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Can The Republican Party Maintain Control?

Image of NC General Assembly where lawmakers are considering two controversial bills.
Credit NC General Assembly

The North Carolina General Assembly goes back into session Tuesday. Lawmakers will consider Governor Pat McCrory’s vetoes of two bills. One requires drug testing for certain welfare recipients. The other grants immigration exemptions for some seasonal workers.These two bills were just a small fraction of the laws passed during the General Assembly Session. Republican lawmakers were in control of both the house and the senate as well as the governor’s mansion. By any measure, this past session was a success for the GOP. But is the Republican Party as unified as they should be, and can they maintain their hold on control?

Becki Gray, vice president for outreach at the John Locke Foundation says the drug testing law veto will probably be overridden.

"This passed with bipartisan support with a pretty wide margin," she said, adding later, "...we're really starting to get indications that there is an appetite to override both of these bills."

GOP political consultant Marc Rotterman says that McCrory's veto of the the welfare drug law, and lawmakers' desire to override it, is an indication of GOP infighting.

"I would characterize this as a disagreement among the family," he said.

The measure exempting certain season workers from e-verify requirements is a concern of McCrory's because he worries that it could possibly allow undocumented immigrants to take the jobs of Americans. Brian Balfour,  the director of policy at the Civitas Institute, said there could be some truth to that.

"I think there are some legitimate concerns...it will be interesting to see if they try to rework that bill at all or if it will be straight override."

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Alex Granados joined The State of Things in July 2010. He got his start in radio as an intern for the show in 2005 and loved it so much that after trying his hand as a government reporter, reader liaison, features, copy and editorial page editor at a small newspaper in Manassas, Virginia, he returned to WUNC. Born in Baltimore but raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Alex moved to Raleigh in time to do third grade twice and adjust to public school after having spent years in the sheltered confines of a Christian elementary education. Alex received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a minor in philosophy, which basically means that he used to think he was really smart but realized he wasn’t in time to switch majors. Fishing, reading science fiction, watching crazy movies, writing bad short stories, and shooting pool are some of his favorite things to do. Alex still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he is holding out for astronaut.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.