LUMBERTON On a recent November weekend, Danny Britt parachuted from a plane, gave three speeches, cheered on his children in a community-theater musical and, after attending an early Sunday church service, ran 17 miles.

His alarm went off at 4:20 a.m. Monday morning, as it does every weekday, and he headed to Crossfit. Around 7, he was parking his pickup in the alleyway behind his downtown Lumberton law office and walking in the back door. At 7:30, after knocking out some work, Britt changed into a freshly pressed suit, a belt decorated with the state of North Carolina and loafers with a small American flag on each shoe.

“This is an easy Monday,” Britt said, moments before heading out the front door of his office and across the street to the Robeson County Courthouse. He slid in through a side door and ping-ponged between hearings and meetings while fielding questions from security guards, clerks and attorneys he passed in the hallway who wondered when North Carolina would finally have a state budget.

Britt, a 42-year-old criminal defense attorney and state senator, was the first Republican to ever win his majority-minority district of Robeson and Columbus counties. Now, he’s known for his ability to persuade the most dug-in politicians and facilitate compromise even among enemies.

Most recently, Britt, who is white, led a major effort to overhaul North Carolina’s criminal justice system by carrying legislation that cracks down on bad police officers and raises the minimum age of when children can be prosecuted. Those measures, and others he has sponsored this year, successfully passed the often-divided state legislature with broad support from both sides of the aisle.

For his efforts to serve constituents and work with people across the political spectrum on legislation that is transforming the state’s criminal justice system, Britt is The News & Observer’s Tar Heel of the Month, which honors people who have made significant contributions to the state and region.

Britt’s ability to bridge divides even between far-left and far-right lawmakers is rare in a time of intense political polarization, both in North Carolina and nationally. The state has gone farther on rethinking its criminal justice laws than some other conservative states have been willing to.

Britt’s success in passing those changes in a Republican-controlled legislature despite this is in part because of his indefatigable nature and willingness to hear people out. He’s also known to make his fellow lawmakers laugh, even when he’s pushing them to make concessions or support legislation they may not have backed otherwise.

“Nobody else could get away with some of the stuff that he gets away with,” said Senate leader Phil Berger.

Once, in praising Britt for his ability to bring together groups of people who often disagree, Berger made the “mistake” of calling Britt a “miracle worker.”

“Well, he spent the next month referring to himself as a ‘miracle worker,’” Berger said, smiling.

With Republicans in control of North Carolina’s state legislature, Britt’s willingness to cooperate with Democrats in particular is reflective of the spirit of compromise that has pulsed through Raleigh at times this year.

Conservative legislative leaders have worked with Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and their liberal counterparts in the legislature in recent months to pass bills reopening schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, codifying the governor’s clean energy plan and making health care more affordable.

None will have as widespread of an impact as the criminal justice legislation Britt advanced this year, some Republicans say.

“It took a Republican, I think, to be able to do that,” Berger said, highlighting that Republicans are the “party of law and order” and have been hesitant to pass similar bills in previous legislative sessions. “The fact that Danny works in that field — he’s a criminal defense attorney — that he has the trust and confidence of even the most conservative members of our caucus, he was the piece that may have been missing.”

Legislators on both sides of the aisle agree that while activists, advocates and some lawmakers have worked for years to reform the state’s criminal justice system, some bills Britt has sponsored would not have passed under the Republican-controlled legislature without him.

“I believe as legislators we are vehicles to passing important legislation,” said Sen. Sydney Batch, a Democrat from Holly Springs, who has worked closely with Britt on legislation this year. “He is the perfect instrument to get criminal justice legislation passed.”

Born in Robeson and raised in Bladen County, Britt knew from a young age that he wanted to be a doctor or lawyer, join the military and serve his community as an elected official.

The grandson of a man whose tombstone reads, “Lifelong Democrat,” Britt attended party conventions, put out political signs and helped voters with absentee ballot applications as a young kid.

When he got older, Britt spent his summers working in the tobacco fields and serving ice cream at Dairy Queen. A local attorney Britt admires recounts that it would take him 45 minutes to get an ice cream cone because Britt pummeled him with questions about law school. The day after his 17th birthday, Britt enlisted in the National Guard.

He graduated from Appalachian State University, where he served as president of the College Democrats, and attended law school in Oklahoma. After making his way back to North Carolina, Britt was eventually hired as an assistant district attorney in Robeson County.

During one of Britt’s two deployments, his second child, Annsley, was born. He watched her birth over Skype.

“Her beginning was her daddy in service,” said Jill Britt, his wife.

As he grew older, Britt’s political affiliations shifted. Sometime around 2006, he changed his registration to unaffiliated. Three years later, he registered as a Republican, which he said better aligned with his beliefs and values.

In 2008, former President Barack Obama won Robeson County. He did it again in 2012, but support for down-ballot Democratic candidates was slipping in the county. In 2012, the district’s Democratic state senator won 73% of the vote. In 2014, another Democrat won 63%.

Britt saw the dwindling support for Democrats and “ineffective” representation as an opening and decided to run for state Senate.

“When he decided to run as a Republican, nobody thought he could do it,” Jill Britt said. “I mean, nobody.”

Britt went after it anyway.

