Republicans thought they had Governor Cooper trapped on the Atlantic Pipeline mitigation fund. Now old Roy and his team are slum-dunking them – and exposing everything that’s wrong with this legislature.

It started when the Governor’s Office got Duke and Dominion to put up $58 million for economic-development and environmental-protection projects in eastern North Carolina.

That’s a good deal. People complain all the time about the state giving financial incentives to corporations, and here corporations are giving money to us!

But Republican legislative bosses couldn’t stand for the Governor doing something good for the state. So they hijacked the money. They said they’d give it to the schools – to fix the class-size chaos they had created.

Now Democrats are sending mailers saying Republican legislators “raided” the mitigation fund and “killed Eastern North Carolina jobs.”

That’s a nice shot. And the whole episode makes a bigger point: Republicans will do anything that hurts public education – what they call “government schools” – and helps private schools, especially for-profit schools owned by big donors. Even more, they’re so bent on hurting the Governor, they’re happy to hurt the state.

Which gives Democrats the greatest message in politics: Throw the bums out.