No one cares for the trees anymore. The NC General Assembly made the first bill of its long session a piece of legislation that would authorize rampant clear-cutting along North Carolina highways. Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed this legislation. As usual, however, the legislature is expected to override his good sense and enable the creation of a Carolinian countryside that is reduced to a mess of tacky billboards.
This act of contempt for nature represents more than the philistinism of a provincial legislature. It stems from a corruption that has put down deep roots, if you will, in the civic soil as North Carolina Republicans have entrenched their majority. Billboard operators have shoveled campaign donations into the GOP purse for years, and legislators, led by the omnipotent Phil Berger, have repaid their suitors with a bill that will degrade the scenery of North Carolina’s rural areas for decades to come.
The GOP’s corruption has a common theme. While the extremist fervor of the party is beyond question, some of the most egregious policies to spew out of Jones Street have represented payoffs for monied interests. These policies have often been astonishingly stupid.
For example, Republicans reauthorized online-only charter schools despite incontrovertible evidence that internet-based schools produce putrid outcomes on nearly every measure of educational achievement. This particularly ill-advised extension of the school-choice craze emerged because the online schools’ wealthy lobbyists poured cash into the insatiable maw of the Republican campaign machine.
Stupidity-for-money reached its apogee last year in the casino affair. Virtually no one in North Carolina — right or left — wanted casino gambling to be established in the state. But Senator Phil Berger fought a relentless campaign to force casinos on three rural communities in large part because of his party’s financial connections to the gambling sector.
Addiction, blight, and unruly male behavior were all prices Phil Berger was happy to have us pay in order to secure yet another stream of revenue for his party’s campaign account. The theme, as with online charter schools and numerous other quid-pro-quos, was of a Republican majority willing to make destructive deals with special interests with no concern whatsoever paid to the common good.
The GOP has evolved into a corruption machine remarkably quickly. North Carolina Democrats never lived in the celestial world of civic idealism. In 1936, a lobbyist plopped a paper bag with tens of thousands of dollars in hard cash down on the desk of the state’s Democratic political boss, O. Max Gardner. But in the modern era, Democrats resisted crude corruption until the early 2000s when their majority had become smug and complacent.
The GOP, by contrast, took less than 15 years to become thoroughly corrupt. The champion grifter Tim Moore has already left the legislature to pursue greater riches in Washington.
Phil Berger has often been portrayed as an aggressive ideologue. I used to think of him that way, and I often used very provocative language to critique his rigid dogma. But Berger has become an uncomplicated and ruthless political boss in a matter of a baker’s dozen’s years. He and his majority have repeatedly traded bad public policy for campaign donations that amounted to legalized bribes. Tawdry billboards and drunken gamblers are the GOP’s cost of doing business.
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