Jan 14, 2007
Change in speaker, change in direction?
Jack Betts - Charlotte Observer

What's most remarkable about the apparent selection of Rep. Joe Hackney, D-Orange, to be the next speaker of the N.C. House is not that he's a liberal in an often-conservative chamber. 
 
It's that he's a reformer in a legislature that has sometimes resisted substantive change. 
 
That's a sharp contrast to outgoing Speaker Jim Black. Black was not a reformer and didn't pretend to be one. He was a manager who rarely pushed House members in a direction they weren't inclined to go. 
 
Hackney, on the other hand, has prodded North Carolina in new directions. He pushed for changes in the way we elect judges and finance judicial campaigns. He took a lead role in toughening the state's drunken-driving laws. He backed a new way to examine inmates' claims of innocence. He drove the House version of a new lottery regulation bill in 2005 and engineered more sweeping ethics reforms in the 2006 session. 
 
He has not won every reform he pursued. He backed a two-year moratorium on executions to allow time to study how the death penalty is administered. A commission he co-chairs may recommend procedural changes, but it doesn't appear a moratorium is any more likely to pass in 2007. 
 
And while Hackney supported creation of a public funding mechanism for appellate judicial races, his legislative colleagues have resisted broadening that experiment to legislative races. 
Hackney will find the job of speaker notably different from his past role as majority leader. There are administrative duties and ceremonial appearances that will detract from Hackney's principal strength -- absorbing himself in legislative issues and working with other lawmakers to develop consensus legislation. 
 
Yet Hackney also has the opportunity to make reforms in the way the House operates and more fully involve other legislators in the chamber's work product. Many of those changes already have the backing of a bipartisan coalition that helped push for ethics and lobbying reforms the last two years. They include limiting special provisions in budget bills, requiring every appropriation to have a sponsor and giving legislators several days to read and absorb budget bills before they vote on them. 
 
Some reforms also have the support of such Republican legislators as Rep. John Blust of Guilford County. They include such items as giving every legislator the opportunity to have amendments considered on the floor. That seems like a basic right for any legislator who, after all, was elected by the people to represent them in Raleigh. 
 
Blust also believes each party caucus should have the right to name the party's members of committees. Seems fair to me. Why should Democrats get to pick which Republicans serve on certain committees -- or vice versa when Republicans control the House? 
 
Hackney and Blust probably are not natural allies on most legislation. But I think John Blust and Joe Hackney share one important interest: making the House a more open place to do the public's business. 
 
All this presumes that the House will elect Hackney speaker when it convenes Jan. 24. Democrats control 68 House seats this year to Republicans' 52, and while Hackney has the support of the Democratic caucus, word is he won the nomination on a fourth-round vote the other night with 41 votes. That means a couple of dozen Democrats voted for someone else. 
That raises the possibility Republicans could forge a coalition with some of those non-Hackney voters to elect another candidate. Something similar happened when Republicans and a handful of Democrats unseated Speaker Liston Ramsey in 1989. Variations on the theme were attempted in 1997 and 1999. In 2003 a handful of Republicans voted with Democrats to create the first co-speakership. 
If I've learned one thing in nearly three decades of covering the legislature, it's this: Don't miss opening day of the state House. You never know who will win. One of these days, it's going to be a reformer.