Please permit me to pass along some news from close to home. Today, an eight-year speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Jim Black, will plead guilty to federal corruption charges and receive a prison sentence. It’s the latest in a series of guilty pleas related to a criminal conspiracy of lobbyists and public officials involving pay-for-play bribery deals, violations of lobbying and campaign-finance laws, regulation of the video poker industry, passage of a state-run lottery, and a general seediness in North Carolina state government. And other state lawmakers may yet be caught in the dragnet.

Black, a Democrat and optometrist, had used his fundraising prowess and bare-knuckle tactics to maintain power in a chamber that often featured close partisan divides. In 2003, he even wound up as speaker again despite the fact that Republicans had won a 61-59 majority in the 2002 elections. That’s one of the scandals, actually — he bribed a Republican lawmaker to switch parties, which paved the way for a rump ground of disgruntled GOP moderates to ally with Black to organize the chamber. Today’s plea bargain appears to involve other charges, however. State prosecutors will reportedly charge Black with additional crimes next week.

According to Black and his allies, the last couple of years of high-profile investigations were merely the result of a conspiracy involving Republican prosecutors, the John Locke Foundation and other conservative groups, and their complaint handmaids in the news media. Yeah, not kidding about that last part. Now that Black, once feted, is about to be fettered, he suddenly has many new critics. In fairness, some Democratic activists had turned on Black last year, recognizing how much his misbehavior had stained state government and put their own party’s candidates at risk. But few party officials or officeholders of prominence had done so. Black barely won his Mecklenburg County seat in November, even though it is solidly Democratic, and was not elected speaker last month when it became obvious that the gendarmes were closing in. Most Republican lawmakers who had allied with Black back in 2003 were defeated in subsequent GOP primaries or general elections.

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