Meet the Press - May 21, 2023
Interview
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Glad to be with you, Chuck, as always.
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I don't think so, but I hope so. We're going to make sure that this bill gets implemented in a way that we provide the most access possible to women. This bill was contradictory, conflicting, confusing. They wrote it in the middle of the night. It's going to be open to interpretation. This is in no way a reasonable compromise as Republicans have presented it. It's a compromise between the right wing and the radical right wing. It is better than some of the surrounding states. But we know that Republicans are unified in their assault on women's reproductive freedom. Not a single one of them, not a single one of them stood up even when they had made promises to the people that they weren't going to change North Carolina's abortion law. That tells us where we are right now.
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Well first, I've already issued an executive order for paid parental leave for state employees, and they should be doing these kinds of things anyway. What they spent a lot of time doing is dressing up this bill so that they could attract their swing Republicans, because they knew they needed every single vote in order to be able to get this bill passed. Democrats were unified on a Roe v. Wade standard. So what they did is try to make this bill ugly. It's the old lipstick on a pig kind of thing. Yes, those investments are important and should be made anyway. But when you look at what this bill does, I don't think we can even comprehend yet the pressure that these clinics are going to be under by these additional restrictions. Women who are working hourly wages and already have children and have to make multiple trips in order to get reproductive care. North Carolina has been an access point in the Southeast. We already have long waiting lines. And when you compress the time that women have to make these decisions, I don't think it's reasonable to call this thing a 12 week ban because inside of that 12 weeks there's a lot going on that would be obstacles to women in being able to get care.
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You can't make major policy changes because you get your feelings hurt. Here in North Carolina, we are on a razor's edge. Major policy changes can happen because of one legislator making a decision. Because of our gerrymandered districts, we are so close to a supermajority. The last four years we've had enough Democrats to be able to stop all of the bad legislation. All of my vetoes have been upheld. But when you're talking about investments in education for our children, when you're talking about expanding Medicaid, which we were able to get done by the way, when you're talking about bills that discriminate, bills that attack voting rights, bills that affect our democracy, those one votes matter. And yes, it's a lot of pressure to make sure that we don't have these radical policy changes in a state that has kept our purple nature. One of the reasons we're the number one state in the country for business is because businesses say we are stable, we have a good business environment, but we also have stayed out of the culture wars. And if you run for elective office, you have to be tough. You have to be ready to jump into these issues and understand that there are going to be differences of agreement -- differences of opinion, and that people can be pretty rough in that kind of situation.
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Thank you, Chuck.
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