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What’s new on July 1? North Carolina’s new laws are more than just abortion

Steve Doyle

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – You have been hearing a lot about whether Senate Bill 20 – the state’s new restrictions on elective abortion – and its companion House Bill 190 will go into effect on Saturday (they will).

But, regardless of that, there are many other bills and parts of bills that will become the law of North Carolina as of midnight Saturday.

Abortion rights protesters are removed after becoming vocal after North Carolina House members voted to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that would change the state’s ban on nearly all abortions from those after 20 weeks of pregnancy to those after 12 weeks of pregnancy. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)

What won’t go into effect that technically should have – the state’s biennial budget plan – remains in negotiation between the House and the Senate.

Medicaid expansion, the ballyhooed adoption of a plan that expands health care for nearly 300,000 residents, went into effect sort of earlier this spring, but the crux of the bill can’t be enacted until that budget is passed.

And although many laws already have been enacted – local bills, such as those governing local school boards and election cycles, are live as soon as the General Assembly gives them that “enacted” stamp – some portions of laws can be delayed until later dates.

Technical corrections can go into effect in some cases, too, like for the budget that is ending (House Bill 2) and for general statutes (HB 103). These can include comma splices, spelling errors, updated cross references or, in the case of the budget, new numbers.

Some are a little more significant than that, though.

You probably recall SB 41, the “Guarantee 2nd Amendment Freedom and Protections,” which passed along party lines back in March and delivered a much bigger guarantee than it had implied.

That’s the bill that removed permits and background checks for private sales of pistols, among other things. But it also was the first bill of the session in which lawmakers overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, which they’ve done 10 times and counting.

That’s because this was the bill on which Rep. Tricia Cotham, then a Democrat, skipped the vote, costing the override, and then announced she was becoming a Republican, which created a GOP supermajority that led to all those overrides.

Almost all of SB 41 went into effect when that veto was overridden, but some technical portions of it won’t be effective until Saturday.

Check out all bills

Other laws won’t be effective until later this summer, such as the Transgender Athlete ban, which, if it survives, won’t go live until Aug. 15. Others would be enacted this fall – Oct. 1 is popular – or Dec. 1 or even next year.

For instance, the state’s new sports gambling law goes live on Jan. 8, the day of the college football national championship game. That allows licenses to be acquired, management by the Lottery Commission to be up and running and software and systems to go live.

If you want to know the details about each bill and subelements, you can find every law and enactment date in 19 pages provided by the General Assembly.

But we have gone through that list for you and extracted the highlights of what laws change on July 1.

What you won’t find is the much-discussed Senate Bill 49, “The Parents Bill of Rights,” which guarantees parents the right to be involved in their children’s education and dictates some school policies – such as forbidding curriculum about gender and sex in kindergarten through Grade 4 – and is awaiting Cooper’s review. He has until about July 9 to decide.

New bills signed

But Cooper added to the list for July 1 by announcing Friday that he had signed six bills, some of which went live with his pen:

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (AP Photo/Karl B DeBlaker, File)

New laws on Saturday

Here are highlights of some other laws that will be effective when you wake up: