Fireworks as NC Senate Committee Rejects Governor Cooper’s Radical Woke Pick for Environmental Secretary

RALEIGH – Just over a month ago we highlighted the radical perspectives on ‘environmental and racial justice’ espoused by Governor Roy Cooper’s pick to head North Carolina’s environmental agency, Dionne Delli-Gatti, as revealed during her interview process in Senate confirmation hearings. She’s Woke, as it were, and though that may be a practical requirement for Democrats these days, the Republicans on the committee weren’t quite ready to explicitly endorse that Kool-Aid for consumption.

Wednesday the appointment of Delli-Gatti was rejected by the relevant Senate committee. The move was accompanied by a testy exchange between Republican and Democrat members of the committee:

These Democrats are feigning outrage over the Senate not allowing the ‘nominee’ to speak in committee yet again, fomenting offense over insults to Delli-Gatti’s resume and experience.

What is really fueling the frustrated anger you hear in these Democrats’ voices is that the majority would dare use the confirming power of the N.C. Senate to do anything other than rubber stamp and applaud the Democratic governor’s appointments. You might remember that Governor Roy Cooper and Democrats in the General Assembly fought tooth and nail to ignore and invalidate the N.C. Senate’s constitutional role in confirming cabinet secretaries.

Indeed, the Cooper administration instructed appointees to blatantly ignore Senate requests to testify before the relevant confirmation committees, as to not even grant the lawmakers legitimacy in having a say. The most notable no show? Previous DEQ Secretary, Michael Regan, now heading the EPA for the Biden administration and whom Delli-Gatti was appointed to replace.

Yet, eventually (and quietly) the Cooper administration relented; confirmation hearings proceeded without issue; and, the Senate actually confirmed all of over a dozen Cooper cabinet nominees.

Until now. The emotional reaction to this rejection amounts to Democrats in the minority throwing a tantrum. They are whining, stamping their feet, and holding their breath because Republican majorities are actually using this constitutional power to reject a nominee they do not approve of in terms of her politics and policy.

Delli-Gatti has testified that environmental bureaucracies like DEQ have a duty to consider EVERYTHING through the lenses of environmental and racial justice. Her perspective is Woke enough to tie environmental regulatory policy directly to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thus the dramatic hemming and hawing that Republicans would regard such views as disqualifying factors.

Republicans and moderates in North Carolina, however, should be overjoyed that the majority is actually leveraging it’s constitutional powers to balance out the extremes currently defining the Democratic Party. They’d do well to make a habit of it.