The embattled Speaker It is getting close to the time when many people who refer to House Speaker Thom Tillis will call him the “embattled Speaker of the House.” Tillis came under fire this week for giving severance pay to two staff members who resigned after their affairs with lobbyists came to light.  [Continue Reading...]

In a perfect world, this would be the legislative session where the leaders of the Republican General Assembly would take a break from their extremist agenda of the last 16 months and focus on the state’s actual problems instead of their narrow ideological pursuits. They’d open up the budget process that has been [Continue Reading...]

A largely unreported decision made last Tuesday could have a dramatic impact on public education in North Carolina as soon as this fall, diverting millions of dollars from local school systems to a shady out-of-state corporation and opening the door to the next stage of dismantling traditional public schools. The ruling by Administrative [Continue Reading...]

255 million—amount in dollars of federal funding for education that will disappear after the current school year unless replaced by the General Assembly in the 2012-2013 budget (“Time to Step Up, With federal Recovery Funds Gone, State Lawmakers Just Recommit to Funding Public Education with General Fund Appropriations,” N.C. Budget & Tax Center) [Continue Reading...]

Frills we can’t afford You can tell a General Assembly session is coming up by the volume of nonsense wafting out from Right Wing Avenue these days. The folks at the Pope Civitas Institute are ever vigilant in case any Republican might remotely consider supporting raising revenues this year to restore some of [Continue Reading...]