Key Takeaways
- The North Carolina House did not schedule an override vote for SB 50 on August 3, correcting an earlier article’s error.
- SB 50 remains in ‘Unfinished Business,’ with no action taken since April 6, 2026.
- Rep. Keith Kidwell states that four Republicans will not support the override, concerned about voting risks pre-election.
- The House plans to reconvene in November, with a deadline of December 31, 2026, to act on SB 50 before it expires.
- Kidwell doubts the House will gather the needed votes before the year ends, leaving the future of SB 50 uncertain.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
RALEIGH, NC — On August 1 I published an article reporting that the North Carolina House had put the SB 50 veto override back on its calendar for Monday, August 3 at 10 a.m. That was wrong. No override vote was scheduled for that day, and none happened. This article corrects it.
Here is how I got there. SB 50 does appear on the House calendar for August 3. It is printed under the heading “Unfinished Business, Reconsideration of Vetoed Bill.” I read that as a scheduled vote. It is not. That is a standing entry. It prints on the House calendar every session day because the veto message on SB 50 is still pending before the chamber and has never been disposed of. The bill has been sitting in that block since the summer of 2025.
I did check the bill history on the General Assembly’s own site, and it did not show what I expected. Every time the House genuinely scheduled this vote, the record left a pair of actions: withdrawn from calendar, then placed on calendar for a specific date. That pattern repeats eleven times between July 2025 and April 2026. The last entry is dated April 6, 2026, placing the bill on the calendar for April 21, 2026. Nothing follows it. No action ever placed SB 50 on the calendar for August 3. I saw that gap and assumed the history had not caught up yet.
There was a second tell I missed. The August 3 House calendar listed no other bills at all. A chamber convening to take up the only outstanding veto override in the building does not arrive with an otherwise empty calendar.
Rep. Keith Kidwell contacted me directly after the article published and told me SB 50 would not see an override vote. He agreed to go on the record about where the override actually stands.
Kidwell puts the number of Republicans who will not vote for the override at four. Public reporting has named two: Reps. William Brisson of Bladen County and Ted Davis Jr. of New Hanover County, both of whom voted against the bill on final passage and neither of whom is seeking reelection.
On why the vote never gets called, Kidwell said House leadership is unwilling to bring the bill to the floor until after the November elections, “because they’re more worried about losing seats than they are about doing what’s right.” He added that he sees the calculation backwards: “if Republicans did what they were sent to do when elected we would likely win more seats.”
That reading matches what the House did in June. On June 24 the chamber overrode Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes on the DEI and immigration enforcement bills by identical 71 to 47 margins. SB 50 was not among them, which left it as the only veto override in the House still awaiting action.
The arithmetic explains the caution. An override requires three fifths of members present and voting, not three fifths of all 120 seats. That means absences matter as much as yes votes, and it means every member who shows up has to go on record. For Republicans in competitive districts, a recorded vote carries risk in both directions.
Kidwell says the House intends to return in November, and he laid out the deadline plainly: “They have until 12/31/26 to pass SB50. Then it dies.” He is right. This General Assembly’s term ends with the calendar year. A new one is sworn in in January 2027, and anything left unfinished starts over as a new bill.
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He is not optimistic about the window. “I doubt if they will get all 4 of the Republicans that are not votes to come around.”
Kidwell has his own history with this issue. He was the lead sponsor of House Bill 5, the NC Constitutional Carry Act, filed January 29, 2025. It received a favorable committee report on March 19, 2025 and was sent to the House Rules Committee, where it never moved again. Senate Bill 50 had been filed on February 4, 2025, and it passed the Senate on March 20, 2025, the day after HB 5 was referred to Rules. SB 50 became the vehicle.
Where that leaves things: the Senate overrode the veto 30 to 19 on July 29, 2025. The House has not voted, is not scheduled to vote, and by the account of a member of its own caucus will not vote before November. The window closes December 31.
I will track this one through the end of the year and report what the House does with the time it has left.
Read the full article here
