Gov. Cooper needs just one Republican to help him save abortion rights in NC

Joining me now is the governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper. Governor, good to see you again. Thank you for being with us. I just want to lean into this whole thing. In addition to saying what you thought yesterday, you were laying out a specific strategy for the 2,000 people who were in front of you, for the people who watched this on our show because we covered it live. You were saying there's a way out of this for North Carolina and it is to put pressure on the four Republicans or every Republican. And the goal is to get in this particular case just one.

And this is mirrored in a number of states. In South Carolina, the five women in the legislature, some of whom are Republican, some of whom are independents, gathered together to overcome a bill like this. Governor, I think you may be muted and I definitely want to hear what you're saying. So let's talk about that. There we go. There we go. Yeah, sure.

You've hit it on the head. Really, your zip code shouldn't determine your constitutional rights, but that's where we are with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And these battles have moved to state capitals. And the extreme position of Republicans is being felt across the country. But you're having Republicans take a second look at this because they know that this is largely unpopular throughout the country. These bans that criminalize abortion, that put doctors in very difficult positions.

So you have South Carolina where Republican women are standing with Democratic women and saying no. You have a Nebraska legislature that is saying no. And we have Republicans in North Carolina who are working now to try to convince at least one Republican in our state to do the right thing. In North Carolina, three-fifths of the body can override a veto, but we are now one vote short of that three-fifths in both the House and the Senate. An override has to go through both chambers, so all we need is one Republican to step up. So you were on the show with me a couple of weeks ago, and we were having a similar discussion. It was not about abortion, but we were talking about whether people are on your side on this.

So let's just discuss this again. It's highly specific to North Carolina and some other states. You won your last election by about 250,000 votes over your Republican opponent. You have Democratic statewide elected officials in North Carolina. There are more registered Democrats in your state than there are registered Republicans, and the math based on the polling would indicate that that means there are far more people who support abortion rights than who don't in your state. And yet, if you take a quick glance at your legislature and your Supreme Court, one would have the impression that North Carolina is a very deep red state, and gerrymandering is one of the things that your state is dealing with. This is an undermining of the Democratic process.

Most people in your state probably support what you were saying yesterday morning as you vetoed that bill, and yet you have to overcome a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Technologically diabolical gerrymandering, some of the worst in the country. And in fact, when our state Supreme Court said that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional last year and made the districts be redrawn, we saw seven Democratic and seven Republican members of Congress be elected. That shows you the purple nature of North Carolina, yet we now have a Republican Supreme Court that's overturned that. It's going to allow them to go back to partisan gerrymandering. You're probably going to see a 10 to four at best because they go house by house, they look at numbers. We see it all over the country.

We need independent redistricting commissions to make these decisions, but until then, we have to just fight like hell, Ally, and to work to turn out people. We're gonna make sure we've got candidates in every legislative district this fall. We're gonna make sure that we work to break that supermajority, because when we do that, when you have a Democratic governor and you don't have a supermajority Republican legislature, you can stop all of the bad legislation. For four years, I have vetoed bad abortion bills, bad discrimination bills, bills that hurt education, bills that hurt voting rights. We've been able to stop all of them, but now they got a little closer to this election after the election was over. We had broken the supermajority by one vote in the house and lost it by one vote in the Senate. Then we had this switch that happened that put them in a position where we have to have some Republican votes to turn this thing around.

They've made campaign promises during the year to say, we're gonna protect women's reproductive freedom. Several of them said, we support the law as it is in North Carolina, and we had become an access point in the Southeast, not only helping women in North Carolina, but across the Southeastern United States. They need to remember that promise, and that's what this week has been about for us. We have been conducting forums, we've been educating people. We had a legislature that did this actually in 42 hours, Allie. No amendments allowed, no public input allowed, and this is a monstrous bill that not only puts burdens and restrictions that may close a lot of clinics in North Carolina, it's extraordinarily confusing for doctors, and when they had these harsh penalties waiting for them on laws that are very difficult to interpret, that's no way to run a legislature. That is not democracy as we know it.

Governor, good to see you again. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate that. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. Thank you.

Ali Velshi