition party – whichever party that should be. That means Republicans would benefit on the national level, but in GOP-dominated North Carolina, it’s the Democratic Party that stands to gain. Plus, Jensen says, NC Republicans were so successful in the 2010 and 2012 elections that there aren’t many winnable races left that they haven’t already won – so while Democrats are looking to pick up seats, the best Republicans can hope for is to hold the seats they already have. (In the race for U.S. Senate, incidentally, it’s the same story in reverse: all the seats up for election this year were last contested in 2008, a landslide year for Democrats.)
What will this mean in November? Jensen says it’s highly unlikely that Democrats will pick up enough seats to reclaim a majority in the State House or Senate – but they could win enough to cancel the GOP’s veto-proof majority. That in turn would strengthen the power of the governor’s office – giving Pat McCrory more of a chance to flex his moderate muscle in the short term (if he so chose), and elevating the importance of the 2016 gubernatorial election in the longer term.
Tom Jensen spoke with Aaron Keck on WCHL this week. In addition to the General Assembly race, they also discussed public opinion about a minimum wage increase – and (of course) the upcoming UNC football game.
http://chapelboro.com/news/election/2014-gains-dems-nc/Pat McCrory is unpopular and the North Carolina General Assembly is extremely unpopular – but it doesn’t look like there will be much of a shakeup in Raleigh when North Carolinians go to vote this November.
That’s the upshot of the latest survey from Public Policy Polling, released last week.
Governor McCrory’s approval rating is only 39 percent and his disapproval rating is 45 percent – marking the 12th month in a row that McCrory has been in negative territory. PPP director Tom Jensen says that may be because voters see McCrory as a weak governor: only 27 percent believe he’s calling the shots in Raleigh, while 43 percent think the General Assembly is in control. (And voters don’t see that as a good thing: only 18 percent of North Carolinians approve of the job the NCGA is doing.)
But voters disapprove of Democrats in the NCGA as much as they disapprove of Republicans – so even though the NCGA is in Republican hands, there doesn’t appear to be a groundswell of support for Democrats yet. Republicans actually lead a generic legislative ballot 43-41, which Jensen says would give the GOP essentially the same majority for the next two years that it enjoys today. (That’s in spite of the fact that most of the policies being passed in the House and Senate are themselves unpopular as well.)
Tom Jensen joined Aaron Keck on the Tuesday afternoon news to discuss the poll.
As for the 2016 election, Jensen says to expect some close races: McCrory currently holds a 44-42 lead over attorney general Roy Cooper, the presumptive Democratic challenger (owing partly to Cooper’s low name recognition, Jensen says), while Hillary Clinton leads the most likely Republican candidates in the presidential race by equally narrow margins.
http://chapelboro.com/news/election/nc-gop-unpopular-danger/I was in the middle of writing a column about the unique benefits and properties of fertilizer made from seaweed when I got distracted by the North Carolina General Assembly. A Republican-led senate committee has proposed to make it a felony for a citizen to disclose the names of the chemicals used by drilling companies in the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process. The purported rationale is that drilling companies claim that the mixtures of chemicals they use are confidential trade secrets. As I will outline below, this claim borders on the absurd.
I have written about fracking several times in the past. For a thorough review of the technology and potential environmental risks please read my previous column, To Frack or not to Frack. For the purposes of this column, here is a very brief summary of fracking. When companies drill for oil or gas, everything is much easier if the deposits are contained in underground rock structures which are relatively porous. The porosity makes it easy for the oil and gas to move from place to place and thus to be extracted to the surface. As time has passed in the United States and around the world, oil and gas deposits contained in porous rock formations have been significantly depleted and drilling companies have started to exploit deposits which are present in low-porosity formations. To extract the oil and gas from these low-porosity rocks, the rocks must first be broken by fracking.
Fracking involves first drilling a hole straight down to the depth where the oil and/or gas deposits reside and then drilling horizontally through the non-porous rocks. Next, millions of gallons of a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals are pumped into the well. Since the temperature below ground is much higher than the surface, the water expands, which creates incredibly high pressures which then fractures the rock. The sand stays within the rock formation to help keep the smaller fissures created in the fracking process open. About 40% of the water and chemicals used in the process are pumped back out to the surface, while the other 60% remain underground.
The chemicals used in the fracking process have several purposes. A partial list includes:
• preventing the sand from clumping together too soon or too tightly,
• reducing the viscosity of the mixture so that it will flow through small cracks,
• preventing corrosion of the metal pipes used in the well, and
• killing bacteria in the water.
Many of the chemicals used in fracking are not soluble in pure water. If these chemicals can’t be dissolved or at least suspended in the water, the fracking process would not work. Therefore, in order to stabilize the chemicals in the water, it is necessary to add some hydrocarbons to the mixture as a co-solvent. Many of the issues and controversies surrounding the environmental risks of fracking are related to the hydrocarbon co-solvent.
