It doesn't look seemly for a billionaire to buy elections while still serving as the budget warden of a state, so Art Pope submitted his resignation just in time to spend some serious bucks buying himself a Senator and more extremists for the North Carolina state legislature.
Art Pope, a prominent financier of conservative think tanks who served as North Carolina’s state budget director for the last 19 months, is stepping down from his post at the end of the summer.
Republican Gov. Pat McCrory announced Wednesday that Pope was leaving to resume his work in the private sector. He is the chief executive of Variety Wholesalers, a private retail company that operates hundreds of discount stores across the southeast. Pope had stepped back from his daily duties when McCrory tapped him in January 2013 to join his administration, a job for which he was paid $1 a year.
Art Pope is an honorary Koch Brother in the Conservative Billionaire Boys Club.
As state budget director, Pope played a singular role in North Carolina – as the architect of a network of conservative advocacy groups who was working inside a Republican-led government that he had helped remake.
Just so we're clear here, that paragraph massively understates the damage Pope did while holding the North Carolina budget hostage to billionaires. With Art Pope's guiding hand on Governor Pat McCrory's, voting rights, welfare, unemployment, education funding and denying the Medicaid expansion were just a few of the joint ventures between McCrory, Pope, and the wingers Pope bought.
I would say good riddance, except I suspect he's resigning in order to buy himself an even more extreme government as his midterm 'gift' to North Carolinians.
