The N.C. Free Enterprise Foundation legislative scorecard shows that leaders of the state House and Senate also top the nonprofit group’s rankings of the most pro-business lawmakers.
In the Senate, the chamber’s 30 Republicans held down the top 30 slots in the ranking, with Senate leader Phil Berger at the top. The highest-ranked Democrat was Wake County Sen. Dan Blue.
In the House, Republicans held down the first 54 slots, with Speaker Destin Hall on top. The chamber’s highest-ranked Democrat was Mecklenburg County Rep. Carla Cunningham, who is facing a primary challenge from two candidates.
Foundation leaders say the ranking system equips “business leaders and the public with a tool to assess whether a lawmaker is generally favorable toward free enterprise or not.” The nonpartisan nonprofit was formed in 1984. In this year’s survey, most Republicans received scores in the 80s, while most Democrats were in the 30s and 40s, reflecting a significant disparity in how the two parties view many business topics.
This year’s top-performing state senators are: Berger (Rockingham), Timothy Moffitt (Henderson), Brent Jackson (Sampson), Bill Rabon (Brunswick), and Ralph Hise (Mitchell).
The top-performing state House members are, John R. Bell IV (Wayne), Jeff Zenger (Forsyth), Dean Arp (Union), Mike Schietzelt (Wake), Cody Huneycutt (Montgomery), Karl Gillespie (Wayne), Stephen Ross (Wayne), Allen Chesser (Wayne), and Jimmy Dixon (Wayne).
Scorecards typically involve scoring support or opposition to particular pieces of legislation, making up 70% of a rating. NC FREE further rewards or penalizes House and Senate members for sponsoring particular bills.
Its ranking also incorporates a subjective component, which counts for 30%. The group asked “industry leaders” to grade lawmakers “not only [on] their alignment with free-enterprise principles — such as taxation, regulation, civil liability and private property rights — but also their professionalism, accessibility and responsiveness to discussion and information sharing.”
A couple of observations about the result:
- Across the board, House members, even the Republican ones, did worse than senators. Hall’s score would have ranked him 27th in the Senate, slotting between Harnett County’s Jim Burgin and Rowan County’s Carl Ford.
- The lowest-ranking Senate Republican was Craven County’s Bob Brinson. His House counterpart was Guilford County Rep. John Blust.
- The way NC FREE reports the numbers gives a possible view of the results of the subjective component. Two senators and 11 House members may have improved because industry leaders think well of them.
- The senators in question were Democrats Jay Chaudhuri and Gale Adcock, both of Wake County.
- Rep. Mitchell Setzer, R-Catawba, led House gainers from the subjective component. House Democratic Leader Robert Reives wasn’t too far behind him. The others were Democrats Allison Dahle, Zack Hawkins, Abe Jones and Brian Turner, and Republicans Matt Winslow, Kyle Hall, Erin Paré, Karl Gillespie and John Sauls.
- Conversely, the House member who took the biggest penalty from the subjective component and his bill sponsorships was Rep. Cecil Brockman, D-Guilford, who’s now in jail as he faces charges of statutory sexual assault.
- In the Senate, the biggest subjective/sponsorship penalties fell on Sens. Chris Measmer, R-Cabarrus, and Terence Everitt, D-Wake.
Legislative scorecards bear scrutiny because their authors can put a thumb on the scale via their choices of what bills to score. NC FREE Executive Director Alex Baltzegar said the group made no attempt to stack the deck. “We’re definitely not in the business of pushing a partisan agenda,” he says.
The group decided not to score a bill calling for a shrimp-trawling ban, which attracted lots of publicity late in the session. Opponents argued the ban would kill not just the coastal shrimping industry, but a lot of other businesses that depend on it.
Baltzegar said the committee had considered scoring HB 442, but “moved away from it pretty quickly” because of the complexities of the issue. “Regulating somebody’s business out of existence, that would be the clear-cut argument in favor of putting this bill in there,” he said. “But we felt like, broadly speaking, the bill is preventing over-harvesting, which is going to kill that industry in the long run.”
