The ‘Sin Session’: Bringing back weed, casinos AND booze AFTER the primaries
*Isn’t that special?*
Taking a second stab at that nonsense after our only shot at them this year. How many times do you have to scream “HELL, NO” for the message to sink in? If this doesn’t make it clear that The Raleigh Grift™ and its associated slimy cash are more important than US and what WE think, I don’t know what will:
During North Carolina’s legislative session, which kicked off in January and ended just last week, a flurry of bills and the two-year budget were passed. New laws include various conservative priorities such as new abortion restrictions, a repeal of the state’s permit requirement for buying handguns and more. But despite the months-long session dominated by the GOP, who hold a supermajority in both legislative chambers, lawmakers will shortly be back: April 24 is the first day of the 2024 legislative short session. Lawmakers will tackle some of the pending legislation left over from the 2023 long session and make budget adjustments. Here are some proposals that may resurface:
CASINO LEGALIZATION
Whether casinos should be legalized in North Carolina was one of the primary causes of a standoff between the House and Senate over the months-delayed $30 billion state budget, which was supposed to be passed by July 1.[…]
You folks in Rockingham County know all too well about this particular issue. All kinds of backroom sneaky games were played on you folks. The zoning process was finessed. Y’all were given the full-blown mushroom treatment: kept in the dark, and fed a lot of, um, manure.
The state budget would have been held hostage for many more months had the bad publicity not reached the intolerable crescendo that it did. A lot of people got PAID pretty doggone well. (And more cash was reportedly on the way to some very key Raleigh pockets.)
Polling even surfaced suggesting Phil Berger would be vulnerable to a primary challenge over the casino hijinks.
MORE:
[…] Towards the tail end of the 2023 session, Senate leader Phil Berger set a stake in the ground that casino legalization, as well as the authorization of thousands of video lottery terminals, must be included in the state budget. He said he would not back a standalone bill to legalize casinos. Meanwhile, House Speaker Tim Moore said there were not enough votes in House to back legalization if it was in the budget.
In late September, the House released a new budget version — superseding a prior version approved by them, as well as another Senate budget version — that did not include casinos. Instead, casinos were pushed into a new bill, alongside the gambling terminals and Medicaid expansion. Enactment of Medicaid expansion, passed in an earlier bill, had originally been tied to the passage of the budget. Ultimately, the Senate folded and the budget was passed alongside Medicaid expansion, but without casinos.
Once Berger and Moore announced that they had reached a deal on the budget without casinos, Berger said that lawmakers could consider taking it up again during next year’s short session, as previously reported by The News & Observer. He also said that he believed opponents of the proposal had ignored financial and developmental benefits for rural counties.[…]
The booze part of the package involves allowing ABC stores to open and sell liquor earlier on Sundays. Here’s a thought: Why not scrap the ABC stores altogether and just sell liquor in regular old stores?
Let me answer that for you: There are way too many patronage and grift opportunities in the current ABC system to let it simply go away. Way too many folks at the state and local levels are having BIG fun with the system as-is.
(I know of people who cruise over the border to SC to buy their booze – at quite a discount from the NC ABC prices — and then take it to their parties in NC. )
And there’s the whole weed thing:
[…] Medical marijuana legalization is another policy that may show up. During the long session, Senate Bill 3, the “Compassionate Care Act,” which would have allowed medical marijuana use statewide for people with certain health ailments, failed to pass the House, after having passed the Senate in March with bipartisan support. Last year, a similar bill also passed the Senate and died in the House.
This failure came despite the bill being championed by powerful Rules chairman Sen. Bill Rabon, a Brunswick County Republican. Rabon, in late May during a House committee hearing, shared his experience using marijuana illegally while undergoing chemotherapy to treat his colon cancer. He credits the use of this drug as the reason he is alive, as previously reported by The N&O. Despite getting a hearing in the House, which did not happen last year, and Moore signaling earlier in the year that it may have had a chance, the bill stagnated.
Moore later said that until a proposal is backed by the majority of the Republican caucus, it will not come up to a vote. Another sponsor of the marijuana bill, Democratic Sen. Paul Lowe, told The N&O in late May following Moore’s comments on consensus that he feels “pretty confident we’ll get something done.” He said that he believed the bill would be handled either in the long or short session.[…]
The whole medical marijuana thing is a get-rich scam by politically-connected folks in and around Raleigh who have already worked out their monopoly territories. Suggesting that opposing this is hurtful to cancer patients and the like is at best, a farce.
