- [Narrator] A US House subcommittee discusses violent crime in Charlotte.

The state's Medicaid funding deadline passes as does Congress's deadline to avoid a federal shutdown.

This is "State Line."

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[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome back to "State Lines."

Pull up a chair with us.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today an all star panel of guests, Billy Ball, who edits Cardinal and Pine, John Locke Foundation's Mitch Kokai to his right, and his neighbor in C3 Theresa Kostrzewa of Capital Advantage debuting on "State Lines."

Bruce Thompson, you'll know him if you see 'em around Raleigh with Parker Poe and Parker Poe's a law firm does lots of things.

Government advocacy.

I won't dare put your title out there 'cause I have no idea, but I know you're connected and you know a lot about state politics, Sir.

Welcome.

- Good to be back.

Very good to be here.

- Hope you're ready.

We have a lot of topics to get to.

Let's start with the US House Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing in Charlotte early this week where the politicians heard input on violent crime and what might can be done about it.

Charlotte was selected as it's where Iryna Zarutska was murdered on the Charlotte Light Rail back in August.

Members of North Carolina's US House delegations sit on that committee and they heard from victims, families, police officers, and former prosecutors.

- Why is it that we take people who commit these heinous crimes and we do not hold them accountable for their actions?

We sit there and we try to give it a reason as a mental health issue or some other type of issues that realistically doesn't take blame.

- The Association of prosecuting attorneys so that suggests that for a jurisdiction the size of Mecklenburg, we should have at least 144 state prosecutors.

Instead, we have 62 state allocated positions and 22 additionally funded positions through Mecklenburg County and the city bringing that total to 84.

- Those were just two comments.

It got a lot more fiery with the victims and families there advocating on behalf of their, you know, their lost family members.

I can see supporters saying, Charlotte is the perfect location to discuss violent crime.

I can see critics saying political theater.

How, if we're open-minded sitting back watching this tonight days later, how should we assess that subcommittee meeting and why in Charlotte?

- Well, I think you can say that it is political theater and it's also dealing with an important issue and a lot of what Congress does is that if they're not negotiating a bill or voting on a bill or meeting with constituents, most of the rest of what they do is sort of political performance.

And this is part of that, but it is drawing attention to some major issues that are somewhat related.

You've got crime and the threat of violent crime and why violent criminals are out being able to commit crime.

You also have what's causing these people to get in that situation.

Of course, this is tied into the Iryna Zarutska case where you have DeCarlos Brown Jr is the alleged suspect.

There's the video that that appears to show him stabbing her in the neck.

Then you heard all of the details about him going in and outta the court system 14 times, having clearly documented mental issues, but still being out on the streets.

And so all of this is in a mix and it's interesting to see the two major political parties taking very different takes on what we should make out of this and how we should respond.

- Billy, it does seem though, if there's a big gap in the debate on this 'cause one side blames the other for being soft on crime.

The other one says, well, you're cutting all the ability to fight crime by reducing government funding of law enforcement.

Lots of emotion here.

Is it possible right now for- - Us normal folks who just cast ballots every two and four years to properly assess this issue of crime in our cities.

- You know, I think one thing that people should do who are watching this story, and I want to acknowledge, this story is terribly sad.

It is the worst kind of irony for someone to flee their country to seek shelter here and then to have this happen to them.

What happened to Iryna is awful and heartbreaking.

But I do think that people need to watch this with a certain degree of guardedness as well, because there is a tremendous amount of political theater in this.

And I've written about this this past week.

This crime, we have crimes that happen in this country and they are sad.

Each one is individually bad, but this crime was handpicked by partisan actors to make a point.

You'll note that this involves a knife, not a gun.

Republicans would not have chosen this crime to make it a big story if it involved a gun.

And suddenly when we talk about gun violence, people on the right wanna say, "Hey, we need to do something about mental health.

But since this is a knife case, they don't care about the mental health, this man was a monster," was I think the quote that Tricia Cotham used.

I think people need to watch this and be guarded.

We need to also make policy decisions based on actual numbers and trends, because you would think based on all the rhetoric, that we had some explosion of violent crime in this country.

And while our gun violence is high, we do not see anything particularly in the numbers that says we are going through anything particularly bad in the United States in terms of violent crime right now or I should say, out of the normal.

