Speaker Timmy cheers ‘the new moderate Republican Party’
Yep. That’s exactly what the tubby little guy did during the pep rally welcoming newly-minted Republican Tricia Cotham to the, um, “family.”
Some more of Timmy’s comedy from the presser? He claimed that he tells all of his caucus members to vote “their conscience, their district, and then their caucus.” He may have said that a few times in front of the press, just for giggles. In both Jones Street chambers and in both parties, your committee assignments, office assignments, staff allotments, and your campaign funding are all threatened on a near-daily basis. Great “reminders” on the *importance* of loyalty to your party leaders.
(For what it’s worth, lil’ Tricia has said she left the Democrats because they got mad about the emojis she used on her social media. Seriously ???? No irritation with liberal extremism? Just a tantrum over social media nonsense?
One has to wonder if she will continue with her abortion extremism as a Republican. Or her support of Planned Parenthood and its side gig of peddling dead baby parts?)
To those of you not as educated on political doublespeak (known in some quarters as bullshit), ‘the new moderate Republican Party’ will stand for whatever the Charlotte bagmen – who first saddled us with Speaker Thom Tillis – and the DC money folks tell us it will stand 
for.
If this doesn’t make things clear for you out there, I don’t know what will. The Raleigh elites DO NOT GIVE ONE DAMN ABOUT CONSERVATISM. (Not a single one.)
Never mind that the party’s conservative image gave the GOP all of the power and perks it has enjoyed in-state since 1994. You can lay that squarely at the feet of Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan. Helms’ name is the one-that-shall-not-be-spoken. And you barely hear any mention of Reagan.
If you hear the Raleigh crowd tell it, it’s all Thom’s doing. Seriously.
I can remember when the Holshouser – Broyhill crew ran the NCGOP show. Nearly the entire NCGOP in-state footprint could be contained within portions of the 704 area code.
They didn’t stand for much of anything. And the party didn’t control much of anything either.
When you govern as 95 percent of what the Democrats are, why wouldn’t people take the Democrats’ 100 percent offering?
What’s being done now is a conservative-sounding campaign, which, if successful, becomes Democrat-lite governance. In the real world, telling someone one thing and having the truth be something else, is lying. Or even “better” — FRAUD.
In the Tim Moore-Phil Berger era on Jones Street, the GOP has thumbed its nose at just about every aspect of the party platform.
The Tillis-Jones Street mafia has copied and applied the the formula used to water-down the legislative branch to our congressional delegation. (With the election of Ted Budd, we’ve apparently replaced the last two Rs [Burr]with two Ds [Budd].). The gang used Chuck Edwards to get rid of Madison Cawthorn. Now, Dan Bishop is all we have left.
Now, the sights are being set on the state’s executive branch.
State senator Danny Britt, former Tillis aide Ray Starling, and Tillis crony Andrew Murray are being mulled over for attorney general. Any of those three would be owned by the Tillis-Jones Street mafia.
Word is that state Rep. Erin Paré is being groomed for a lieutenant governor run. Apparently, Tillis is still pissed at Hal Weatherman for helping Madison Cawthorn. (Actually, Hal ran a horrible campaign. Tillis & co. should thank him.)
Jon Hardister — the House majority whip – has his eyes on Labor commissioner. He’s been a good soldier for Timmy. Should be no different if Hardister wins and takes over at Labor.
Tillis crony and state Rep. John Bradford is being bandied about to replace Dale Folwell at treasurer. Bradford has been a good soldier for the mafia, and would be expected to reverse everything Folwell has done in his two terms.
Word is also there that Tricia Cotham is being groomed for a run at DPI superintendent, currently held by RINO Catherine Truitt.
In the governor’s race, it’s become clear that the Berger political machine has sunk its claws into Mark Robinson. Those expecting a repeat of his first year as LG will probably be unpleasantly surprised. The Berger crew sees the fundraising potential and the cash-flow. Tons of money is already being raised off of Robinson’s girth. If he wins in May and November 2024, he’ll likely be faced with two choices: (1) play nice with the folks (Tillis, Blaine and et. al.) who got him across the finish line, or (2) get sat in the corner and ignored – like he has been for most of his current term as LG.
There you go. We’ve got a formula for a state party – and the governance of our state — being fully controlled in smoke-filled rooms in Raleigh and Charlotte. Total control of our executive and legislative branches as well as our congressional delegation.
We can keep applauding like trained seals and showing up to perpetually re-elect these clowns. Or we can wake up.
We’re clearly being told that we, as conservatives, don’t matter and aren’t wanted. We brought the party the success it’s enjoying, and are now dismissed as fringe extremists.
We can go on a war footing and take the GOP back, or we can go our own way and let them rediscover their irrelevance circa 1969.
The House Speaker once told me that he also is a remnant son of the American Revolution. Is that not proof that Ronald Reagan was RIGHT when he said that freedom does not run through the blood stream, you have to FIGHT for it?