I’ve had some medical treatments that required some intensive pain management. The doctors have a whole lot of stuff at their disposal right now that works magic with pain — even with marijuana being illegal.
The big story here is all the politically-connected names who already have exclusive distributorship deals worked out. Leaking that out could make things really interesting.
THIS right here is example number FIVE ZILLION of the lack of respect the Raleigh political class 
has for the rest of us. The ‘conservative majority’ has been told pretty strongly that their base does not want this crap. But the siren song of the special interests and their slimy cash is just tooooooo strong.
Go ahead. Wait until after the primaries, and then pull this scam. You may giggle to yourselves and ask rhetorically: “Where else are they going to go?”
Funny. I bet the Democrat majority on Jones Street was thinking the same thing just prior to the 2010 vote. Voters sit on their hands. Majorities get lost. ALL THE TIME.
We need to be loaded for bear in the primaries, and casino whores Phil Berger and Jim Perry need to be the top targets to vote out in the Senate. Throw the rascals O-U-T. Casino whores Destin Hall, Jason Saine, and John Bell should be the top targets in the House. Also anyone supported casino whore Hall for Speaker should be targeted.
You old guys kill me with your hypocrisy. You really have no idea what it means to be conservative, yet you think you own the term. You think you should be able to use GOVERNMENT to make someone else live like YOU want them to live. Some of you are trapped in the 1960s. There is NOTHING conservative about using government to take away someone else’s freedoms. You don’t want to place a bet? Don’t do it….but you have ZERO right to USE GOVERNMENT to tell me I can’t. Some of the worst offenders love to run around this state talking about Freedom. I noticed there are not many of them that wore a uniform and a number of them are Yankees….maybe that is why they think it is oK to tell other folks how to live. I’ve had enough of the carpetbaggers and I would rather you just go back up North.
I am more convinced each day that we should not allow anyone over 60 to hold office. Conservatives SHOULD want to limit Government. I can make my own life decisions. It will not be you and “sister bertha better than you” standing at the pearly gates to render judgement….though you hypocrites certainly try to do so here on earth.
Casinos are a hot topic with many voters right now, but the “woke” Republican establishment “leaders ” listed have many more transgressions. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which will deprive thousands of North Carolinians who have had employer-paid health insurance of that insurance and force them onto Medicaid, causing many of them will lose their doctors as a result, is a big one. The “woke” concept of allowing men in womens restrooms and locker rooms is something else these “leaders” did to us. So is the Green New Deal, HB951 which will raise our electric rates and lessen its reliability. These “woke” fools we have as “leaders” have a lot to answer for.
The NCGA GOP has been steering this way since they voted for the Repeal of HB2. Don’t forget that one! Then we had Murphy’s Medicaid expansion wrapped in a pretty package and tied with a bow. See how pretty ?. NCGA has kissed the ring of Wind and Solar for YEARS! What aren’t you understanding folks? They are lining their pockets and selling their souls! Don’t vote for them!
You hit the nail on the head, Bev. That was the first major sellout by Phil “Boss Hogg” Berger and Timmy Moore to the woke special interests. They kicked Christian conservatives in the teeth to do the “woke” bidding of the special interests to let men into womens restrooms. The result was that Christian consevatives stayed home the next election, and Berger and Moore threw away their supermajority. There is an old saying in politics that “you don’t piss on your base” but Berger and Moore defecated as well as urinated on it with their repeal of HB2, and the base kneecapped them as a result in the very next election.
Since then, Berger and Moore have regularly been selling out to the woke special interests, and Berger seems to be the main one driving it. Moore has been a wussy who is afraid of Berger. Berger has been passing the key elements of Roy Cooper’s agenda through the General Assembly – men in the ladies room, Green New Deal, Obamacare Medicaid expansion, corrupt crony capitalist slush fund NCInnovation, etc. Berger is Roy Cooper’s boy.
It is up to us to make changes in the primary, starting with Boss Hogg Berger himself and his chief lieutenant Casino Jim Perry.
Oh, and green energy whore Paul Shumaker says his client Timmy Moore is running for Congress. All conservatives need to contribute to his primary opponent.