By Rose Hoban and Rachel Crumpler
After a month away from Raleigh, state lawmakers returned to the capital on Tuesday — along with crowds of protesters and supporters — for a session aimed at overriding vetoes issued by Democratic Gov. Josh Stein during the recent legislative session.
The galleries overlooking the chambers for both the Senate and the House of Representatives were filled with spectators, and more people peered in through the windows while hoisting signs that mostly urged lawmakers to uphold the governor’s vetoes on a variety of topics.
Included in the 14 bills being considered for veto overrides were a handful with health policy implications:
- House Bill 805, which covers a number of transgender issues, as well as increasing penalties for sexual exploitation of women and minors;
- House Bill 318, which requires local law enforcement personnel to coordinate with federal agents to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with certain offenses;
- House Bill 193, which allows staff and volunteers at charter schools to carry firearms, among other provisions;
- House Bill 402, which mandates legislative review of many new state rules — including environmental ones — that have financial impacts.
Stein kicked off the morning with a media briefing during which he encouraged legislators to enact a state budget, something that is supposed to be done by July 1, the start of the state fiscal year. However, that’s happened less frequently since the General Assembly was taken over by Republicans in 2012.
“Having been off work for nearly a month, they’ve not yet passed a budget, and they’re passing a lot of other bills that are divisive,” Stein said. “There’s one bill that matters to every North Carolinian, and that is the budget bill. They could do nothing but pass the budget and set the state up for continued success. I urge the General Assembly to focus on what matters.”
“Let’s put aside the divisive stuff,” the governor said, sidestepping questions from reporters on the veto overrides queued up in the legislative building.
But even before Stein was done speaking, lawmakers in the Republican-led House and Senate were moving forward with override votes that, for the most part, hinged on only one or two Democratic votes. In the end, of all the bills Stein vetoed, the Senate overrode 12 vetoes, and the House overrode eight of those, including four that have the potential to affect people’s health.
“On most issues, we’re going to have a working supermajority,” House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Granite Falls) told reporters after his chamber recessed for the day. He acknowledged that on the remaining override bills, he’d likely encounter more Democratic opposition.
The speaker said he’ll be keeping the remaining override bills on the calendar every day they’re in full session, which will be at least a few days each month until the end of the year.
“So if people are out and the numbers are there, we’re going to vote to override,” he said.
House Bill 805 – Transgender issues
Lawmakers voted to override Gov. Josh Stein’s veto of a bill that will have multiple impacts on transgender North Carolinians, notably recognizing only two sexes in state government rules and public policies. Charlotte Democratic Rep. Nasif Majeed was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans, providing the needed vote for the bill to become law.
House Bill 805, titled “Prevent Sexual Exploitation/Women and Minors,” was originally filed in April solely focused on regulating online pornography and garnered bipartisan support. Lawmakers subsequently loaded the bill with several partisan provisions, including the two-sexes-only provision, barring the use of state funds to pay for gender-affirming care for incarcerated people, requiring the preservation of the original birth certificate when a transgender person goes to change their sex on that form, and extending the statute of limitations for medical malpractice claims for minors who underwent a gender transition.
These additional measures sparked frustration and concern from advocates for intersex and transgender people, who said the bill targets an already vulnerable population.
“There’s a lot of folks feeling in limbo and feeling undersupported and unrepresented,” Eliazar Posada, executive director of Equality NC, said. “We are talking about a small population of our community, and we are spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in putting them in a bad light.”
In North Carolina, fewer than 1 percent of the adult population, or an estimated 71,300 people, identify as transgender. In addition, an estimated 8,500 people ages 13-17 identify as transgender, according to a 2022 report by UCLA’s Williams Institute, which researches sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.
Several medical experts have told NC Health News that while most people fall into one category of male or female, the law’s language doesn’t acknowledge the existence of people who do not. Experts also said defining biological sex and determining whether someone is male or female are more complicated than they seem. They also said the bill may not adequately reflect scientific consensus.
Rep. Laura Budd (D-Matthews), who originally co-sponsored the bill, blasted the way a bipartisan bill unanimously passed by the House was then reworked in the Senate by “wrapping it in culture war policies.”
Landon Carter, who is transgender, came to Raleigh from Greensboro to voice his opposition to the legislation that he told NC Health News “completely erases my identity.”
Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the NC Values Coalition, celebrated the veto override. “It’s a great bill… The Senate decided to put five bills into one, and so it has a lot of provisions,” Fitzgerald said, describing the ways she said it would protect women and children.
North Carolina now joins more than a dozen states that have adopted laws formally defining the terms “female” and “male” in state law — language that echoes President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that asserted this as the U.S. government’s position.
House Bill 318 – Immigration & law enforcement bill
Charlotte Democratic Rep. Carla Cunningham crossed party lines to cast the deciding vote in favor of an immigration bill that will require sheriffs to work more closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the Trump administration’s focus on ramping up deportations.
Since 1990, North Carolina’s foreign-born population has grown by 763 percent, according to a January 2025 report from Carolina Demography. More than 1 million foreign-born residents live in North Carolina, representing 9.3 percent of the state’s overall population and the 13th largest foreign-born population of any U.S. state.
In voicing her support for the bill, Cunningham said that the U.S. has been more tolerant of immigration than most countries. “We have been naive,” she said during the floor debate in the House. “We have been exploited and abused by the different tactics to gain citizenship in America. It’s time to wake up.