A remnant son
I choked on my snuff when I was listening to the press conference and heard Timmy say he tells the caucus to vote their conscience first. Could be true, maybe most of them have no conscience.
What do have this feeling that the general assembly is like a frat party?
If I was a Dem in Cothams district, I would be pissed too. Hell, how can anyone make such a drastic change? Oh wait, I forgot about the complete 180 by republicans on Medicaid expansion.
Timmy Moore is Tillis 2.0 and Berger is North Carolina’s Mitch McConnell. They are openly betraying the Republican base by pushing lots of major far left policy issues. This year it has been socialixed medicine with the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, plus partial legalization of marijuana and more gambling. Las year it was climate alarmism with the NC Green New Deal, HB951, and before that radical gender ideology with the repeal of the bathroom / locker room privacy law, HB2. Meanwhile, Moore sits on conservative legislation like he did on the Parents Bill of Rights last year.
Timmy Moore doesn’t want legislators to vote their district or vote their conscience. He wants them to vote for his rotten backroom deals with Cooper and with the specail interest lobbyists. He and Berger twist arms to do that. Take the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. Even after they had enough votes to pass their rotten sellout to Cooper, they insisted that all Republicans were supposed to cave in to them. Legislators were told that it did not matter what pledges they had made to voters or what their voters back home were calling for, they needed to vote the leadership’s liberal line. If they did not, the bills they were running and money for their home districts were threatened. This pressure was even worse in the Senate than in the House.
Berger and Moore are the same breed of cat as McConnell and Boehner. They are a Fifth Column within our party that needs to be taken OUT. Local party organizations need to be able to endorse in primaries to get REAL Republicans elected in place of these despicable phonies. Berger and Moore help Cooper the same way McConnell and Boehner helped Obama and McConnell is now helping Biden.
Timmy can tell his caucus to vote ‘conscience’ all he wants. The 9 adults voting members of MY family are voting ‘our’ conscience. And NONE of that includes this sot of republicans named above for any of the respective offices…..DONE with green energy, medicaid expansion, the ECU med school/trustee/BOG disaster…goes on and on and on….just as bad as any dem majority GA would be doing .
Timmy has an ambition to run for Congress, and drew himself a district to do so in the last redistricting. That blew up on him when Cawthorn said he would run in Timmy’s new district, but then the judicial gerrymandering came along and it all went out the window anyway. Now it looks like the new Supreme Court will undo that prior judicial gerrymandering and give Timmy a new shot at Congress. If that happens, conservatives need a top drawer primary challenger to him, and we need to hammer Timmy really hard on his massive sellouts to the far left in the legislature. Timmy is NOT Congressional material.
I am deeply disappointed in the NC GOP Legislature and State NC GOP. They straddle the fence to see who donates the most money and then votes accordingly. Definitely not following the GOP Platform.
Vote your conscious? Freaking Hilarious. As long as your conscious doesn’t change the outcome of what leadership demands…
Don’t be fooled.
North Carolina used to have legislative traditions that kept the power of the leadership in both chambers in check. Those were wise policies, but were breached for personal power, ambition, and partisan reasons by the Democrats, and very unfortunately, the Liston Ramsey / Marc Basnight formula has been continued by Republican legislative leaders.
In the House, the very long standing tradition, going back to 1850, was for one term speakers, and that did not allow a concentration of power. However, Speaker Carl Stewart, Jr. wanted to run for statewide office and wanted to do it as the sitting Speaker, so he ran for a second term in 1979 so he could do that in the 1980 election. Then his successor, Liston Ramsey decided to use that precedent to try to become Speaker for life.. Ramsey became such a legislative dictator that he irritated many in his own party, and a group of them rebeled, joined with Republicans and overthrew Ramsey in the Mavretic coalition in 1989. After Marretic’s one term, the Democrat leaders reverted back to the Liston Ramsey methods and those have been continued by Republican speakers as well.
In the Senate, the tradition was to divide the major legislative powers between the Lieutenant Governor and the President Pro Tem, and most of that division of power rested in the Senate rules. After Republican Jim Gardner was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1988, the Democrat Senate majority rewrote the Senate rules to strip the Lieutenant Governor of all of the powers conferred in the rules and gave them to the President Pro Tem, leading to Marc Basnight being called “the most powerful politician in North Carolina.” Even with a Republican Senate majority and a Republican Lieutenant Governor for almost ten years now, none of those powers have been handed back.
North Carolina, the Republican Party, and conservative voters would all be well served by restoring the time honored traditions of limitations on leadership power. Concentration of legislative power has led to an outsized influence of the special interests, who now concentrate on winning over the leadership, without usually having to necessarily win over the rank and file legislators.
No one is likely to dethrone the current leaders, but when a vacancy comes up, it may be an opportunity to restore tradition. Someone running to be the new Speaker based on putting term limits for the Speaker, hopefully at the traditional one term, might get votes both from those with ambitions to be speaker themselves and those who wanted less control from the top. It could be a winning campaign issue. Similarly, when the Senate President’s position opens up again, it could be an opportunity to make some needed changes.