Republicans in North Carolina muscled through a sweeping expansion of their own power on Wednesday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that will give the G.O.P. increased control over elections, judicial appointments and whether its laws stand up in the courts.
Perhaps most striking was how Republicans did it: They titled the legislation “Disaster Relief” but filled it with measures that had nothing to do with aid for areas devastated by Hurricane Helene and instead eroded the power of top state Democrats. Just 13 of the bill’s 131 pages dealt directly with the storm.
Republicans moved swiftly to pass the bill last month, only for Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to veto the legislation. Republicans then moved to overcome his veto in the final weeks of their single-vote supermajority in the House, where they lost key seats in November. Even as Donald J. Trump carried the state, Republicans fell short in several other top races, including for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
The override vote, which passed by 72 to 46 along party lines, follows four years of efforts by Republicans nationwide to gain greater control over the mechanics of elections, a push initially fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential contest.
State Representative Tim Moore, the departing Republican speaker of the House, said openly before the vote that the bill was meant to help his party win future elections.
“This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket and move this country in the right direction,” Mr. Moore told the Trump ally and conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday.
Lawmakers in North Carolina have a tradition of trying to lock in their political power after election losses. Democrats wielded such tactics in the 1990s, but more recently Republicans have led the way. After Mr. Cooper beat the Republican incumbent in 2016, the legislature stripped the governor’s office of key powers and reduced the number of staff members he could appoint by more than 1,000 positions.
Republicans in the state have also long used voting laws to try to gain an upper hand in elections. In 2016, a federal appeals court struck down a voter identification law passed by Republicans, saying its provisions deliberately “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” (A less restrictive voter ID law was passed in 2018.)
The House vote on Wednesday means that the bill will now become law in North Carolina, after the State Senate voted this month to override Mr. Cooper’s veto. Democrats have vowed to challenge the legislation in court, arguing that changes to the state election board and other measures were unconstitutional.
The law will significantly restructure the state election board, the top authority over voting in North Carolina, wresting appointment power away from the governor’s office and handing it to the state auditor, who will be a Republican next year. The change is likely to put the board, which currently has three Democrats and two Republicans, under G.O.P. control.
The legislation will also significantly restrict the governor’s ability to fill vacancies on state courts, including the Supreme Court, by limiting the options to candidates offered by the political party of the judge leaving the seat. And it will curtail the ability of the attorney general — currently Governor-elect Josh Stein, and next year Jeff Jackson, another Democrat — to challenge laws passed by the legislature.
Beyond those proposals, the law will make major changes to state election procedures. It will significantly shorten the time voters have after Election Day to address problems with their mail and absentee ballots — a process known as curing — and will require local election officials to finish counting provisional ballots within three days of the election.
Though Republicans currently enjoy a one-vote supermajority in the House, a successful override of the governor’s veto was not a foregone conclusion in Raleigh, the capital. Three Republican state representatives from western North Carolina had voted against the initial bill, arguing that it had not done enough to bring new storm aid to their region. As recently as Tuesday, at least one of them, Mark Pless, had indicated he was unsure how he was going to vote.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Pless, along with the two other lawmakers from the region, Mike Clampitt and Karl E. Gillespie, backed the move to enact sweeping changes to state government.
On the eve of the vote, Democrats in the legislature expressed exasperation.
“I don’t see how you can still look people in the face and say we have three coequal branches of government,” State Representative Robert T. Reives, the Democratic leader in the House, said in an interview on Tuesday, pointing to what he called “10 years of power grabs.” “If we don’t have three coequal branches of government, how does that put us in a position to look people in the face and tell them they’ve got a functional democracy?”
Dozens of protesters gathered inside and outside the chamber on Wednesday before the vote, singing “This Little Light of Mine” and holding signs that read “stop the power grab” and “Western N.C. needs disaster relief, NOT more voter suppression.”
Western areas of the state are still struggling to recover after Helene ripped through in late September, causing roughly $53 billion in damage. In October, the legislature approved about $877 million in recovery aid, including $50 million in loans for small businesses. But local leaders called for far more, and Mr. Cooper had sought a $3.9 billion proposal.
A drive down Lyman Street in the River Arts district of Asheville revealed block after block of devastation, with crumpled buildings, tangled steel and debris stretching for nearly a mile. Residents and small businesses have been waiting for more help from the legislature, and have grown frustrated about the intrusion of politics.
Two Democratic state representatives from the western part of the state — Eric Ager and Lindsey Prather — criticized the override effort from the chamber floor, listing at length the residents and businesses still struggling to recover from the hurricane.
“This bill just doesn’t meet the moment, and it doesn’t meet North Carolina’s values,” Mr. Ager said. “We should have done more sooner. You know, we talk about figuring all this out. The people in North Carolina are tired of hearing that help is on the way. It’s not coming. And that’s, that’s the way people feel.”
State Representative Destin Hall, the incoming Republican speaker, said that recovery would take time, and defended the hurricane relief legislation that state lawmakers had already passed in October.
“You can send all the money in the world to it immediately, but you’ve got to go out and figure out where the need lies,” Mr. Hall said. “And the damage area is so great that it takes time for folks to figure out, where does the money need to go?”
But Mr. Stein, the governor-elect, has been critical of the effort. “The bill, to be clear, is a power grab, not disaster relief,” he told reporters at the Democratic Governors Association’s winter meeting last week in California. “It’s petty and wrongheaded, and it’s contrary to what the voters of North Carolina had just done in this election and who they elected.”
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