Two things that stood out from Speaker Hall’s new interview
He offered the clearest public explanation yet of the House position on the budget and Medicaid.
I’m thrilled to see more N.C. Republican leaders doing real sit-down interviews and making their case to the public.
The latest to do so is House Speaker Destin Hall. In a new 25-minute interview with WRAL he didn’t really break any news, but what he did is a lot more important than that. He sounds calm, smart, and perfectly reasonable throughout. In a Raleigh environment that often rewards opacity, that alone is refreshing.
One of the side effects of long-running Republican supermajorities is that leaders can begin to act as if the only audience that really matters is inside the building. That’s a mistake. Real political power stems from public support, not Roberts Rules of Order.
That is what Hall is starting to build here.
Two things in particular from the interview stood out to me.
The first was his explanation of the House position in the budget stalemate. As you probably know, the House and Senate couldn’t agree on a two-year budget. The Senate wanted to keep aggressively lowering pe…