North Carolina Rep. Tricia Cotham is reportedly planning to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party, Fox News reported.
Cotham’s change of party would give North Carolina Republicans a veto-proof majority in the state House; they have one already in the Senate, meaning Republicans in the state legislature could soon pass legislation with no agreement from the state’s governor.
But just how important is a veto-proof legislative majority in North Carolina?
Since taking office in 2017, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, has vetoed 75 bills — more than twice as many as his four predecessors combined, according to a thorough piece by The Assembly, a local publication.
Republicans overrode 23 of those vetoes, but none since losing their supermajority status in 2019. Now they may get it back.
North Carolina was the last state in the nation to grant its governor the power of the veto. Doing so required a constitutional amendment, and the veto went into effect in 1997. Most states require a two-thirds vote to override a veto, but North Carolina law requires a majority of just three-fifths.
Why the lower threshold? The proposal to grant gubernatorial veto power did not have quite enough support, resulting in a compromise — reducing the veto override’s threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths was enough to coax some holdouts onboard.
The architect of that decades-ago deal, State Sen. Roy Cooper (D), said:
“I always bring this up as the biggest irony in North Carolina politics,” said Chris Cooper, a Western Carolina University political scientist (no relation to the governor). “Past Roy Cooper tied current Roy Cooper’s hands behind his back. If he had written a different kind of veto, we’d have a very different North Carolina.”
Rep. Tricia Cotham’s announcement is expected Wednesday.
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