Eight-year lifetime term limits for speakers of the House and presidents pro tempore of the Senate would address an overconcentration of power caused by legislative leaders clinging to their positions for a decade or more. Allowing a freer leadership rotation will enable the General Assembly to consider new ideas better and make old rivalries and conflicts less likely to derail policy considerations.
Legislative sessions in North Carolina have grown longer over the past decade. Those longer sessions cost legislators time and taxpayers money. Session length limits would impose more regularity on the General Assembly. They would also restore a power balance between legislative leaders and rank-and-file members by reducing the advantage of “strategic patience” that leadership has.
North Carolina has one of the lowest state legislative salaries in the United States. The time legislators spend in the General Assembly is not spent working to support their families. Raise legislative pay from $13,951 to somewhere between $20,534 (cost-neutral, when combined with session limits) and the $32,401 national average for similar state legislatures
Legislators backslid on transparency when they included a section in the 2023 budget granting themselves the power to determine if their own records are public, demonstrating the need for more robust institutional support of transparency. A transparency constitutional amendment should cover all three branches of state government, require a supermajority for the legislature to exempt itself from transparency laws, and include a “clearly outweighing” standard that would favor public disclosure.