It's much better than it was in the 1990s.

So I think when you make policy decisions based on thoughtful things and not the sort of partisan theater that I think we're seeing.

- Theresa, why do we have a national look in Charlotte?

We have a legislative branch that could done the same thing.

And Charlotte has a city council, and Mecklenburg County has a board of commissioners, I would most believe.

Why did it get to Congress to show up?

- Well, so first of all, I know it sounds cynical to say never waste a good crisis, right?

But that's certainly part of it for everybody.

But I actually am hopeful that with what's happened in her situation, it's exposing some things that need to be fixed, that it looks like despite the political theater, there are some good things that they're looking at.

Certainly one of them involves bail and the ability, you know, no bail, you're out on the street again.

The other thing that's really interesting is that that crisis coupled with what happened in Southport, I don't know if y'all saw this week that Speaker Hall actually has created a select committee on mental health as it relates to public safety.

And so those are the Republicans saying, "Hey, wait a second, mental health really matters."

Obviously the left has been saying that a lot, but I think it's great that they're now all saying it because that's the crux of the problem here.

- And there was even some element of that in the Iryna's law, which I was pleasantly surprised about.

You thought it was all gonna be lock 'em up.

- Right.

- You know, stop the judges from releasing people.

And there was some of that, but there was some piece in that that dealt with mental health, which at least is a recognition that it plays a role.

- Bruce, tell us about Dena King.

There was a lot of soundbites we could've selected.

She's a former prosecutor, she is your partner at Parker Poe.

Talk from a very policy driven perspective.

Tell me what she brings to the table.

Could she have influenced Congress and maybe as the victim's families rightfully told their story, here she is with fund the communities.

- Yeah, I hope so.

And Dena is my law partner.

She's the former US attorney for the Western District of North Carolina.

She has a ton of experience in this area.

And I think when you hear from someone like her who has now been on both sides of criminal representation and somebody that has that prosecutorial experience and knows that.

We need to continue to invest more in that.

I hope they do listen.

And, you know, just to add onto something that Theresa was just talking about, I do think we have an opportunity on both the federal and the state level to get people focused on the preventative side of this.

I mean, it's very easy to come up with punishments that the issue we're dealing with.

And there was some of this debate in the legislature where people said, the things that we're talking about doing aren't necessarily going to deter crime because you're dealing with criminals that don't have the same thought process as we do.

But if we can get to them early and take preventative measures and do something to help in the mental health realm, that's where our focus really should be.

- The state debate until the death penalty amendment comes out, Bruce, that knocked the liberals out of the bipartisan feel of an arena's law.

Outside of that though, do you think Democrats, Republicans are fairly close on a comprehensive, at least agreement on how we should address this?

- You know, I don't know if they're close.

They should be.

If they talk to each other and listen to each other, I think it would be easy to put a bill together.

But unfortunately, and I think this is gonna be a theme and a lot of things we talk about today, compromise has become a bad word in politics, and we suffer because of that.

- And Kelly, one other important thing to note is, when you see the two parties talking past each other, part of that is 'cause very different ideas about what is causing the problem.

The last Carolina Journal poll asked the question, "What is most responsible for the rise of violent crime?"

And we gave people nine different options.

And this was after the murder of the polls in the field in the middle of September.

For Republicans, the top answer, 40% was light sentences or judges releasing people.

Number two was LAX prosecutors.

Or no, number two was poor parenting.

Number three was LAX prosecutors.

For Democrats, the top answers were economic hardship, mental illness, and drugs.

So you're seeing two very different ways of looking at what's causing the problem, which makes compromise more difficult.

If you don't agree on why... - It sounds like no one is wrong.

It's just an idea of where you're focusing your attention.

Bad parenting, drugs, economic hardship, tough on crime.

- It all combines to it, absolutely.

- Yeah, a good legislation on this issue would address all those issues that Mitch just mentioned.

- Yeah, good luck.

Well, another big deal in this state is over a big bill.

It's state Medicaid payment reductions coming into effect for hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors happened this week with the October 1st deadline passing.

The Stein administration believes there's a $319 million state funding gap for Medicaid.

Legislative analysts for the Republicans have different estimates, but House and Senate Republicans are stalled amongst themselves on any new Medicaid funding plan.

