There is, of course, nothing new about the spectacle of everyday people being forced to endure great suffering because of the whims, foibles, fears and egos of powerful rulers and politicians. From the forced labor that helped construct the pyramids to the countless wars waged to boost a leader’s domestic political standing, millions of people throughout history have suffered greatly because of a powerful man’s – and it’s almost always been a man’s – desire for power.
We Americans sometimes like to think that our country has advanced beyond the kind of crude politics in which a leader issues edicts that sentence innocent people to pain and even death based on a personal desire for wealth, glory and power (or even just their mood on a particular day), but as President Donald Trump has made clear on numerous occasions, it has not.
And today, here in North Carolina, we are experiencing this phenomenon at the state level in the maddening actions and inactions of the state’s Republican legislative leadership – and in particular, one especially powerful leader, state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.
Berger, as you may or may not recall (and if you don’t it’s understandable, because it’s been a very long time), was elected to the Senate a quarter-century ago and has presided over the chamber for 15 years. Like a lot of other Republicans who entered politics around the turn of the century, Berger was elected during a time in which the North Carolina GOP was, rather ironically as it turns out, championing term limits for lawmakers and regularly decrying then-Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight’s long tenure in office. Basnight led the Senate through nine two-year sessions – a number that Berger clearly aspires to match or exceed.
Basnight ultimately lost his Senate presidency when Democrats lost their Senate majority in the 2010 elections, but for Berger, the threat to his position comes not from the opposing party, but from within his own.
Thanks to aggressive GOP gerrymandering, Republicans have almost no chance of losing their state Senate or House majorities anytime soon – even if Democrats win far more votes in legislative elections. But an interesting side effect of that gerrymandering is the way it has emboldened far-right candidates in GOP primaries to seek to outdo incumbents in demonstrating their slavish allegiance to Trumpism.
Hence, the current remarkable situation in Senate District 26, in which Berger, a hard right Republican who has adhered diligently to the Tea Party/MAGA line throughout his time in office, is nonetheless being challenged in the upcoming March primary by Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page. From all indications, it appears to be a credible challenge by a man who has long been a Trump backer and campaign chair and who has won national attention as a loud promoter of anti-immigration policies.
And that brings us to the crazy and deeply harmful situation that this primary electoral battle in a mostly rural state Senate district – a race that could be decided by a few thousand (or hundred) votes — is inflicting on millions of average North Carolinians.
Because Berger is clearly determined to cling to power, he has chosen not to allow the Senate to take any actions that might provide fuel to Page – even if he knows deep down from years of experience in Raleigh that doing so will harm the state’s residents.
And so it is that as the New Year dawns, six full months into the 2026 state fiscal year, North Carolina is the only state in the nation not to have enacted a budget. The central issue: taxes and tax cuts.
As fiscal analysts have repeatedly noted, now is not the time for North Carolina to plunge ahead with another round of income tax cuts benefiting the wealthy and profitable corporations. Overall public investments are already down effectively by more than a third since the GOP gained power 15 years ago, and the state is failing miserably to meet its basic obligations in numerous core areas of governmental service like schools, health care and fighting hunger.
The new cuts that took effect January 1 will make this situation much worse. Even Republican leaders in the state House acknowledged the need to at least slow the tax cut rush in the budget proposals they crafted last summer.
Unfortunately, Berger has determined that such a pause would, if enacted, provide red meat for the Page challenge.
The result: scheduled tax cuts are now in place and the funding shortages that are starving our schools, keeping thousands of children malnourished, and precipitating scores of preventable deaths among people who’ve lost their health care coverage will continue to metastasize.
Will things go on like this? One fantasizes that after the primary Berger might somehow relent and allow common sense policy to prevail.
If Basnight’s 18-year record remains the goal, however, that seems like a longshot. And as has been the case with Trump and so many other power-obsessed leaders throughout history, average North Carolinians will continue to pay the price for Berger’s ambition.
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