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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Watching Trump's approval rating fall even more will affect my mental state by making me smile and laugh as Americans realize they fell for it again

  • -30

Please remember that this is not PoliticalCompassMemes; pointing and laughing in the style of Nelson Muntz invites only heat, not light.

That's incredibly fair

The first article is about how all of this was locked in back in March by the Democrat governor. There's one off-hand reference to the OBBBA, and no effort made to connect anything.

Which makes sense, since, last I saw, the bill just decreased the rate of increase in spending. Remarkable how consistently people miss that. Some antimemetics shit, really.

Despite having a Democrat governor, the Republican (almost) supermajority in state congress and the past decade of slowly removing powers from the governorship combined with NC already having a low power governorship means a lot of things that would normally be in the governor's hands are instead in the state Congress. North Carolina might even be the weakest governor in the nation

As governor, Stein holds essentially no power over the state budget other than the obligation to share his vision with Republican lawmakers who are free to promptly discard it in favor of their own.

His veto power is one of the weakest in the country, with no ability to object to specific items in budget bills, redistricting legislation, constitutional amendments or bills that apply to fewer than 15 counties.

He doesn’t even get to appoint his executive team. The attorney general, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction and six other primary executive offices are elected by the people.

Just curious where you are reading that? The NC Newsline article doesn't say that:

"The Governor has been clear since March that the General Assembly needs to fully fund the Medicaid rebase, and he recently reiterated his concern when their Band-Aid budget fell $319 million short of what is needed to fund North Carolinians’ health care,” the spokesperson wrote.

The NC Governor doesn't have much power because the NC legislature has a veto-proof Republican majority so I don't really see how you could lay this at his feet.

Edit: Oh, actually they aren't technically veto-proof anymore by the margin of one seat. One or two Democrat representatives have also been voting in step with the Republicans to override governor's vetos.

That's a valid enough point. I checked for the governor, but didn't think to look at the legislature.

Regardless, there's no reason to think there's a connection to Trump and the OBBBA based on that article. This was decided at the state levels months before the bill passed, or was even finalized.