The governor can legally shift some money around to delay Medicaid payment reductions, but he says he wouldn't do it.

He says legislators, Billy should pass a funding bill and if you delay the cuts in October, it just delays Republicans willingness to work on it.

And Medicaid ends up broke anyway in about six, seven months.

So how was that for a 32nd synopsis of a very huge idea and plan, problem in this state?

- Whenever, you know, I talk about healthcare, and I try to ask people to think about it from the people who are receiving care and what are the barriers to people receiving the care that they need.

The preventative type stuff that heads off you having to go to the ER, or you dying because you didn't take care of some nagging ailment.

And I think to put this as simply as possible.

If the Medicaid, if the providers, the hospitals, the doctor's offices can't get money for Medicaid, then they don't have much incentive for them to actually provide care for patients who are on Medicaid.

So what we're gonna have is we're gonna see people who aren't going to get the care they need.

And I also think this is an interesting case 'cause usually we're up here and we're talking about Republicans arguing with Democrats.

These are Republicans in both chambers who are having a hard time coming to an agreement about how to resolve this.

There's some debate in there about a children's hospital.

The House and the Senate can't get along about it, but you've got two chambers run by Republicans that right now the pressure on is on them to figure it out.

- Theresa, Josh Stein could have maybe alleviated this or delayed the pain and he stuck to his guns and said, no, October 1st, we're gonna reduce, what is it, 3% for doctors, roughly maybe 8% to 10% for hospitals and nursing.

This is now not February.

- Right.

Well, first of all, why would he let the Republicans off the hook?

He's the Democrat governor.

This is on them for not doing their job is his position.

But secondly, if you look at last year, they left without a budget.

This year so far, we don't have a budget.

If I were Governor Stein, I don't know if I would believe that six or eight months from now they're gonna fund what we need.

I mean, the reason why the Republicans are arguing between each other is because the House believes they have to change something about the tax cuts in order for us to be able to pay for things going forward.

If in fact, they walk away without a budget and there's no agreement about changes in taxes, you guys, that means the estimated revenue shortfall for next year is going to be close to a billion dollars.

That's why the House has decided to take a different tack than the Senate.

So the problem's just gonna keep getting worse if in fact that holds true.

So I don't know what choice he had.

- Bruce about Destin Hall, his first term house speaker.

He sure hasn't given much back to Senator Berger and I would say the more mature, more established, older, locked in Republican caucus over there in the Senate.

- Yeah I think some of that comes with the advantage of being a fairly new member and having a quick rise to be speaker, because in working with him, it's clear that the way things used to happen, that isn't how the legislature's gonna operate.

So he's held pretty firm on some of these issues.

- Do either of you work in the healthcare space?

And if you do, you don't say who it is, but what are they feeling about taking if it's a doctor you represent a 3% cut, if it's a nursing home up to 10?

- Well, I wanna talk about that a little bit because I do represent a number of clients that are Medicaid providers, and I represent a company that owns two freestanding psychiatric hospitals in North Carolina.

Over half of their patients are Medicaid patients.

And these are the patients that both parties would agree they should get Medicaid, we should be developing these resources for them.

But they're on the higher end of the cut.

You know, they're at a 8% cut.

And the frustrating thing from their standpoint is you talk to the governor DHHS, they agree that there needs to be more money.

Go talk to the Senate.

They say, we don't agree on the amount, but we agree there's a hole.

Same thing with the house, yet the cuts are still going forward.

So it's a frustration not only for the patients, but also the people that are providing those services.

Too much uncertainty.

- Mitch, there's a line online, you'll see conservatives say, they say, we voted for this.

Yay!

You know, they do it for PBS funding, you know, defunding.

And at the state level, I'll see the same thing.

Did conservatives vote for this kind of, is this an approach, a conservative way of governing to just work a deal as close as you can?

If you don't get one, it's fine to delay.

- Well, on the budget issue, one of the things that hurts the House's position is that the Senate looks at the house position as worse than the status quo.

They say, look, you know, if we leave things as we are, the tax cuts that we all agreed to in the last budget that was passed, move forward, what you want to do would stop those from happening.

They see that as worse than the status quo, rather than both having slightly different versions of getting better than the status quo.

So that hurts.

But on the Medicaid issue, to me, I think the key thing coming out of the last legislative session was that it doesn't appear that the Republican leaders saw this as much of a crisis as the sign administration did.