“He really put the time and effort in to win that election,” said Rob Davis, the Robeson County attorney who has known Britt since he was a high school student working at Dairy Queen. “There was not a fire department he did not visit. There was not a church he did not visit.”

A month before the election, Hurricane Matthew rocked North Carolina, bringing devastating floods to Lumberton, the Robeson County seat. Britt got to work, taking his boat out to rescue people from the rising waters.

“He put his boots on and jumped right in,” Davis said.

Those who watched Britt work during Hurricane Matthew said he hid that he was running for office, but the people of Senate District 13 took notice. Britt beat the Democratic incumbent with 55% of the vote in 2016 and flipped the district, which includes a large Native American population. Britt even out-performed former President Donald Trump, who won with 51% of the vote in Robeson County that year. Britt won 52%.

As a freshman lawmaker, Britt had little power but filed a record number of bills, worked with Democrats and challenged his fellow Republicans on some legislation.

“People were annoyed by it,” said Daniel Bowes, who serves as the director of policy and advocacy for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina. But, Bowes said, “because he put the work in and proved to be really smart, especially around criminal justice and able to talk to it in a nuanced way, by his second session, he was made co-chair of judiciary.”

Britt held onto his seat in 2018 — when Democrats rode the “blue wave” to break Republicans’ legislative supermajority — winning 62% of the vote that year.

That next session, Britt, driven by his own experiences as a former prosecutor and current defense attorney, sponsored measures that help people clear their criminal record and give judges more discretion in sentencing low-level drug offenders.

“I’m very much in the middle with a lot of issues,” Britt said, leaning back in his chair at his Lumberton law office. “And I think a lot of that comes from practicing law and being on both sides, whether it be with criminal cases or civil cases or what have you, and having to be able to see and judge and interpret and comprehend things and arguments of every side and every angle.”

Met with pushback from outside groups, the legislation stalled in the state House, despite unanimous support in the Senate.

In the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, killing him, North Carolina Republicans looked to Britt. The House reversed course and advanced the bills Britt had been working on, and Cooper signed them into law.

“What I came to really appreciate about Sen. Britt was that, unlike most other legislators — Democrats or Republicans — at the General Assembly, he’s willing to fight against the Conference of District Attorneys or the Sheriff’s Association,” Bowes said. “That’s what gave me some trust in him: seeing that he does what he says he’s going to do, which is also fairly rare.”

In November 2020, when Britt ran for his third term, he again garnered more support than Trump — a sign of his growing political clout in the district. This year, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Britt worked with lawmakers and advocates across the political spectrum to pass Senate Bill 300. The measure is meant to hold law enforcement accountable by tracking their use of force and disciplinary history.

Britt worked closely with advocacy and law enforcement groups to make that happen. He met with them in his office or in the hallway and, often with a protein shake in hand, listened to their concerns about the legislation.

Some groups, including the ACLU of North Carolina, argue that SB 300 did not go far enough, saying it didn’t address the “systemic racism that underpins our criminal justice system.”

Still, Bowes said the bill wouldn’t have passed without Britt.

“The question should be: Who’s pushed harder?” Bowes said. “And the answer there is nobody. Nobody has pushed harder than Danny Britt.”

With political maps newly redrawn, Britt’s district has shifted. He will no longer represent Columbus County, but will continue to represent Robeson County in addition to neighboring Hoke and Scotland counties. He’s already gotten to work in getting to know his new constituents. In mid-November, he parachuted at a Hoke County GOP Veterans Appreciation Day event, and, that same day, attended a Chamber of Commerce oyster roast in Scotland County.

On one Monday this month, just four days before Cooper signed a bipartisan budget into law for the first time in three years, Britt had his law office phone in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Dressed in an Army green shirt that read “Britt N.C. Senate,” sweats and socks, no shoes, he paced around his office while advising a client who had been arrested for drinking and driving. At the same time, he read up on what funding for his district made it into the final state spending plan, responded to budget questions from constituents and planned for the coming days he would spend in Raleigh to vote on the measure.

“He imposes that same energy in every walk of life, whether it be in practice, or when he’s in session in Raleigh or when he’s out deer hunting or at the turkey shoot,” said Mark Locklear, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a private investigator with Britt.

Now, Britt’s gearing up for his next re-election campaign to serve a fourth term. He’s also considering a run for state attorney general in 2024, he said, but doing so would pull him away from his wife and children more than his 12-hour workdays and frequent trips to Raleigh already do.

In the rare moments that Britt does stop moving, it’s usually because he’s hunting with his kids.

“When he’s in that tree stand, he’s actually forced to slow down,” Locklear said. “He knows he’s gotta be quiet and still to match wits with a big buck.”

When Cooper signed the budget into law Nov. 18, Britt was in a tree stand with his 11-year-old son, Carter, quietly waiting for deer to sniff out the sweet potatoes they had left for them.

Thanks to bad cell service on the property of the East Howellsville Hunting and Fishing Club, only a handful of phone calls made it through to Britt. He quickly rejected them and sent an automated reply: “I am in a tree stand and I cannot answer.”

At dusk, when he had cell service again, he was back on the phone, figuring out how to help a constituent fix a ditch that wasn’t draining and answering a call from Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, who thanked him for his work on the budget.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.