“We must establish new rules to address the distinct type of migration that we are facing in our country, state and cities,” Cunningham added. “It’s time to turn the conveyor belt off and adopt a global migration suitable for the times that we are in, and that is not destabilizing our communities.”
The legislation builds on a law enacted last year that requires local sheriffs to hold people in their jails for up to 48 hours for possible deportation if federal immigration officers ask them to, even if they don’t have a warrant to detain that person after their scheduled release date.
House Bill 318, titled the “The Criminal Illegal Alien Enforcement Act,” requires the 48-hour hold period to begin from the time when a person would otherwise be released.
Stein wrote in his veto message of the bill that “anyone who commits a serious crime in North Carolina must be prosecuted and held accountable regardless of their immigration status” but added that he could not support the bill, contending it is unconstitutional. “The Fourth Circuit is clear that local law enforcement officers cannot keep people in custody solely based on a suspected immigration violation,” Stein wrote.
Liz Barber, director of policy and advocacy for the ACLU of North Carolina, said the new law could affect the health of immigrant communities. “Our immigrant communities and immigrant families, especially those families with mixed status — where some are citizens and some aren’t — they’re afraid to get their basic needs met,” Barber said. “They’re afraid to go to the doctor, to take their children to the doctor when they’re sick, or to take themselves.”
Communities are safer when they trust their local law enforcement, Sen. Jay Chaudhuri (D-Raleigh) argued. “This bill doesn’t provide protections for witnesses and crime victims, including domestic violence survivors,” he said during the Senate floor debate. “In the end, this bill will allow abusers and child traffickers to have a new weapon to strengthen their threats and hold these threats over a victim’s head when the victim is trying to call 911 for help.”
Senate Leader Phil Berger, for his part, said that Stein’s vetoes put him “further to the left from where he presented himself, and I think that’s where he has been all along.”
House Bill 193 – Concealed firearms at private schools
Initially filed as a bill to allow people with concealed weapons permits to carry those firearms on private school property, House Bill 193 was expanded — after three revisions — to include employees and volunteers at private schools and at religious events held on those school properties. The revisions also added penalties to anyone who makes a threat against a public elected official.
When Stein vetoed the bill, he wrote that many of these otherwise well-meaning school staff and volunteers lacked adequate training in crisis management and in deescalating conflict. He also noted that law enforcement officers receive more than 800 hours of firearms instruction during their training.
“We cannot substitute the protection offered by well-trained law enforcement officers by asking teachers and school volunteers to step in and respond to crises while armed,” Stein wrote in his veto message. “Just last year, an employee at a religious school in Goldsboro left a gun in a bathroom that was later found by an elementary school student.”
Durham Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey took the lead arguing against House Bill 193, saying that she had not run across a “single report of a private school being successfully defended by a good guy with a gun.”
“The solution [is] banning assault weapons, which are military grade machines that are meant for just one thing — killing a lot of people really fast,” Morey said on the House floor. “If we are really serious about saving kids, we would ban assault weapons instead of trading in debunked theories.”
Becky Ceartas, head of North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, decried the override. “Guns are now the leading cause of injury death for children in N.C.,” she told NC Health News. “More guns in schools with less safety training — this is a lethal combination that will put our children’s lives at risk.”
House Bill 402 – Limiting state rulemaking
When state agencies make rules, it’s pretty easy in North Carolina to slow them down. All it requires is 10 people to write letters objecting to the new rule, and it sends the rule back to whatever state agency for more review.
House Bill 402, titled “Limit Rules with Substantial Financial Costs,” restricts state agency rule-making even further. The law adds a requirement that the General Assembly must approve any new state rule that would cost the regulated industries more than $20 million over five years.
“This is just giving the people what they expect from their government, which is accountability and a voice at the table when we’re debating rules that are going to impact their lives every day,” said Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Middlesex).
But in his veto message, Stein said this kind of requirement would “hamstring the decision-making of agencies, boards and commissions, making them less effective at protecting people’s health, safety and welfare.”
“This bill would make it harder for the state to keep people’s drinking water clean from PFAS and other dangerous chemicals, their air free from toxic pollutants, and their health care facilities providing high quality care,” Stein wrote.
On the floor of the House, Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Greensboro) said the bill “excludes the benefits of those rules which are meant to protect us, like PFAS rules or air quality rules or DHHS rules.”
There’s also a provision in the law that requires any rule that has aggregated costs totaling more than $10 million for all of the people affected to garner unanimous agreement from the board or commission that oversees the rulemaking process.
“We have a lot of rules on our books that are going to be subject to this periodical review, and they are going to possibly come off our books, because they’re not going to pass this higher threshold,” Harrison said. “These are rules that have been on our books for decades.”
The new law also prohibits any consideration of the economic benefits of a proposed rule.
Brooks Rainey, a lobbyist for the Southern Environmental Law Center, used the example of new rules to limit the amount of forever chemicals being discharged into the state’s waterways. She said that the rules would cost industry more than $100 million, but would generate hundreds of millions in economic benefit to ratepayers and people who drink the water across the state.
“It costs money to keep drinking water clean,” she said. But requiring unanimity from the Environmental Management Commission would set an impossible bar for new rules to clear.
“Lawmakers passed this bill completely against the best interests of North Carolinians,” Rainey said. “This new law marks an awful turning point for families and communities across N.C. Elected officials in the state legislature are ignoring preventable serious illnesses and deaths in order to ensure that polluters don’t have to spend too much in order to limit their toxic pollution.”
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