Bills that make you raise up and say Wooooo!

North Carolina's state senators introduced nearly 300 bills in a single day to try and beat a deadline. Here are a few of the most ridiculous ones.

The North Carolina Legislative Building in 1977 (Photo by Walton Haywood. From Color Transparency series, General Negatives Collection, State Archives of North Carolina.)

This caught my eye:

On Tuesday, 283 bills were introduced in the North Carolina Senate. Why, you ask? Because they all waited until the very last minute. The filing deadline was at 4 p.m. (The house has until April 3 to introduce new legislation). So what does that mean? It means bill drafters are working at breakneck pace so lawmakers can throw legislation at the wall in the hope that it’ll stick somehow.

You can read through all of the last-minute bills here. Some of them are practical, like one that would get rid of sales taxes on menstrual products. A few are locally specific, like one that would send $12 million to the town of Beaufort to fix up its boat docks. There are a couple’a bills introduced by Democrats that are cleverly named for causes championed by Republicans. One, the “Voter Fraud Prevention Act,” has nothing to do with stricter restrictions to counteract the nearly non-existent problem of people impersonating other people at the polls. Rather, it would mandate a special election for elected officials who switch parties with more than six months remaining on their terms, which happened most recently when Tricia Cotham flipped to the Republican Party and gave them a supermajority in the legislature. And you have competing ideas, like one that brings back some of the stuff from 2016’s “bathroom bill” (EDITOR’S NOTE: Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhh not again) versus a different House bill that would cleanly repeal what’s left of it.

Most of these bills are probably going nowhere. There isn’t enough time to hold hearings on the bulk of them, and the vast majority got referred to the Rules Committee, which is a good place for bills to go to die. (SIDE NOTE: In the old days, senate leaders would kill bills by sending them to the Ways & Means Committee, which hadn’t held a meeting SINCE THE 1960s. You can’t advance a bill out of committee if that committee literally never meets! Anyhow, it went from a trolling mechanism that Republicans used on Democrats to non-existent—senate leaders got rid of Ways & Means in 2017.)

That said! There are a few late-filed bills that caught my eye, if only because they feel particularly Rabbit Hole-y.

S512: AN ACT TO ADOPT THE SONG "RAISE UP" AS THE OFFICIAL HIP HOP SONG OF THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA

Timbaland and Petey Pablo in the 2001 video for “Raise Up.”

I’m genuinely shocked that nobody has tried to do this before now. The Carolina Hurricanes have used Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” as their goal song since 2018 (For what it’s worth, then-governor Roy Cooper did not sing along when I watched a Canes game with him two years ago). The UNC Marching Band plays it. So does the band at NC Central. Mr. Pablo is from Greenville. The song mentions North Carolina 21 times if you count the intro and outro. This song was optimized for SEO before SEO even existed.

Now before you jump in with both feet, know that there are other hip hop anthems dedicated to this state, most notably J.Cole’s “Carolina On My Mind.” I mean, sure, it sort of shares the name of James Taylor’s “Carolina In My Mind,” but that’s about it! Should your sweet old grandmother listen to the J.Cole version? Probably not, unless she’s ready for lyrics like this:

'Cause in Carolina, we thorough
My n——s hold it down all the way from Fayettenam to the G-Boro
And up in Winston, and Raleigh, did I mention?
The Bull City got them old fake n——s flinchin'
Tar Heel State, you either shootin' or you hoopin', yo
N——s can't wait for the Panthers to win the Super Bowl
So shout out to them super cold n——s up in Charlotte

For what it’s worth, this song came out in 2007, three years after the Patriots beat the Panthers in the Super Bowl. Today, the Patriots’ coach is now UNC’s coach, J.Cole is about to run Dreamville back in Raleigh for the last time, and the Panthers kinda suck.

Also! DaBaby wrote a whole song about Charlotte and the Panthers way back in 2015 when he was still known as Baby Jesus, but it was mostly about Cam Newton and dabbing and not really a statewide anthem. That said, DaBaby has specifically said he wants to create a new North Carolina banger. “We've got to give ourselves another theme song,” DaBaby told WFNZ radio back in January. “Petey Pablo's been holding it down for decades for us.”

Back to the bill. This seems like a slam dunk? And yet, this is the same legislature that has been unsuccessfully trying for years to pass a law naming an official state cookie (good luck this time, Moravians!) The text of the actual bill itself does not require the bill to be twisted round yo hand, and spun like a helicopter upon third reading. It does not talk about the song’s specific name-dropping of North Carolina’s extensive state prison system. The bill would specifically make the censored version the official song, which is really too bad, because I really wanted Ralph Hise to have to say “Petey Pab’, motherf—-er” on the floor of the Senate.

S754: AN ACT TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL FLEXIBILITY TO LOCAL BOARDS OF EDUCATION IN ADOPTING THE SCHOOL CALENDAR

The Tiki Bar in Carolina Beach, 2022.

Boy, the most important bills are usually the ones that sound boring as hell (looking at you, omnibuses). This one would allow schools in North Carolina to start school a week earlier in August. Among other things, that would make it possible for a lot of districts to hold fall midterm exams before Christmas. And unlike a lot of other bills introduced on deadline day, this one actually has a chance to pass. It’s sponsored by senate leader Phil Berger and already got moved out of the Rules Committee.

So, why do North Carolina schools have to start during the last week in August? Because back in 2004, a group called Save Our Summers teamed up with the tourism industry to demand it. Was it good for students? Unclear. Was it good for people who rented out their vacation homes on the coast? Sure!

That said, the K-12 school calendar didn’t line up with the community college calendar, and a lot of districts got grumpy about not having control. In 2023, a total of 14 districts just went ahead and started school early anyway because they realized that even though such a move was illegal, there was no real penalty for doing so! That’ll change if this year’s bill passes. Schools could lose funding and open themselves up to lawsuits from business owners if they don’t follow the rules.

Anyhow, if the sound of Shibumi Shades has been haunting your dreams, you might get one week of respite.

S404: AN ACT TO REMEMBER ICONIC COMBATANTS THROUGH FOSTERING LEARNING AWARENESS AND INTEREST IN RASSLING

Boy, that’s kind of wordy, let me just take the first letters of th—ah they’re calling this the RIC FLAIR Act.

Basically, this just sets aside $500,000 to study whether it makes sense to build a pro wrestling museum in North Carolina. That’s it. It’s a bi-partisan bill, too—one of the sponsors is a Democrat who grew up watching wrestling.

Is it a good thing to name a funding bill after Ric Flair? Isn’t that tempting fate? Isn’t every Ric Flair promo, at its core, about misappropriation of funds?

This may be a good time to update you on how the Ric Flair memecoin is doing. Remember that? It launched in January 2024, and I wrote about how the official website was chock full of explicit warnings. One said that you shouldn’t look at Wooooo! Coins as an investment vehicle. Another stated that the coins were explicitly illegal for Americans to purchase. So how’s Wooooo! Coin doing these days? From what I can tell, it’s worth about 1/8th as much as it was at its peak last March, and crypto folks tell me it doesn’t look like it got much traction.

So, instead of thinking about the finances of Ric Flair, may I recommend you take life advice from another legendary North Carolina wrestler: Wadesboro’s late great Junkyard Dog: