news-record.com

House Speaker Joe Hackney has been making the rounds visiting various newspaper editorial board offices throughout the state this fall. I sat in when he arrived at the News & Record for his interview.

Much of what he talked about was a review of the legislative session, which readers of this blog probably don’t need rehashed.

He did bring up a few interesting points, including that the legislature’s new ethics apparatus seems to be working well. Given that it’s great you have a smoothly working ethics apparatus, isn’t the larger point that you’ve had to use it on a fairly regular basis?

That prompted Hackney’s best answer of the day: “We don’t get to decide who the public sends us.” More of his answer here:

Speaking of ethics, Hackney was asked if voters would punish Democrats for problems involving former Gov. Mike Easley. This was two days before we knew that the State Board of Elections would hold hearings on L’affair de Easley.

“People in my district, my legislative district, are not going to blame me for what Mike Easley did,” Hackney said. “And I don’t think people in Alma Adams’ district or Maggie Jeffus’ district are going to blame them either, because common sense tells you they had nothing to do with it.” More of that answer:

I asked Hackney about the ongoing expansion of video poker/lottery/ sweepstakes machines throughout the state. He noted that there were three superior court decisions in the mix and that the legislature may or may have to step in after they were settled on appeals.

“I don’t think it’s so all fired certain that the superior court level judicial decisions are going to be upheld on appeal,” Hackney said. More of his answer:

The interview touched on several other topics, including:

• The fact that students on full-ride athletic scholarships get in-state tuition to UNC-system campuses. Hackney said it was a bad policy:
  
• The recent decision by the Community College board to admit the children of illegal immigrants into system schools. He was non-committal on the legislature might do and said that a federal fix to immigration was what’s really needed:
  
• The editorial board and Hackney discussed at length how he’d like to reform to appointment and retention of judges and how a fix almost came to be recently: