Four North Carolina House Republicans filed a bill on Wednesday that notably introduces the “show me your papers” provision of Arizona’s anti-immigration law. Under the bill, H.B. 786, police can check the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest and detain them for “reasonable suspicion.” The bill also makes it easier for police to seize immigrants’ vehicles. Furthermore, it would require a detained undocumented immigrant to pay the costs of his or her arrest, while making bail more difficult.

The bill does provide driver’s permits to undocumented immigrants if they lived in the state for one year. However, these licenses follow the controversial design North Carolina attempted to issue to DREAMers, which mark them from the rest of the state’s population: Undocumented immigrants would receive a vertical license, instead of the standard horizontal one, and they would carry a thumbprint.

Since Arizona enacted SB 1070, the state has suffered economically, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity, tourism, and new business. North Carolina, home to 325,000 undocumented immigrants, also has a growing number of immigrant citizens who comprise 10 percent of the state’s workforce.

Lately, North Carolina Republicans have made the state the Tea Party’s ground zero with bills that suppress minority votes, create a state-sponsored religion, and shut down abortion clinics.

In a email to a constituent obtained by the Raleigh News & Observer, one North Carolina state representative said that she is against Muslim prayer because, “I do not condone terrorism.”

Rep. Michele Presnell (R) was a co-sponsor of North Carolina’s proposed (and since dropped) unconstitutional resolution to establish a state religion. But when one of her constituents challenged her idea of imposing a religion on others, asking in an email if Presnell would “be comfortable with a public prayer to Allah before a legislative meeting in Raleigh,” that’s when Presnell got Islamophobic:

In an email exchange with a constituent, Republican state Rep. Michele Presnell of Burnsville was asked whether she was comfortable with a prayer to Allah before a legislative meeting. Presnell responded: “No, I do not condone terrorism.”[...]

[Constituent Britt] Kaufmann replied: “Yes, I do understand that the ACLU is suing Rowan County and I think they have clearly articulated why they are not comfortable with prayer before the commissioners meetings. I wanted you, as my representative, to know that I do not think the proposed bill is a good solution to that problem. … Would you be comfortable with a public prayer to Allah before a legislative meeting in Raleigh?”

Presnell equated Islam to terrorism and added,“We just need to start taking a stand on our religious freedom or it will be whisked away from us.”

Muslims in the United States have endured horrible Islamophobia since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and unfortunately legislators at both the state and federal level have been behind much of the vitriol. Just recently, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) led a Islamophobic witch hunt in Washington, DC wherein she claimed that one of former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s aides was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2010, Republicans took over both houses of the North Carolina legislature for the first time since 1870, due in no small part to the spending of a single, very wealthy Republican. As Jane Mayer reported in 2011, “three-quarters of the spending by independent groups in North Carolina’s 2010 state races came from accounts linked to” wholesale baron Art Pope. Of the 22 state legislative races targeted by Pope’s family and his organizations, 18 fell to Republicans. Yet Pope’s bought-and-paid-for legislature had limited reach until very recently thanks to the state’s Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue. That all changed last January, when Perdue was succeeded by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological — and ill-considered — tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation. Here are just a few of the bills being pushed in the house (and the senate) that Art Pope built:

• Voter Suppression : It’s a sad commentary on the state of American politics that once Republicans take over a state, they almost immediately begin enacting laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to cast a ballot. North Carolina Republicans, however, have embraced voter suppression with unusual enthusiasm. They’ve introduced voter ID, a common GOP method of reducing turnout among minorities, low-income voters and students. They’ve introduced Florida-like restrictions on early voting, cutting early voting hours and eliminating voting the Sunday before election day in order to thwart voting drives at African-American churches. And they want to punish parents whose children vote from their college addresses.
• Reverse Robin Hood: A GOP bill in the North Carolina Senate would eliminate all individual and corporate income taxes, and largely replace it with higher sales taxes. Sales taxes disproportionately burden lower-income taxpayers, because they spend a larger percentage of their income on basic needs. It is also far more difficult to create a progressive sales tax than to enact a progressive income tax code that places a lesser tax burden on those who can least afford it. As a result, a similar tax plan in Louisiana would raise taxes on 80 percent of residents, while giving Louisianans in the top 1 percent of income earners an average tax cut of $25,423.
• Shutting Down Abortion Clinics: Another bill in the state senate would add new restrictions to abortion clinics in an attempt to force them to close their doors. Among other things, the bill requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, an unnecessary restriction that serves little purpose other than to limit the pool of doctors available to clinics.
• Anti-Worker Constitutional Amendment: A so-called “right-to-work” law, which depresses worker wages by cutting back unions’ ability to collectively bargain for wages and benefits, is already the law in North Carolina, effectively cutting both union and non-union wages by $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, 34 Republican lawmakers (and one Democrat) sponsored a state constitutional amendment that would lock this anti-worker policy into the state Constitution. The same amendment would strip public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain, and lock in policies making it easier for companies to pressure their workers against unionizing to boot.
• Subsidizing Home Schooling: Eight Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill giving families a $1,250 per semester tax subsidy if they home school their children.
• Judges For Sale: A pair of bills in the state senate would eliminate the state’s successful public financing system for judicial elections. Prior to this system’s enactment in 2004, “73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Alicia Bannon. Now, it’s 14 percent. So public financing was successful in rolling back moneyed interest groups’ ability to buy and sell judges through campaign donations, and these GOP bills would throw judicial elections back to the old ways.
• State Sponsored Religion: Eleven Republicans, including the state’s House Majority Leader, backed a resolution proclaiming that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional,” and then decreeing that North Carolina could establish its own state religion. On the bright side, state house Speaker Thom Tillis announced that he would not advance this resolution after it was widely panned.

