Voters Rebuke Democrats, Pass Four of Six Constitutional Amendments

RALEIGH – Democrats won’t admit it, but if there was a strong victory for conservatives in last night’s election results, then it was in the way voters approved of the constitutional amendments on the ballot.

As it turns out, a majority of North Carolinians agree that photo identification requirements for voting makes common sense. They also see how lowering the constitutional ceiling on income tax rates is a surefire way to insure future lawmakers, Democratic ones specifically, can’t reach their filthy government hands deeper into our pockets.

It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats were mobilizing hordes to descend upon the grounds of the General Assembly in protest of Voter ID legislation; that they were heralding a nonsensical judicial opinion that declared that overturned that legislation; that they were leaning hard on the slanderous premise that Voter ID was a racist policy designed to suppress the minority vote.

All those years of propaganda, fortunately, did not blind voters in both parties of the straight forward and sensible nature of protecting the integrity of the ballot by insuring your are who you say you are. Perhaps this was foretold in the way Democrat operatives did not single out Voter ID nearly as much in 2018  – they knew even voters in their party supported it.

They did, however, do a lot of fear mongering with respect to the tax cap. Lowering the constitutional cap on income tax rates from 10 percent to seven percent, the N.C. Democratic Party claimed, would threaten funding for schools and protecting the environment, and ruin the State’s AAA credit rating. They ran ads claiming it was a gift to the rich at the expense of the poor.

It was all ridiculous.

The state government has been running surpluses upon surpluses with tax rates LOWER than the seven percent cap. Education funding has not been threatened, but climbing; debts were paid off; (much needed) rainy-day funds were filled to the brim; and the seven percent proposal was weighed by credit rating agencies and they determined it did not threaten the state’s borrowing ability at all.

What’s more is that the state income tax, thanks to Republican tax reforms, is a flat tax – everybody is taxed at the same rate. Therefore, lowering the cap protects EVERYONE from higher taxes down the road. That’s good for poor people and rich people, and everyone in between.

Perhaps most insulting to the electorate is the Democrats’ narrative that lowering the constitutional cap via statewide vote was unfair to future politicians that may need to raise your taxes. But who better to restrain the government’s taxing power than the people themselves? That’s how representative government works.

On these two issues in particular Democrats were very quiet come Wednesday. Instead they are celebrating the fact that voters rejected two ‘in-the-weeds’ amendments that transferred powers from the governor, to the legislature. One on judicial vacancy appointments, and another on board of elections reform, these amendments are not transformative in the sense that they project conservative policy into the future.

The parties in control of the legislature and the governor’s mansion will change back and forth over time, so the focus on the current power struggle was myopic of the Democrats. Voter ID and tax caps, on the other hand, will protect election integrity and taxpayers’ pocketbooks for as far as they eye can see now.

As such, conservatives should feel pretty good about how the amendment proposals turned out. The Right to Hunt and Fish, as well as a Victims’ Rights amendment passed as well.

Four out of six amendments passing when the Democratic Party campaign hard against all six is a victory for Republicans, voters, and taxpayers.

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