The General Assembly overrode vetoes on guns, trans issues, immigration and more. Here's what they passed last week

Summer vacation ended last week for the North Carolina General Assembly, at least for a few days. The state House and Senate returned to Raleigh to override several of Gov. Josh Stein's vetoes and hammer out a mini budget. Adam Wagner is a reporter for the NC Newsroom in Raleigh. He joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.

Marshall Terry: So the General Assembly overrode eight vetoes, meaning those bills now become law. What are some of them?

Adam Wagner: One that removes Duke Energy's interim carbon reduction goal, so they don't have to cut carbon dioxide emissions 70% from 2005 levels by 2030 any longer. A House immigration bill that will now require sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. They'll have to detain illegal immigrants for 48 hours after they would have otherwise let them go to give ICE a chance to come pick them up. A bill on rule making, so things like environmental rules, health rules, anything, that gives the General Assembly the final say over any rule that costs $20 million over a 5-year period.

And then we saw them pass a bill that started as a way to let people who have pornographic material of themselves on the internet get that pulled down. That was then changed in the Senate to add a number of provisions relating to LGBTQ people, including letting trans people sue medical providers over gender transitions, kind of shifting the definition of biological sex in state law to exclude gender identity, and then also letting parents see the full list of their school's library books and choose books that they don't want their children to be able to check out. That's just some of what they did last week

Terry: And to do this, all of this, they had to get some Democrats to defect, right?

Wagner: They did, yeah. So remember, Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority in the Senate, but they're one vote shy in the House. So if everyone's there, at least one Democrat has to side with Republicans to override a veto. They were able to do that eight times, but there are two instances that really kind of stood out.

On the immigration bill, Carla Cunningham, a Mecklenburg County Democrat, was the person to cross party lines. Cunningham gave a speech on the House floor that has really seen a lot of blowback from Democrats. She said that all cultures are not equal and that some immigrants are unwilling to assimilate in the United States.

And then on House Bill 805, which was the LGBTQ bill, Representative Nasif Majeed, who's also a Charlotte Democrat, was the legislator who crossed party lines. Majeed is not usually someone who crosses party lines on vetoes, so this was kind of an unexpected vote.   

I caught up with him right after the session, and he said that he had moral issues with parts of the bill, but he really didn't want to elaborate on what those are. Majeed and Cunningham were also some of the Democrats who crossed party lines on the Duke Energy carbon bill.

Terry: What do the defections say about Gov. Stein's control of his own caucus?

Wagner: At first glance, it says that maybe he doesn't have the iron grip that his predecessor, Roy Cooper, had at times. House Speaker Destin Hall insisted that even though Republicans are one vote shy of that supermajority, they'll be able to find a vote when they need it. And this week went a pretty long way towards proving him correct.

Terry: Finally, lawmakers passed a mini budget instead of a two-year spending plan. What is that? And what spending questions are still unresolved?

Wagner: A mini budget basically just deals with a limited number of issues, especially things that are kind of have to do right now. This time around, the General Assembly funded things like enrollment growth at schools, hiring more driver's license examiners at the DMV, and shifting funding to pay for expenses in the state's Medicaid program.

This mini budget also includes some money to pay for construction projects and funding for the auditor's new accountability office. There's still a number of questions around that bigger budget initiative, including how the General Assembly wants to approach tax cuts. The House has wanted to ease up a bit on some triggers that the General Assembly previously put in kind of saying that there's warnings of a looming fiscal cliff and they're taking those warnings pretty seriously.

The Senate wants to remain full speed ahead, arguing that growth is going to make up for any revenue that may be lost by tax cuts. Other big differences are what raises state employees should receive, and also funding for a new children's hospital that would be built in the Triangle.