Fitzsimon File

The legislative halls were buzzing most of Wednesday with conflicting rumors about a final budget agreement, with wildly different assessments about how close House and Senate leaders were to resolving their differences and setting the stage for the session to adjourn.

Committees were busy rushing through long lists of bills and House and Senate calendars are getting longer every day as the session ends approaches. The House Appropriations Committee met for 90 minutes Wednesday morning and the meeting provided a clear picture of how the General Assembly works and who it often works for.

Rep. Larry Womble presented his proposal to help the surviving victims of the state’s shameful eugenics program that sterilized 7,600 people from 1933 to 1974, most of them African-American women who the state deemed “feeble” or “promiscuous.”

Governor Mike Easley issued a formal apology for the state five years ago. Womble has been trying since then to pass legislation to give financial compensation of $50,000 to each of the victims who are still alive, which may be as many as half of the people the state abused.

No one opposes Womble’s bill, yet it had never even had a hearing in the General Assembly before Wednesday morning when the Appropriations Committee heard not only from Womble but from surviving victims of the disgraceful program.

Mary English was 22 when her doctor convinced her to enroll in a state medical program that would help her. She didn’t realize until years later when she was trying to get pregnant that she had been sterilized without her consent.

Jesse Riddick was sterilized at 16 and didn’t know it until she was married and trying to start a family. Riddick’s son Tony compared the Eugenics program to policies of Nazi Germany and it seems to fit.

But Womble wasn’t presenting his plan to provide $50,000 compensation to the surviving victims. He wasn’t allowed to talk about that bill. Instead, the committee approved legislation directing the state to conduct a study of how to compensate the victims, ignoring the fact that a special commission appointed by Easley studied it several years ago.

Just before Mary English and Jesse Riddick described their maiming at the hands of the state, Rep. George Cleveland presented his plan to repeal a provision snuck into the budget a few years ago that gives in-state tuition to out of state athletes and academic scholarship recipients at UNC campuses.

Cleveland told lawmakers that the majority of the students who get the in-state tuition are athletes, which provides a huge windfall for the athletic booster clubs at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State. Then one lawmaker after another spoke against Cleveland’s idea, which was co-sponsored by Rep. Pricey Harrison.

The objections were remarkably similar and sounded like talking points provided by the Citizens for Higher Education, a political action committee run by wealthy supporters of UNC that donated roughly half a million dollars to legislative campaigns in the last election cycle.

Virtually every opponent of Cleveland’s bill said that most of the money went for academic scholarships, ignoring a staff memo handed out to every committee member that showed 70 percent of the students affected were out of state athletes, not scholars.

No one mentioned that UNC President Erskine Bowles says he opposes the in-state tuition provision and that includes the lobbyists who work for Bowles, who sat quietly in the back of the room. The Citizens for Higher Education lobbyists were working the committee and apparently working it well. Half a million dollars in campaign contributions makes that kind of job a little easier.

Cleveland finally withdrew his bill sensing that it was destined for defeat and the $16 million giveaway to the folks in the padded seats at basketball games was safe.

Mary English and Jesse Riddick and the other 3,800 living victims of the state’s forced sterilization program will have to wait for their compensation.   Maybe if they formed a PAC, raised $500,000 and hired well-connected lobbyists, they would finally receive the settlement they are due.

 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.