Power politics.

• Author: Hood, John
• Position: FREE+CLEAR

Sure, Republicans played rough in stripping Gov. Roy Cooper's power, continuing an old Raleigh tradition. The republic will endure.

Dan Blue believed the North Carolina legislature should retain its supremacy over the executive branch. Art Pope thought the governor deserved more power. Roy Cooper sought to work out a compromise.

Recognize these names? But the episode I'm referring to isn't recent. It occurred in 1990, when Blue, Pope and Cooper served together in a Democratic-controlled North Carolina House that frequently locked horns with Gov. Jim Martin, a Republican then in his sixth year in office.

The proposal in 1990 was to give North Carolina's governor a power that every other U.S. governor enjoyed: the veto. But the bill also gave the governor the power to appoint judges to the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, replacing direct elections. To counterbalance these added powers, the measure gave state legislators the power to confirm gubernatorial appointments and extended legislative terms from two years to four years.

All the Republicans in the House favored the package. Most Democrats--including future House Speaker and now state Sen. Dan Blue and our new governor, Roy Cooper--opposed it. The Democrats weren't of one mind, however. Blue flatly opposed the gubernatorial veto. Cooper favored it, but he thought the measure in question wasn't balanced enough. Cooper and a group of House Democrats had previously allied with Pope and other Republicans to overthrow longtime House Speaker Liston Ramsey in favor of Democratic reformer Joe Mavretic. Blue supported Ramsey.

The 1990 measure narrowly passed the House Rules Committee but never attracted the supermajority required from the entire body. It took the election of a Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, in 1992 and a Republican House in 1994 to realign enough legislators in favor of gubernatorial veto. Voters approved the changes in 1996, albeit without any concessions to the legislature.

I offer this history lesson as critical context for recent battles over legislative and executive powers. You may not have been in North Carolina to witness the preceding battles in this struggle during the 1980s and 1990s. Neither were many of the reporters, analysts and commentators who covered the special legislative session in December that stripped Gov. Cooper of some of his appointment powers and made other changes to the structure and operation of state government.

But all of the key actors in...