North Carolina Republican legislative leaders ditched late Tuesday efforts this year to dramatically multiply legal gambling in the state, announcing instead that they will pass a final budget without it that also will trigger Medicaid coverage to begin for hundreds of thousands of adults.
“We think this is the best, most prudent way for us to move forward,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters.
House and Senate GOP lawmakers had been grappling with how to get the votes necessary to enact language to authorize four new casinos and legitimize and regulate video gambling machines. Social conservatives in the state House balked earlier this month at the idea from Senate Republicans to insert those provisions into the two-year spending plan.
Then in recent days, there was talk of putting the gambling items in a bill separate from the budget and require its passage for Medicaid expansion to finally occur. But that threatened a landmark health care deal that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper had reached six months ago with GOP legislators, who had until recently been set against accepting expansion through the 2010 federal health care law.
Nearly all of Cooper’s Democratic allies in the legislature wouldn’t go along with the ploy, which along with Republican holdouts threatened to take down the bill. At a hastily arranged Legislative Building news conference, Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore said that efforts to advance this type of gambling were over for the immediate future.
Within the House Republican caucus, “clearly there were there were differences of opinion and at the end of the day, we felt like this issue and no one single issue should hold up the budget,” Moore said.
Expansion is considered a top priority of Cooper and his legislative allies. Those lawmakers opposed the 11th-hour effort to link it with gambling, saying it broke the promise Republicans essentially made within an expansion law that Cooper signed in March that stated enacting a budget law was required for expansion to start. And enough Republicans were still unhappy with the gambling efforts contained within to threaten to sink the measure.
Now, “Medicaid expansion will still be contingent on the budget becoming law,” Berger said.
Moore and Berger said details of the final two-year spending plan would now be released Wednesday, with floor votes Thursday and Friday. They both anticipated full Republican support for the budget bill, with Moore expecting Democratic votes as well. Republicans hold narrow veto-proof majorities in both chambers.
A state budget was supposed to be in place when the new fiscal year began July 1, but negotiations slowed during the summer over the extent of income tax rate reductions and how to distribute billions of dollars for initiatives and programs.
North Carolina already has three casinos operated by two Native American tribes.
