Who is Tim Moore, North Carolina’s longest-serving speaker of the House?

North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, is being sued by a former Apex town council member who claims Moore had a years-long affair with his wife and used his position to demand sexual favors.

The lawsuit, filed Sunday in Wake County Superior Court by Scott Lassiter, alleges that Moore “aggressively pursued a sexual relationship” with Lassiter’s wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter. The lawsuit claims that Liles Lassiter, the executive director of the N.C. Conference of Clerks of Superior Court — a position funded by the GOP-controlled General Assembly — hoped her “acquiescence” to Moore’s demands would help her employer.

Moore, responding to the lawsuit through his spokesperson Monday, called it “baseless” and said Scott Lassiter was a “troubled individual,” adding that he will “vigorously defend this action and pursue all available legal remedies.”

First elected to the House in 2002, Moore has served as speaker since 2015.

In January, Moore began a record fifth term as speaker, after being reelected to the caucus position by the rest of the House Republican caucus. In the eight years he’s served as leader of the House, Moore has shepherded through several major pieces of legislation. He’s also found himself in the spotlight over questions about his business dealings and other issues.

Rising through the ranks in the House

At the start of this year’s legislative session in January, Moore began his 11th term in office. He was first elected to the House in 2002, after defeating former Rep. Andy Dedmon, a high-ranking Democrat who was serving as House majority whip at the time.

In 2010, Republicans won control of both the House and Senate in a wave election that also saw major gains for the GOP in the U.S. Congress.

House Republicans elected then Rep. Thom Tillis to serve as speaker, while Moore, then a three-term representative from Cleveland County, was elected chair of the powerful House Rules Committee.

He served as chair of the committee for three years, deciding which bills would advance to the House floor and which would not, before running in 2014 to succeed Tillis, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate. During House leadership elections in November 2014, Moore was chosen by the rest of the House GOP caucus to serve as speaker on the first ballot.

Nearly a decade serving as speaker

During Moore’s first term as speaker, Republicans controlled the Senate and the governor’s mansion. The GOP’s control over both chambers of the legislature, and the governor’s pen to sign or veto bills, ended in 2016, when former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory was defeated by Roy Cooper, a democrat who was then attorney general.

Republicans responded to Cooper’s election by passing a number of bills, before he took office, that limited his power to make appointments.

The GOP-controlled legislature later limited Cooper’s emergency powers, after criticizing Cooper for the restrictions he put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moore and Berger have also repeatedly found themselves at odds with Cooper over the state budget, and major legislation that Republicans and Democrats have been on opposing sides of. In 2019, lawmakers failed to pass a new budget after negotiations between Cooper and legislative Republicans broke down and ended with Cooper vetoing the GOP’s spending plan.

The budget stalemate that year was in large part over Cooper’s insistence that negotiations include Medicaid expansion, which Republicans had long opposed, but would later support, agreeing to an expansion agreement earlier this year that passed the legislature and was signed into law by Cooper. It won’t go into effect until this year’s budget is finalized and approved as well.

Regaining a Republican supermajority

For the first two years of Cooper’s first term, Republicans continued to hold a supermajority in both chambers, leaving the Democratic governor unable to successfully block bills that came across his desk.

In 2018, however, Republicans lost both of their veto-proof majorities. Over the course of the following five years, Cooper vetoed several bills, none of which Republicans were able to override.

Restoring the GOP’s supermajority became a top priority for Moore and Berger, and despite an otherwise disappointing showing in races across the rest of the country, Republicans picked up multiple seats in November, falling one seat short in the House of total legislative control.

In April, Moore managed to bridge that gap with the defection of former Democratic Rep. Tricia Cotham, who decided to switch parties and hand Republicans the supermajority they had been chasing for half a decade. The move attracted national attention for Moore and Cotham, and was the buzz around the NCGOP’s annual convention two months later, where Cotham received a standing ovation from hundreds of Republican delegates across the state.

Even before Cotham’s switch, House Republicans under Moore’s leadership managed to pass a number of bills over Cooper’s objections.

Those included a repeal of the state’s pistol permit law, which was enacted over Cooper’s veto with the help of three Democrats who didn’t show up to the vote, and legislation to strengthen criminal punishments for rioting, which earned the support of a number of Black Democrats that broke ranks with the rest of their party.

Moore helped pass and enact a new 12-week abortion ban last month, delivering on a major campaign promise Republicans made to voters after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

Scrutiny of business dealings

Besides his leadership in the House and role in budget negotiations, Moore has also found himself under scrutiny over questions about whether he improperly used his position as a high-ranking elected official to curry favors outside the General Assembly.

In March 2018, the Washington-based watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed an ethics complaint accusing Moore of using his position to try to influence state environmental regulators that were looking into pollution at a closed chicken processing plant that used to be held by a company co-owned by Moore.

Moore, at the time, dismissed the allegations as a “meritless election-year political ploy.”

Several months later, in January 2019, The News & Observer reported that a member of Moore’s staff had in 2016 contacted the state’s Department of Environmental Quality about the closed chicken plant. Responding to that revelation, Moore said he didn’t know the staff member had made an inquiry with DEQ inspectors.

The complaint filed by Campaign for Accountability was ultimately dismissed by the state ethics board.