Hi, this is Jack. I'm here on the phone's cliffs of the Rappahenic River in Warsaw, Virginia,

working for the Rappahenic tribe planting over 1800 trees. This podcast was recorded at...

108pm on Tuesday, May 16th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be here with my bag of seedlings and my shovel,

hoping to have a little less runoff go into the Rappahenic River.

Okay, here's the show.

This is quite appropriate. My son had his Virginia studies test today and we have been studying a lot about things including the Rappahenic River and the Rappahenic tribe.

So there you go. I don't get some states, you know, Virginia studies, Texas studies, I didn't do that in New York. It's a weird thing.

Oh, I did California studies. I had to make a mission.

Yes, every state's exceptional with Styrofoam. Other people did sugar cubes. Hey, there. It's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamer Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Dominican Montenar, senior political editor and correspondent.

And Steve Harrison is with us. He's the politics and government reporter for NPR member station WFE in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hey, Steve.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me on.

I'm glad to have you here. It has been a busy few weeks in North Carolina politics. The state's Democratic governor, Roy Cooper recently vetoed a bill that would ban abortions in the state after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

But the state's legislature has veto proof Republican majorities in both houses. As a result, they are expected to override that veto as early as today.

So Steve, let us start from the beginning. Is this a surprise? Like did Republicans run on abortion as an issue in 2022 when they were running for the legislature? Or did this come out of nowhere?

I mean, I would say it wasn't something that they particularly ran on as, you know, like vote for us. We are going to put more restrictions in, but it also wasn't a surprise either.

I mean, this was coming. The legislative leaders had talked about it. So it's not a surprise from kind of a statewide perspective. What is a surprise? Is there are a handful of members in the general assembly who had kind of campaigned on, I'm not going to roll back abortion rights.

They were pretty clear about that. And it looks like with this override vote and in previous votes, they're going to do that. So at an individual level, some very big surprises.

I do want to ask in particular, we mentioned that Republicans have super majorities in both houses of the state legislature. That was not the case on, you know, the day after the election 2022. So tell us what happened.

Republicans had a super majority in the state Senate, but they were one seat short in the house. And very quickly after that, the house speaker Tim Moore was like, you know what?

We have what I call a working super majority. We think there's going to be a handful of Democrats who were going to come over with us, which was the case. But then the big bomb show was there is a woman from Mecklenburg County, which is, you know, the home to Charlotte, the biggest city.

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