If they had, they would've come up with a deal.

The Senate wouldn't have put the Children's hospital in there, which they knew the house didn't want.

They would've said, "Okay, we won't give the Stein administration all of the money they want, but here's the amount that they will put in and we can come back later if we need to give them more."

They just didn't see it as as much of a crisis.

- I think - I wanted to be- I'm sorry, - Go ahead.

- I wanna make one point about the tax cuts, right?

So you're right.

Both chambers agreed to the tax cuts x number of years ago.

Right?

What they didn't do though is trigger those tax cuts that are based upon inflation.

There's no room for inflation in that situation.

But you know what they did tie to inflation, how much money you can give them every single year.

[laughs happily] Literally.

Literally, so it goes up every single year.

I think it's now $6,400 and because it's tied to inflation, but the state budget and the tax cuts are not tied to inflation.

And if think about you guys, it makes a lot of sense.

- So the cost gets higher.

The revenue is can't follow with all this inflation.

- Correct, absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Billy.

- And I think it's important that we frame this properly too.

And there's a big national contacts with Medicaid and the one big beautiful bill that passed at the federal level this year that passed down a lot of Medicaid cuts.

There's a lot of uncertainty about how we provide healthcare for people who can't afford it.

And some people think, "Oh, we're just talking about super poor people."

No, we're talking about working people who cannot afford basic healthcare.

So I think at the end of the day, what the average North Carolinian sitting at home thinks is, I don't really care how you work out these disagreements.

Like, does it make it harder or easier for me to see a doctor and stuff like this makes it harder.

- And you're looking down the road, this isn't one big beautiful bill.

This is a state problem.

This is the state challenge of them reaching an agreement.

People may blame that federal legislation, right?

- People- - Experts have told me straight, no, this is the state in disagreement.

- And you have to wonder whether this issue would be very different if Medicaid expansion had been in place for several years.

We were kind of used to it.

And so they said, "Okay, we have to deal with this rather than it being relatively new and a lot of Republicans still not liking the idea of Medicaid expansion and just not wanting to have to deal with it.

- Well, October 1st also triggered a federal government shutdown.

Congress stalled on passing at least a continuing resolution up in DC.

Federal employees, military personnel not getting paid during the shutdown, though a deal would likely give them back pay.

Democrats want affordable care subsidies reinstated on health insurance Senate.

Democrats do have the filibuster in place.

President Trump says a shutdown could allow his administration to conduct large scale employment changes, layoffs through the federal government.

Here's Congress.

- A thousand small businesses in Mecklenburg County will see small business loans pause, threatening their ability to stay open.

They're gonna become uninsured, and that's gonna raise healthcare costs for everyone.

Simply put, North Carolinians can't afford for Congress not to act.

- Unfortunately, last week, the Democrats voted no to keep the government funded and to keep the federal government operational to help my district recover.

And they voted no to add $22.5 billion to disaster relief coffers that the governor was in Washington, DC asking for.

- Well, there's two sides of this issue and this is what it's all about.

- Yeah, that's a good example of why we are where we are, these two sides that are so far apart.

You know, one of the interesting things, I thought about this this morning, the sticking issue for Democrats are the subsidies for the marketplace policies.

That is an issue that vulnerable Republicans want to see get through.

I mean, there are Republicans in the US House telling the speaker, "We've got to do this or I'm going to lose my seat."

- Take this to North Carolina, are there any vulnerable Republicans in North Carolina's US House delegation?

- No.

[laughing] [panelists laughing] - Okay, there isn't.

- Haven't you seen the map?

- I've gotta stay true to this conceptof state lines, I'm wanna keep it.

But to your point, I mean, does it make you more willing to deal when you know you've got it made if you just survive your primary?

- It should.

And, you know, there are conversations that are going on, especially on the Senate side, about coming up with a way to do this and to get the Democrats on board.

But I think the big issue is that the leaders in the House and the Senate are not having those conversations.

And I don't know that our delegation is having those conversations.

- Theresa, we have a large military presence that is operating at emergency level to some degree, and I'm sure it's not shut down at Fort Bragg.

And you also have a lot of federal employees in the Triangle, Charlotte and all these other areas.

What does this shutdown mean now, or is this what's going on in general just one more layer of complexity?

