There was much hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and fingernail-gnawing among liberal activists last week when the Republican-led General Assembly “reassigned” (“took away,” say the critics) some duties of statewide elected officials who were elected on Nov. 5 and who “just happened” to be Democrats.
There must be a lot of newcomers to North Carolina or else North Carolina history is no longer taught in public or private schools. If they knew the history of near-absolute Democratic control in North Carolina for over a century before 2010, they would not have been so incensed.
The lessons learned when the Democratic-controlled NCGA stripped powers from incoming Republican Lt. Gov. Jim Gardner in 1989 should be edifying then to many.
Gardner hailed from Rocky Mount, where he helped start the Hardee’s hamburger chain in 1961. In 1964, he came close to defeating Democrat Congressman Harold Cooley even though Republicans were getting demolished nationwide, getting caught in the Barry Goldwater riptide as he lost to Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In the next election, 1966, then-NCGOP party chairman Gardner somehow defeated Cooley by 13 points in rural eastern North Carolina even though Cooley was chairman of the powerful House Agriculture Committee.
Gardner ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1968 and 1972, but he returned to elective politics in 1988 when he defeated Democratic state Sen. Tony Rand to become the first GOP lieutenant governor in North Carolina in close to a century.
And then the fun began.
Gardner thought he was running for the most powerful elected office in North Carolina, which was lieutenant governor at the time. The North Carolina governor had no veto power ― and wouldn’t until 1996 ― and the North Carolina legislature had packed the lieutenant governor’s office with tons of political power.
It wasn’t until Gardner was sworn in as lieutenant governor in January 1989 that everyone fully realized that since the November election, the only thing the Democratic General Assembly left him with was a state-owned vehicle and a state trooper to drive it.
“All I did for four years was drive around the state and meet a lot of nice folks!” he would say at various political gatherings afterward.
It might sound funny now ― but it was the truth. After the election, the Democratic-dominated General Assembly voted to remove all functional powers from the lieutenant governor’s office and rendered the office the political equivalent of a flightless bird.
Most lieutenant governors throughout American history have not held a lot of executive power. Their role was to be a “heartbeat” away from being governor, in the same vein as being vice president of the United States is relative to the president.
In 1972, against all odds, GOP state party chairman James Holshouser somehow won the governor’s race against Skipper Bowles of Greensboro, the father of Erskine Bowles, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and later president of the UNC University system.
In order to provide a counterbalance to the first Republican governor elected since Reconstruction, Democrats in the legislature gave then-Lt. Gov. Jim Hunt more powers and more money to build out his staff.
In 1980, both then-Gov. Jim Hunt and Lt. Gov. Jimmy Green were given the right to run for a second term by the Democratic General Assembly. The Democratic-led NCGA threw a ton of power at Green, thereby making the lieutenant governor the most powerful office in the state.
According to Ran Coble, the lieutenant governor was deeply involved in crafting the budget for the state and controlled 195 appointments to 87 boards in the executive branch of state government. The lieutenant governor had the power to assign committees in the Senate and appoint chairmen, plus decide which bills would go to which committee. There were 11 important constitutional and legislative powers assigned to the lieutenant governor’s office, although few voters knew the Democratic majority could just as easily snatch them away at a moment’s notice.
Which they did ― in full ― before Republican Lt. Gov. Jim Gardner finished saying his oath on a cold January morning in 1989.
History repeated itself last week when the now Republican-led NCGA “reassigned” various powers from the governor and his cabinet. One of the most prominent was shifting the right to appoint people to boards of elections from the (Democratic) governor to the (Republican) state auditor.
“What goes around in politics, comes around” is about as true of a statement as possible.
