Session finishes, adjourns

With a flurry of final votes and a few things left unfinished, the General Assembly ended its 2008 session yesterday and adjourned for the year.

Barring an urgent matter that demands legislators' attention, the assembly won't reconvene until January, after all 170 legislative seats come up for re-election in November.

Compared with previous years, this year's short, 10-week session was relatively free of turmoil, and few landmark laws were passed.

The most significant act was the passing of a $21 billion state budget for 2008-09 that includes modest spending increases and no tax increases.

In addition, the legislature passed laws intended to crack down on criminal gangs, increase penalties for sex offenders and give the governor more power to respond to droughts. Legislators also changed the name of the N.C. School of the Arts to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

But this year's legislative session was perhaps most notable for the bills that didn't pass. Sometimes, legislative leaders simply blocked controversial bills from coming up for debate. Other times, the Senate and the House could not agree on how a bill should read or whether it should pass.

Even though both the Senate and the House are controlled by Democrats, the leaders of the two chambers have different priorities, and the House is generally seen as more liberal while the Senate is more centrist.

The result was that many legislators and activists -- on both the right and the left -- left Raleigh yesterday not completely satisfied.

Here are some of the issues that didn't make it into law this year:

□ Health-plan shortfall: Legislators scrambled this week to try to shore up a potential shortfall in the health-insurance plan that covers state employees. But because they could not agree on a solution, they ended up taking no action, essentially postponing the problem.

Senate Democrats wanted to raise co-payments for state employees, while House Democrats wanted to take money out of a special fund that is reserved for emergencies.

Republicans wanted to direct Gov. Mike Easley to cut spending by 1 percent across the board and use the savings to shore up the health plan.

□ Race and the death penalty: Two Winston-Salem Democrats, Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon, were the chief sponsors of a bill to allow defendants in death-penalty cases to use statistics to try to show that race played a factor in the application of the death penalty.

The N.C. Racial Justice Act, if passed, would have been a landmark in North Carolina's continuing debate over the death penalty. The House approved the bill in 2007, but the Senate never took it up this year.

In a highly unusual step, Womble and Parmon sent out a scathing press release on Thursday, blasting Senate Democrats for not passing the bill.

"We've had three black men released from death row," the Rev. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people, said yesterday. "I believe that if we had had three wealthy men, three white men, exonerated like this, everybody would be declaring that our justice system is broken. And we've got to stop this in North Carolina," he said.

□ Annexation moratorium: Another bill that was approved by the House but never taken up by the Senate would have put a temporary stop to forced annexation, a process by which municipalities add new residents against their will. Annexation opponents have vigorously lobbied the General Assembly for two years, and supporters of a moratorium say that it would give the legislature time to revise the state's annexation law.

Senate leaders said they were reluctant to go along with the moratorium because no senators were part of the committee that proposed it.

□ National popular vote: In 2007, the Senate approved a bill that would have paved the way for North Carolina to enter into an agreement with other states in order to ensure that the presidential candidate who wins the most total votes nationwide enters the White House.

Supporters of the idea say that the Electoral College is outmoded and undemocratic. But the House never took up the bill this year.

□ Other issues: A number of bills supported mainly by Republicans were blocked by Democratic leaders in both chambers. They included a bill that would have made the killing of a pregnant woman a double homicide, and a bill that sought to end a legal dispute that has temporarily stopped the use of the death penalty in North Carolina. Another proposal -- for a constitutional amendment against the government's use of eminent domain -- was never taken up by the Senate.

Although they are dead for 2008, many of these issues are likely to recur when the legislature reconvenes in 2009.

In the meantime, legislators have other work to do. They will spend the time working on numerous legislative studies and other special committees -- not to mention running their re-election campaigns.

■ James Romoser can be reached at 919-833-9056 or at jromoser@wsjournal.com.