Will next week’s legislative session be about hurricane and fire relief – or political relief?

Will the legislature help people who lost loved ones, homes and property – or help Republicans who lost elections?

And will Republicans give Roy Cooper a nuclear weapon to use against them in 2017, one that dwarfs HB2?

Senate Republicans are mad that the voters didn’t elect their candidate Bob Edmunds to the Supreme Court. So will they pack the court by adding two more justices? Show the voters who’s really in charge? Make the Court nothing more than a rubber stamp for the legislature?

The arrogance would be breathtaking.

Of course, the Republicans already tried twice to load the court dice.

First they made it a “retention” election, with only the incumbent on the ballot. Like Kim Jong Un. The courts ruled that unconstitutional.

Then they took party labels off the Supreme Court ballots. Oops! Given the Trump tide, Edmunds might have won if he’d been identified as a Republican.

He lost because a devastating TV ad pegged him as the Gerrymandering Judge.

Do vulnerable Republican legislators, who may be up again in 2017, want to see ads pegging them as power-mad politicians bent on reversing an election for their own political gain? When they’re supposed to be helping people who are hurting?

The last Republican politician to rubber-stamp a bad legislative idea was Pat McCrory. If he’d said no to HB2, he’d be writing his second Inaugural Address, not his job application to Donald Trump.