Senator Richard Burr (R-NC)
There’s not been a lot of Senate campaign news due to the Covid-19 outbreak, but I’ve been wondering about North Carolina Senator … Richard Burr (R). That’s right, not Senator Tillis (R-NC), who is in a tight re-election fight with Cal Cunningham (D), but with the other North Carolina Senator, who is not even up for re-election.
Burr’s term ends in January of 2023, and he has announced that he’ll be retiring then, but his retirement could be hurtling at him much faster, because he may have walked down the same path as former Representative Chris Collins (R-NY), who shortly should begin serving a sentence for insider trading. Regarding Senator Burr, NPR has the latest:
Sen. Richard Burr’s sale of up to $1.7 million in stocks shortly before the recent market crash was one of the lawmaker’s only market-beating trades since record keeping began eight years ago, according to a new study.
The new analysis, presented by researchers at Dartmouth College, shows just how unusual the North Carolina senator’s transactions were. On a single day, Feb. 13 of this year, Burr unloaded a significant portion of his net worth — a departure from his typically low-volume trading history. …
The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman’s trades and pricate statements about how the coronavirus pandemic would affect American life have become the subject of Justice Department and law enforcement inquiries.
It doesn’t take an indictment for Burr to decide to retire early, it might only take bad publicity for a man looking forward to retirement. If he does?
At that juncture, I’m not sure whether Governor Cooper (D-NC) would have the option to appoint a replacement until a special election can be held, or if the seat would be empty until that election. But it’s not impossible that North Carolina will have not one, but two Senatorial seats up for grabs in November, or at least the second empty shortly thereafter.
And that would make the next election just that much more harder for a GOP that is beleaguered in a State that had been acting as one of their bulwarks. Burr was won his last re-election by less than 6 points, which was disappointing considering the fact that he won by more than 11 points in 2010, and 2016 was the year of Trump and the GOP winning both Congress and the Executive.
That, and the shocking victory of Governor Cooper (D) in 2016, suggests the wheels are coming off of the North Carolina GOP. Look for Burr to be under tremendous pressure to both resign and not to resign. If he does, Trump will not have happy things to say about him, but will hug the GOP nominee to replace him with enthusiasm, in the belief that it’ll help the cause – an opinion not based on fact.
The November elections have some real potential for great stories.