The hydrocarbon co-solvent which is typically used is called petroleum distillate. Without going into a lengthy explanation of how an oil refinery works, petroleum distillate consists of a mixture of small to medium size hydrocarbons which were either present in the oil when it was extracted from the ground or created by “cracking” larger hydrocarbons into smaller ones during the oil refining process. Gasoline, kerosene, and diesel are all examples of petroleum distillates. Petroleum distillates generally contain hundreds of different types of hydrocarbon molecules, including known carcinogens such as benzene.
If you are running an oil refinery and want to maximize profits, you operate the equipment so that you manage to sell most of your petroleum distillate as gasoline, kerosene, or diesel. However, because of the nature of petroleum as well as the limitations in the specifications for products like gasoline, the refinery will end up with some distillate left over, for which there is no good commercial outlet. The refinery may be able to sell a portion of these leftovers as paint thinner, but much of it is effectively just waste. It is this waste distillate which is being used across the country as the co-solvent hydrocarbon for the fracking process.
With that background in mind, let’s first examine the claim that the recipes for these mixtures of fracking chemicals used by the drilling companies represent valuable, proprietary trade secrets. Our first hint that this claim is suspect stems from the fact that the technology involved in suspending sand in water and keeping pipes from corroding is neither novel nor complicated. There is certainly some art in calibrating the concentrations of the chemicals to adjust to local geology, but no esoteric or novel science is involved.
Our second hint is that the drilling companies do not invent or own the recipes for the fracking chemicals themselves. Rather, they rely on the one of the four large U.S. oil field services companies – Schlumberger, Halliburton, Flour or Baker-Hughes – who dominate the market. To the extent that a rationale might exist for maintaining trade secrets on fracking chemicals, it would presumably stem from protecting these four companies from one another. Given that all of these companies have been working on the same projects in the same places for decades, they already know exactly what each other are doing. Therefore, the suggestion that a citizen of North Carolina could cause financial harm to Halliburton by disclosing which anti-corrosive chemicals it is using does not pass the smell test.
So if Halliburton and the other companies don’t really need this to be protected by the North Carolina General Assembly, what is the real purpose of this proposed gag rule? I will give you my thoughts on that next week in Part II of this series. The week after in Part III, I will conclude the series by addressing the fate of the 40% of the water and chemicals which are pumped back up to the surface during the fracking process. It seems that the seaweed column will just have to wait.
Have a comment or question? Use the interface below or send me an email to commonscience@chapelboro.com.
http://chapelboro.com/columns/common-science/fracking-gag-rule-part-trade-secret/North Carolina – Voter turnout this election year was low, but that won’t stop members of the Democratic Party from making bold predictions about their opponents’ futures.
***Listen to the Story***
Randy Voller is the Chair of the North Carolina State Democratic Party, and he says he and his party’s supporters should be pleased with last week’s election results.
“We pretty much swept all the races across the state, and in the big cities,” Voller says.
Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, and Sanford are a few cities included on his list of successes for the Democratic Party in this year’s municipal elections. So what went right for the candidates dressed in blue?
“Tuesday night was a referendum on what the mood of the electorate is in our cities,” Voller says, “The mood was to elect democrats and democrat city counsels across the state, especially in our bigger cities from Asheville to Wilmington.”
Voller says that mood was set by both federal and state government actions and events.He says the government shutdown and structural issues nationally had an effect on this election.
But Voller says events closer to home, within North Carolina’s state government, had a heavy influence on voters’ decisions as well.
“I think the interference in local control by the general assembly probably was on a lot of people’s minds,” Voller says, “There are a number of places where the general assembly got involved in local issues which traditionally they would not have done.”
Voller says he thinks the results in this election are foreshadowing future setbacks for opponents of the Democratic Party.
“I think what happened in Charlotte, where the republicans invested heavily and lost, is a bell-weather for 2014,” Voller says. And he has a message for voters not following his flock.
“If your stance is, ‘I don’t believe in government, or government doesn’t work, or we should privatize government,’ you’re probably on the defense right now,” Voller says.
http://chapelboro.com/news/election/democratic-party-chair-pleased-with-election-results/RALEIGH – In yet another surprise move coming out of Raleigh, the state House answered a veto threat from Gov. Pat McCrory by altering proposed abortion restrictions passed by the Senate and tacking them on another bill about motorcycle safety. Representative Verla Insko, of Orange County, has been outspoken against abortion restrictions and questioned the motives of Republican lawmakers to push the legislation through.
“No one who believes in a thriving democracy should avoid or be opposed to open and transparent process with a vigorous debate on both sides of the issue. They clearly did not want to expose themselves to transparency,” Insko said.
Last week, the original abortion regulations were unexpectedly attached to House Bill 695, buried under legislation on Sharia law. Those restrictions would require abortion providers to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgery centers, a move abortion-rights advocates say is designed to shut down providers. Only one clinic in the entire state currently meets those standards. HB 695 moved through the Senate in less than 24 hours, just before the July Fourth holiday, and with little public notice. The bill then returned to the House for a final vote of concurrence.
After public backlash, however, the bill’s approval was halted Tuesday for a two-hour public hearing held by the House Health and Human Services Committee. It was decided further changes and clarifications were necessary before the bill could move forward. During that hearing, Insko was very outspoken about the potential consequences of preventing women from having safe abortions.