The defeat of North Carolina’s religious endorsement resolution is a hopeful sign that these bills can be stopped. But it’s important to remember that the religious establishment bill was simply a non-binding resolution that amounted to little more than an ideological yawp. The real test is whether efforts to restrict the franchise, target women’s freedom, cut wages and enrich people like Art Pope are ultimately successful.

It’s been nearly seven years since the last execution in North Carolina, but that could soon change after the state Senate passed a bill to resume executions in the Tar Heel State.

The halt in executions stemmed largely from challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol and questions about whether medical professionals can participate in a state-sponsored killing. Additionally, the 2009 Racial Justice Act allowed death row inmates to appeal their conviction if racial bias may have played a role in his or her sentence. A judge would then decide whether to let the capital sentence stand or commute it to life without the possibility of parole.

However, that law’s days may be numbered after the state Senate voted 33-14 on Wednesday to repeal the Racial Justice Act, in addition to enacting other changes to smooth the path to future executions. The bill now moves to the state House, where Republicans enjoy a 77-43 advantage.

WRAL has more:

When it passed, the [Racial Justice Act] was the only one of its kind in the nation. Supporters said it would renew public confidence in the capital punishment system. Detractors said it would clog the courts with appeals.

The original law allowed the use of statistics to prove a pattern of racial bias in jury selection and sentencing. State lawmakers changed that with a major rewrite last year. Senate Bill 306 repeals the remainder of the law.

Whether North Carolina lawmakers recognize it or not, racial bias plays a major role in the criminal justice sentencing system, particularly in the doling out of death sentences. For example, in capital cases, those with at least one white victim were over three times more likely to result in a death sentence than those without a white victim. In addition, as court documents show, potential jurors who were minorities were struck by prosecutors at nearly twice the rate of potential jurors who were white, regardless of qualification. All- or mostly-white juries have been more likely to sentence a black defendant to death. The Racial Justice Act helped address these biases in the system.

North Carolina’s move bucks the national trend towards repealing the death penalty. Six states in as many years have eliminated capital punishment.

As of last year, more than 160 people were on death row in North Carolina.

A Republican legislator in North Carolina is pushing a bill to penalize parents if they have a child in college who chooses to vote where they study.

State Rep. Bill Cook (R) introduced SB 667 this week, which would raise taxes on families with college students if the child registers to vote at school rather than at home.

WRAL has more:

Senate Bill 667, known as “Equalize Voter Rights,” would remove the tax exemption for dependents who register to vote at any address other than their parents’ home.

“If the voter is a dependent of the voter’s parent or legal guardian, is 18 years of age or older and the voter has registered at an address other than that of the parent or legal guardian, the parent or legal guardian will not be allowed to claim the voter as a dependent for state income tax purposes,” the bill says.

In the 1979 case Symm v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision holding that a state cannot place unique burdens on college student voters that do not apply to others. While this bill attempts to sidestep Symm by not explicitly prohibiting college students from registering, the financial penalty their parents would face still amounts to an attempt to punish these voters for voting at their school address rather than their home, and should not be upheld if it is passed.

Cook is not the only Republican lawmaker trying to disenfranchise college students. During the last election cycle, the Republican House Speaker in New Hampshire discouraged students from voting because they’ll just vote “liberal,” and in Maine the Republican Secretary of State sent threatening letters to student voters encouraging them to re-register in another state. This year, a GOP legislator in Indiana introduced a bill in February to bar students who pay out-of-state tuition from voting in the Hoosier State.

Far-right legislation is becoming a mainstay in North Carolina. Republicans, who currently control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office, are currently considering enacting voter ID in the Tar Heel State. In addition, eleven lawmakers recently sponsored a resolution to ignore the constitutional prohibition on government establishment of religion.

Remember the six hour lines Florida voters faced in order to case a ballot last November? The ones that led to at least 200,000 voters giving up and going home without casting a ballot, according to one study? Those lines did not happen by accident. They happened because Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law that nearly cut in half the number of early voting days in his state, as part of his broader efforts to make it harder to vote in Florida.

