Josh Stein gets saved from failure... BY failure: The Override Paradox
"Move quote or reference, yo"
Failing upward is one of those modern era phrases you recognize, that translates right away, and yet is applied so casually that it doesn’t really mean what it’s meant to mean. So let us talk instead on the subject of success through failure in terms of … time travel? I guess?
The year is some year in the future. Let’s arbitrarily pick, oh I don’t know, 2028? Josh Stein is trying to move up in the Democrat party, maybe all the way to the Oval Office, if it’s still called that, and the ticket to that ticket is the “moderate” label. You can be pretty not moderate and still be billed as a moderate in the modern (D) pool, but there are some areas where they still pretend, especially “kitchen table” issues like affordability and safety. You don’t want to be a radical soft-on-crime guy in 2028, what with the War for the Planet of the Apes raging.
Lucky for Stein, he’s got an unlikely ally in the field. The 2026 North Carolina GOP, who saved his past self from future heartache on the topic with a well-placed and correct override of then-Governor Stein’s reprehensible decision to veto a bill requiring state and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.
See it wasn’t an error on the part of the state’s Republicans, they did the right thing. But that’s the problem with retroactive campaigning: it often benefits from the past actions of those against it. We’ll call it “The Override Paradox.” This legislative defeat for past Stein was a gift for future Stein. A preemptive albatross removal, to further mix metaphors.
Stein is kind of a have-your-cake-and-brazenly-murder-it-too type of governor for my home state. His party, whose law and order credentials include the endless and avoidable failures leading up to the horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska here in Charlotte, railed against the outrage over the murder rather than the murder. And when he ultimately and reluctantly signed a GOP crime bill dubbed “Iryna’s Law” last year, he did so while attacking the law as “barbaric.” That’s a word Democrats can’t bring themselves to use for any murdering psychopath or vicious street gang but find wholly appropriate to use about Republicans, their voters, and the laws meant to protect citizens.
But trashing one crime bill and trying veto another are not the only reasons Stein isn’t trustworthy on crime. The multiply-released killer of Iryna Zarutska? Old Roy Cooper, former governor and current candidate in the state, doesn’t like to talk about that guy’s release from prison. Gee, wonder why?
And that’s just one violent criminal released under Cooper. A whole army of them were released during COVID thanks to a barbaric decision by Cooper. Oh and .. wait for it … Stein.
Stein was Attorney General at the time. It was his office that negotiated those releases. As the Daily Caller wrote in May, “Stein’s office played a crucial role by capitulating to leftist criminal reform groups” in that consequential bad decision that has produced many new violent crimes.
The whole thing is under investigation now, a probe led by the party that also overrode his ICE veto. The Override Paradox.
This happens a lot in politics, and not always in the form of someone stopping your worst decisions from becoming reality and thus sparing you the years of consequences.
I see ads for Cooper’s Senate campaign every day. Seriously every damn day. And he’s running this barrage on how health insurance companies are the Big Bads and he’s out to get them. Trying to make "insurance companies are mean to you" the centerpiece is such an obvious attempt to latch onto a politically “safe” issue to avoid the more uncomfortable issues like “Why are Democrats so crazy?” or “Why is the new Democratic Kingmaker a loudmouth dog-abusing anti-Semite?” or “Why are anti-American communists taking over Democrat politics?” or “Why did you release a dozens of repeat violent offenders including the man who brutally murdered Iryna Zarutska on public transportation in your state?” and, well, you get the idea.
He didn’t have anyone to undo the decision he and Stein made on that one. Not like Stein had for his veto of the ICE bill, that changed his McFly family photo from “disaster” to “never mind.”
Now, I will grant you that success via failure isn’t limited to Democrats. I mean this business of everyone pretending to want to end the filibuster and then magically not ending the filibuster is a good example of a well-worn phenomenon in Congress. The idea of planning to vote for something in just enough numbers not to get it.
But in this movie, the guy whose future self benefited from a failure in the present is definitely Josh Stein. That’s good for North Carolina right now. But if the future is listening, someone from right now is reminding you to point out what happened and not to let him coast to victory on the power of his defeat.