By Wednesday morning, the abortion-related provisions from HB 695 were then transferred to Senate Bill 353— the motorcycle safety bill. The new version of Senate Bill 353 was then passed by a House Judiciary Committee later in the day.
“They want to reach their goals in the dark of the night to the extent that they can. I don’t think North Carolinians will accept the process, much less the outcome,” Insko said.
Insko said the changes made by the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday were “modest,” and restrictive, and the language of the bill was still unclear. She explained that committee members only gave “vague answers” when asked what the changes would imply.
“I expect that it is the only way they could have gotten the Republican caucus in the House to agree to that language because the caucus members were clearly not of one voice on that issue,” Insko said.
As of 11:50 Wednesday morning, the new version of SB 353 was not available to the public, and McCrory announced his intent to veto HB 695 only after work was nearly complete on the alternate version SB 353, according to WRAL.
Insko said Democrats in the General Assembly and abortion-rights activists now have a mounting case against Republicans lawmakers of abusing the democratic process, as there was no notice that the abortion-related provisions would be on the calendar Wednesday, mirroring actions taken in the Senate last week.
“I’m increasingly frustrated, disappointed and agree that they are misusing their power. It really is a power move,” Insko said.
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Wos advised state lawmakers Tuesday to update the inspection procedures for abortion clinics because they haven’t been reviewed since 1995. Insko said she supports that proposal because it will help to keep the clinics open and safe. She says the problem is that the state doesn’t provide adequate funds to carry out those inspections.
“We pass laws that create good regulations, but the inspectors are never funded. If you never see someone running a stop sign, you never get a ticket,” Insko said.
Led by Planned Parenthood, protesters have been rallying outside and inside the General Assembly since the Senate passed HB 695 last week.
“I think that the women of North Carolina are energized, and they see that their hard-fought-for civil rights are being removed. I think that you’ll see a continued effort to make sure that those are protected,” Insko said.
The new version of SB 353 will move to the House floor Thursday. If approved, it would then return to the Senate for a final vote of concurrence before going to Governor McCrory.
http://chapelboro.com/news/state-government/rep-insko-questions-motives-behind-new-abortion-bill/RALEIGH – Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Wos advised state lawmakers Tuesday to clarify the sum of the provisions proposed in House Bill 695 to restrict abortion access. The bill moved through Senate in less than 24 hours last week, and only a needed a concurrence vote by the full House to pass. After backlash from abortion-rights activists, the House and Human Services Committee held a public hearing to discuss the bill further.
There was a clear division in the room where the hearing was held. Pro-choice supporters wore pink and anti-abortion advocates wore blue.
Outside of the State Legislative Building, protesters, including Carol Brooke of Carrboro, gathered for a rally led by Planned Parenthood against abortion restrictions.
“I would hope that Governor McCrory will remember how many women in this state helped to elect him and how many women he is representing, and that he will do the right thing and veto this bill,” Brooke said.
Pro-choice rally; Photo by Rachel Nash
House Bill 695 would require abortion providers to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgery centers, a move abortion-rights advocates say is designed to shut down providers. Only one clinic in the entire state currently meets those standards.
Governor Pat McCrory, who said last fall that he would not support further abortion restrictions, criticized the way in which House Bill 695 moved rapidly through the Senate with little public notice, buried in legislation against Sharia Law. Even if McCrory follows through on his pledge, Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both houses making the bill almost certain to pass.
Secretary Wos said that regulations and inspection procedures for abortion clinics need to be updated, saying that they haven’t been reviewed since 1995.
Micah Allen sat in the public hearing and said he is pro-life under all circumstances.
“In terms of consistency across the board with dangerous medical procedures this has to happen. It is inconsistent to argue against it and say that other procedures of a similar nature have to have a sterile environment, and a surgeon present; it really makes no sense. Logically, this bill makes a lot of sense,” Allen said.
Allen agrees with points the DHHS made, saying that certain provisions of the bill needed to be clarified to ensure the safety standards. Two abortion clinics were shut down this year in Durham and Charlotte for unsafe practices.
“I think a lot of the speakers in favor of the bill touched on the issue that has tended to be an emotional thing. Abortion has been put on a pedestal, and currently the laws have put it in another category than surgical centers. That’s unfortunate because it’s much less safe than people have presented it as,” Allen said.
Gabrielle Johnson, a UNC law student, attended Tuesday’s rally and is pro-choice. Johnson also attended last Wednesday’s impromptu demonstration of more than 600, organized in response to the bill itself as well as the way it was passed in the Senate.
“Even if it does pass, I hope that these same women who are getting rallied up at this moment for this anti-women’s rights bill will remember this during election time and will get equally excited and equally energized to remind them [the General Assembly] that if you go against us once, you’ll have to pay for it with your election and your seat,” Johnson said.
Representative Verla Insko of Orange County was outspoken during the hearing, arguing that abortion clinics protect women’s health by providing safe ways to have the procedure done. Representative Beverly Earle of Mecklenburg County said that if all but one clinic were to close, women would be forced to have abortions in the “back-room type of places.”
http://chapelboro.com/news/state-government/abortion-restriction-bill-will-be-reviewed-further/ 51.6°F |
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