Scott faced such a severe backlash from his efforts to suppress the vote that even he won’t admit that he supported the anti-voter bills he signed into law. Nevertheless, even after the long lines and the backlash, a top North Carolina Republican wants to bring Scott’s vision to North Carolina. A bill introduced last week by North Carolina’s Republican House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes would “shorten the length of time for early voting, prohibit voting on Sunday, abolish same-day registration at early voting sites, and end straight-ticket voting.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Republicans are so keen on limiting early voting and making it harder to register. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit explained in a decision striking down the Ohio GOP’s new limits on early voting, “early voters have disproportionately lower incomes and less education than election day voters” — lower income voters tend to favor Democrats over Republicans — and without early voting “thousands of voters who would have voted . . . will not be able to exercise their right to cast a vote in person.” Indeed, several Florida Republicans openly admitted that Rick Scott’s limits on early voting were enacted because “the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting . . . sent a chill down our spines.”

Prohibiting early voting on Sunday is a direct attack on African-American turnout, as many black churches lead turnout drives on the Sunday before Election Day. Indeed, the Palm Beach Post quoted one GOP consultant in Florida admitting that “the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of [GOP lawmakers'] targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.” According to one poll, 96 percent of black voters supported President Obama.

The Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional” according to a resolution sponsored by North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes (R) and ten of his fellow Republicans — a statement that puts them at odds with over 200 years of constitutional law. In light of this novel reading of the Constitution, Starnes and his allies also claim that North Carolina is free to ignore the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

This resolution is nothing less than an effort to repudiate the result of the Civil War. As the resolution correctly notes, the First Amendment merely provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and, indeed, the Bill of Rights was originally understood to only place limits on the federal government. For the earliest years of the Republic, the Bill of Rights were not really “rights” at all, but were instead guidelines on which powers belonged to central authorities and which ones remained exclusively in the hands of state lawmakers.

In 1868, however the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified for the express purpose of changing this balance of power. While the early Constitution envisioned “rights” as little more than a battle between central and local government, the Fourteenth Amendment ushered in a more modern understanding. Under this amendment, “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” nor may any state “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment completely transformed the nature of the American Republic, from one where liberties were generally protected — if at all — by tensions between competing governments to one which recognized that there are certain liberties that cannot be abridged by any government.

There is some academic debate about whether the architects of the Fourteenth Amendment intended the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights to be applied to the states because these liberties are part of the “privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens, or because they are liberties that cannot be denied under the Constitution’s “due process” guarantees. Regardless of the correct answer to this academic question, however, one of the most important judicial projects of the Twentieth Century was a series of Supreme Court decisions applying most of the Bill of Rights’ limits to state governments. This project completed the work the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment began nearly 150 year ago — reconstructing America as a nation that recognizes certain civil rights which no lawmaker is allowed to trample. The right to be free from government endorsements of religious is one of these civil rights.

So when Starnes and his colleagues lash out against this one freedom, they are not simply lashing out against some court decisions that they disagree with. They are rejecting the most transformative moment in American constitutional history and denying that their side lost the Civil War.

In the late 19th Century, Southern states began to enact literacy tests to prevent African-Americans from casting a ballot. At the time, black voters were up to seven and a half times as likely to be unable to read as white voters, so requiring voters to prove their reading skills was an effective way of making the electorate more white. Many states also enacted laws effectively exempting whites from the test, such as by allowing a white voting official to subjectively determine that certain people should be allowed to vote even if they could not pass the literacy test. Indeed, the phrase “grandfather clause” refers to Jim Crow era laws that exempted white voters from voting restrictions so long as their grandfathers enjoyed the right to vote prior to the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

Literacy tests were eventually rendered illegal under the Voting Rights Act, but North Carolina’s state constitution still calls for one. Now, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to fix that:

Earlier this month, two African-American Democrats, Reps. Kelly Alexander of Charlotte and Mickey Michaux of Durham, joined with two white Republicans, Reps. Charles Jeter of Huntersville and Harry Warren of Salisbury, to introduce House Bill 311, which would put before voters an amendment to eliminate Article VI, Section 4 of the state constitution that says, “Every person presenting himself for registration shall be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language.”

An earlier effort to repeal the provision failed in 1970 — the only one of six proposed constitutional changes that North Carolina voters did not approve that year. The clause remains unenforceable under Section 201 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits state and local governments from requiring voters to read and write.

Although this repeal effort is largely symbolic so long as the Voting Right Act prevents North Carolina’s literacy test requirement from being enforced, repealing it is nonetheless important because there is no guarantee that the Roberts Court won’t someday strip away the federal government’s power to protect against literacy tests and similar devices intended to disenfranchise voters, just as they appear poised to cut back another part of the landmark voting law this term.