Convention of States North Carolina volunteers continue to work hard to bring House Joint Resolution (HJR) 235 to the Senate floor before the 2023 long session of the NC General Assembly adjourns for the year!
HJR 235 was filed in the NC House on February 2, 2023 and passed with 61 ayes and 55 noes on March 8, 2023. The resolution was referred to the NC Senate Rules committee on March 9, 2023. It seems our resolution, like a lot of other resolutions and bills, is stuck in this committee. In fact, as of the writing of this post, there are 629 resolutions and bills waiting for action in the Senate Rules Committee. This number is reduced from a high of 634 resolutions and bills in August when they were in recess.
Can you say whaaat??? Over the past few months, the primary focus for the leadership in the NC General Assembly has been passing legislation that many of us as Constitutional Conservatives do not support. Senator Bill Rabon’s attention is totally focused on passing medical marijuana here in NC. Both Senator Phil Berger, President Pro Tempore of the NC Senate and Speaker Tim Moore in the House, have been very focused in Medicaid expansion and allowing casinos in low-income areas of NC. These priorities have faced much opposition and left many of us scratching our heads wondering what’s going on!!
We're Sending Handwritten Letters: In July and August, when the NCGA was in recess, we targeted seven Senators who have committed to us to advocate for our resolution with their colleagues, with a hand-written letter campaign! Based on responses from our supporters, we believe these Senators received somewhere between 25 and 40 letters. These letters were sent to their Legislative addresses.
Unfortunately, we’ve gotten no feedback from this campaign so on September 16, 2023, we launched a second hand-written letter campaign to these same seven Senators. This time however, we opted to provide our supporters with the district addresses they used when they filed for the 2022 election. For information about our current letter writing campaign, please click here.
We Brought our Volunteers Together: On September 16, 2023, almost 60 Patriots joined us for our fourth Statewide Volunteer meeting to:
- Celebrate our volunteers
- Conduct a brainstorming session about ways to increase petition signers in NC
- Run short concurrent training sessions on issues to increase our effectiveness
As we always do, we kicked off our time together with a prayer, the Pledge
of Allegiance and a beautiful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.
We were thrilled to recognize all our amazing volunteers and excited to present a COS Challenge Coin to District Captain Melissa Martin. Melissa has been very active working to bring COS volunteers together, hosting regular events, working to find speaking engagements, and actively engaging in both Telepatriot and COS GOTV missions.
We then conducted a brainstorming session to answer the following question:
What activities can our volunteers organize and engage in, in their local districts, to increase petition signers and engage more grassroots volunteers in North Carolina?
You can review the results of this brainstorming session here! 
We were thrilled to host sessions with both our Lobbyist and our most ardent supporter in the NC House of Representatives, Dennis Riddell. They both provided meaningful information about the inner workings of the NC General Assembly.
We wrapped up the day with 4 current training sessions, running each session 2 times, to allow our attendees to participate in the two sessions most meaningful to them and their role. The topics of our concurrent sessions were:
- Addressing opposition to Convention of States
- Building strong relationships with your Legislators
- Getting people to sign the petition at events
- The Role of a District Captain
In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has”.