- Well, first of all, I think that no one in the United States can look at this and say, "Oh yeah, shutting down our government is a good idea," right?

I think that people are tired of dysfunction.

They're tired of electing these people who are making promises and then they can't even do the basic things, right?

Get a budget, you know, how hard could this really, really be?

And it's not just a cost to the people who have lost their jobs and might not get a paycheck or aren't gonna get a paycheck and can't take care of things, but I think it's eroding the fabric of our society and what we think we are as a country and how we're gonna continue to make it, right?

'Cause we've broken promises to people.

- There's a different twist in it this time though, and it's Donald Trump.

Because usually what happens is, during a shutdown, everybody hunkers down, you eventually get a deal, you reinstate back pay, make people whole.

Trump sees this as an opportunity.

I mean, first of all, Congress isn't doing anything to slow him down even when they're in session.

But, you know, now that we have a shutdown, he sees it as an opportunity to wipe out full slates of agencies.

And I don't know that there's an answer to that.

So that's the riskiest thing I think from the Democratic standpoint in terms of the shutdown is Trump.

Trump is reveling in this.

- Yeah, there's certainly a large part of the Trump base that would say, "Keep 'em shut down.

Don't ever let 'em open again."

- Yeah, and I think we should mention as well that, you know, we're talking about Affordable Care Act subsidies, something that a lot of North Carolinians rely on to get their healthcare, a lot of Americans across this country, this is something that's very popular.

So people want to see their subsidies, they want to be able to have access to their healthcare, despite all the critiques of the Affordable Care Act some years ago, this is a very popular thing, but what we're seeing is, I think people are making calculations in DC based off of who's going to get blamed for this, instead of who's going to be hurt by this?

And I think a lot of people are going to be hurt by this, and the people at home are just gonna say, "Work it out, figure it out."

- We'll defer over the weekend to the fine folks in cable news, pick your choice, to keep you nice and outraged, I guess.

Let's move on, where some Republican leaders in our state, Theresa, are being very tempted to redraw North Carolina's congressional districts ahead of the 26 midterm elections.

Rumors leaked a couple of weeks ago that Senate President Phil Berger might would fight for redistricting if Donald Trump would endorse his state senate campaign.

Berger says that's false, but California's effort to draw Republicans out of Congress might need an answer from our Tar Heel state.

Governor Stein, Theresa, says the idea is ridiculous.

It just creates this atmosphere where your congressional maps will get redrawn based on what the polls show a couple of years out, so just changing the rules about every two years to redistrict to supposedly keep a Republican majority.

Stein right on that?

- Well, I actually have a different perspective on all of this, and I think that Senator Berger just did a major mic drop, because he is in a hard-fought primary, and he now has it out to the state and his constituents that President Trump wants to endorse me, and so he doesn't need to do another thing, because now that's what's out there, so he's done, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't actually see that there's gonna be redistricting to maybe redraw that one seat that Don Davis is currently in.

I think he has accomplished what he needed to accomplish.

- And it runs a risk, because you ask if there are any vulnerable Republicans, that there aren't, there's only, frankly, one competitive district anymore in our state in the east, - In the east, Don Davis.

- and if you adjust that to try to make it a Republican seat, then the adjoining districts, you're gonna have to take some Republican votes outta there.

Maybe you create something that becomes vulnerable, so I think they all have to be careful, and I think everybody points, somebody points to California, then California points to Texas.

Where does it all end?

- Mitch, I was reminded, you need the House of Representatives if you're gonna redistrict anything.

You still need, not just Phil Berger can do it alone.

- Well, that's right, and the thing is, is the juice worth the squeeze if you could only get one more seat out of it?

I don't think anyone's really gonna look at this and say it makes sense, especially since you still have legal action dealing with all of these cases.

Do you wanna have another court case?

'Cause every time they draw a map, they're gonna get sued.

- 10 seconds.

Billy, we're out of time.

- We're looking at a gerrymandering arms race, because we haven't seen the courts in North Carolina or at the US Supreme Court actually do something about gerrymandering, so this is going to keep happening until we take this option away.

- Keep writing.

Thank you, panel, so much.

Thank you, most of all, for watching us.

Email your thoughts and opinions to statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Thank you for watching.

I'll see you next time.

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