The temperature soared to the century mark in Raleigh on Monday, tying the record for the city’s warmest June 23 on record, and the surge of oppressive heat seems as if it may have helped spur lawmakers to bring an abrupt ending to the 2025 legislative session – at least for the time being — and commence their summer vacations.
For weeks now, Senate and House Republican leaders have publicly stated that they were far from an agreement on a state budget for the new fiscal year that commences next Tuesday, July 1 – particularly with respect to tax policy. And in recent days, it seems the two sides have concluded that they’d just as soon live with the budget that’s already in place as spend the dog days of summer mired in a public stalemate. State law provides that the current budget will continue absent passage of a new one.
The unveiling of what some are calling a “mini-budget” by Senate leaders Monday evening along with the quick passage of a new Hurricane Helene relief package were the latest signals that Republican legislators believe they’ve reached a point of diminishing political returns and are ready to vacate the capital city – perhaps even for the year.
If the legislature really does call it a year, it will mark a notable departure from the pattern of many of the last several years of GOP rule in which sessions have lingered into the fall (and in a few cases, the holiday season) and a return to the pattern that generally prevailed in the late 20th Century in which lawmakers usually wrapped up their sessions in or around the start of the fiscal year.
And it will also mark a sudden end to a session in which accomplishments likely to make a marked improvement in the lives of average North Carolinians have been notably few and far between.
There will undoubtedly be a raft of additional bills passed and sent to the Governor during the session’s waning days and hours, but at this point, it’s hard to identify much that will be worth bragging about when things have wrapped.
Aside from Helene relief and a relative handful of other lower-profile measures, lawmakers have largely avoided the big challenges that confront the state – things like its underfunded and understaffed public schools, state employee shortages in several core state agencies like prisons, mental health facilities and DMV offices, rising health insurance rates for state employees, a chronic lack of affordable housing and a steady rise in homelessness, a large and growing list of unaddressed environmental challenges, a rising tide of gun violence, and a growing risk of significant revenue shortfalls in years to come.
Instead, Republican leaders have devoted significant and wasteful attention to right-wing culture war priorities, like attacking the rights of immigrants and transgender people, promoting public school book bans and censorship, attempting to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in state government, further weakening state gun laws, and pulling back from a previously negotiated law that was designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities.
This provocative pattern was on full display last week when Senators chose the Juneteenth holiday, of all days – a date on which even the state House conducted no business at all – to hold a lengthy floor session and multiple busy committee hearings, one of which was headlined by the bill to ban DEI.
How many of the culture war broadsides will actually find their way into state law, however, remains extremely uncertain at this point. Gov. Josh Stein issued the first three vetoes of his administration last week on a pair of bills designed to spur immigrant deportations and another measure that would allow anyone 18 and older to carry a loaded, concealed firearm without a permit, and it remains unclear if Republicans will be able to command the supermajorities they will need in both houses to override them. Only one of the bills – House Bill 318 — is scheduled for an override vote in the House thus far.
If lawmakers do head out of town this week, they will have to arrange to return to Raleigh at some later date to consider any other vetoes Stein might issue after they depart.
And if Stein and his allies manage to figure a way to preserve most or all of the vetoes he ends up issuing, that fact, in combination with the GOP failure to pass a new and comprehensive budget chockful of conservative pet projects and initiatives, will mark a victory of sorts for Democrats and a validation of their electoral success last fall in narrowly breaking the Republican supermajority in the House.
In short, as the end of the 2025 legislative session beckons, Republicans appear to be aware they’ve done about all they can for now, while Democrats are likely feeling that they could have done a lot worse.
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