Jimmy Green's hardball legislative legacy

Someone once said politics is a combat sport, and in Raleigh it’s sometimes hardball without batting helmets. It’s been that way since I came to Raleigh to cover the N.C. General Assembly 30 years ago, when the late Lt. Gov. Jimmy Green, an ex-Marine machine gunner who had survived Iwo Jima and the rough-and-tumble politics of Bladen County, rarely took legislative prisoners. When a bill he opposed was voted down, Green would intone, “That bill is dead, dead, dead.”
Hardball politics still prevail, though not in such a brusque fashion.
Ask Republicans Sen. Phil Berger of Rockingham or Rep. Paul Stam of Wake. As their party’s leaders in the state Senate and House, they don’t have the votes to get their way. That’s the way politics works. Majority rules, often along strict party lines.
Tuesday they were worked up about a House-passed bill they say would close a loophole and provide property owners with more protection against eminent domain seizures for economic development projects. The bill was popular in the House, where it passed 104-15, but Senate leaders evidently don’t believe there’s any need for a constitutional amendment to provide that protection.
So the bill has sat in the Senate Ways and Means Committee for going on two months. Other House-passed bills the Senate Democrats don’t like are also pending in the committee, chaired by Charlotte Democratic Sen. Charlie Dannelly, who is deputy president pro tem of the Senate.
The committee, says Berger, has not met since June 21, 2001.
The Ways and Means Committee is, depending on your point of view, either an efficient way to stop unneeded legislation. or an unconscionable ruse to thwart the democratic process. Take your pick.
But it has a long history. When Lt. Gov. Green was presiding over the state Senate in 1977 or ‘78, he used the same technique to kill bills – some from the House and some proposed by Senate members – late in the session. He created the Senate Special Committee on Ways and Means.
And, he told members of the Senate one hot summer afternoon, he expected the committee to be “firm, fair and expeditious.”
It was. If memory serves, not a single bill got back out of that committee, and in due time the honorables quit Raleigh and went on back home.