Senator Tommy Tucker has an interesting way of interacting with people who have the nerve to disagree with him. He simply reminds them that he is a grand exalted state senator and they are merely lowly citizens.

An editorial in today’s Charlotte Observer has the the latest example.

Sen. Tommy Tucker of Waxhaw said a mouthful with just 13 words on Tuesday”

“I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”

Last week Tucker ordered Bill Rowe of the N.C Justice Center to “sit down” after Rowe pointed out that a bill to require people applying for public benefits to be drug-test tested was clearly unconstitutional.

Somebody needs to remind Tucker that part of his job as an elected official is listening to people he represents, not berating them.

Amidst another weekend filled with legislative and political news, my favorite quote was this from House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes in a News & Observer story about the halfway mark of the General Assembly session.

House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes, a Hickory Republican, said the session is moving as expected. “I think the General Assembly has been on a pretty slow and deliberate pace,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve done anything too terribly controversial yet.”

Well let’s see, lawmakers have denied health care to 500,000 low-income people by refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, refused to allow 170,000 unemployed workers to receive emergency unemployment benefits paid for by the federal government, and voted to allow the state Earned Income Tax Credit that helps low wage workers to expire. Read More…

This report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ought to be required reading for the folks determined to slash or abolish the personal income tax in North Carolina.

The tax “reformers” claim their efforts are all about creating jobs, but the Center’s report shows the evidence in a number of studies proves that income tax cuts are a poor strategy for economic growth.

The vast majority of these studies find that interstate differences in tax levels, including differences in personal income taxes, have little if any effect on relative rates of state economic growth.  Of the eight major studies published in academic journals since 2000 that have examined the broad economic effect of state personal income tax levels, six have found no significant effects and one of the others produced internally inconsistent results.

Check out the good work of the N.C Budget & Tax Center for more on the tax reform debate, including this report showing the Civitas/Arthur Laffer plan that’s similar to what Sen. Bob Rucho eventually wants to accomplish would raise taxes on the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers and give the top 20 percent a tax cut, with millionaires getting a $41,000 break.

And it would not create jobs.

That deafening sound you hear in Raleigh this morning is the right-wing propaganda machine whirring mightily to try to distance its political leaders from the nullification resolution signed by almost 20 percent of the Republicans in the House, including the House Majority Leader and a key budget writer.

House Joint Resolution 494 calls for the creation of an official state religion and proclaims that North Carolina is not subject to decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court. The absurd legislation prompted national ridicule and scorn and yesterday Speaker Thom Tillis announced that the resolution was dead in the House.

Right-wing politicians and pundits have been frantically trying to downplay the incident, explaining the technical differences between a bill and resolution, complaining about the media coverage, even praising Tillis for his leadership in the killing the proposal.

One prominent think tanker decreed today that his organization, which has barely covered the controversy,  tends to “reserve our own reporting for issues of true public concern and significance.”

It seems pretty significant when a fifth of the members of the House Republican Caucus signs on to an official call for ignoring the federal constitution and the federal courts and establishing a state religion.

Expect the right-wing spin machine to stay in overdrive for a while and sadly some folks in the media are abetting the efforts of House Republicans to run away from their signatures.

The story in the News & Observer this morning said that the “resolution originally had a dozen co-sponsors, but it did not get the support of House leadership.”

The resolution actually had 14 signers and the last time I checked the House Majority Leader was a key part of the House leadership, as were the folks in charge of putting the budget together.

They can try all they want to, but their support of George Wallace style nullification is now part of the public record and cannot be erased. But come to think of it, it’s probably a good idea to get a screen shot of that resolution just in case.

The folks at the N.C. Budget & Tax Center have parsed the budget recently proposed by Governor Pat McCrory. The whole report is worth your time. Here is one inescapable conclusion.

While the proposal represents a 1.8-percent increase over the $20.2 billion FY2013-14 base budget, it would nonetheless spend 8.4 percent less than the last state budget approved before the onset of the Great Recession (FY2007-08) when adjusted for inflation. As such, this proposal would continue to significantly underfund basic public services and structures.

We need and deserve much better.