Supporters of public education fight back against empty promises of state’s school privatization movement Americans are suckers for advertising and, in some ways, it’s an admirable trait. It speaks to our national traditions of optimism and hope for the future.
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Sometimes you have to wonder if there isn’t a very specific chapter in the political playbook of Donald Trump’s modern American right that includes the following entries under the heading “default strategies”: A. Attack immigrants B. Restrict voting rights C. If possible, combine strategies a and b
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It’s been almost two weeks now since an exclusive Policy Watch investigation by reporter Joe Killian revealed that former North Carolina state senator and current University of North Carolina Board of Governors member Thom Goolsby has been engaged in business dealings that demand an examination by officials in the Securities Division of the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office. In case you missed it, here are the relevant facts:
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Medicaid expansion is back on the table at the North Carolina General Assembly. Sort of. Maybe. The latest maddening and semi-hopeful development in this seemingly never ending saga arose in the aftermath of the September 11 budget veto override debacle when House Speaker Tim Moore announced that he would fulfill “a promise” to revive the GOP version of the proposal now that the House was “finished” with the budget.
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The confluence of three essentially unprecedented events combined to make last week an extraordinary one in the modern history of North Carolina policy and politics. On Tuesday, the state conducted a special election to choose 15% of its delegation to the U.S House of Representatives. Under normal circumstances, such an event and its aftermath would have dominated the news cycle all week – especially given that one of the two districts had been the subject of intense national scrutiny ever since rampant ballot fraud tainted the 2018 vote. Not last week.
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Nomination of longtime conservative financier and partisan as possible referee makes clear that GOP is still resisting real change There has been a great deal of understandable celebrating in recent days in the aftermath of the September 3rd ruling by a bipartisan panel of Superior Court judges that struck down North Carolina’s state legislative maps as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. Across the state and nation...
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Ever since Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders launched his first campaign for the presidency in 2015, America has found itself immersed in a renewed debate over the concept of “socialism.” This is, of course, not a new discussion. The word itself goes back at least to the 19th Century and many of the ideas associated with it can be traced to the beginning of human history.
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There was a time in the United States not that many years ago in which K-12 public education was taken as a given – something as fundamental to the health and wellbeing of society as drinking water and law enforcement and public roads. It may not have always lived up to this ideal (particularly in places where the great evil of racial discrimination and segregation held sway), but it’s fair to say that the American public school classroom was widely understood...
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If there is a single brightest and most hopeful bit of news on the North Carolina public policy horizon these days, it has to be that our state could, at very long last, be on the verge of ending partisan gerrymandering. With a three-judge panel set to rule in the Common Cause v. Lewis litigation any day (a case in which much of the key evidence offered by legislative defendants was thrown out for being not credible), good government advocates are having to work hard to avoid a sense of giddy optimism about where the case is headed.
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There was a fascinating exchange regarding North Carolina’s ongoing budget stalemate last week at a community meeting in High Point between State Rep. John Faircloth – a conservative Republican and co-chair of the House Appropriations Committee – and one of his constituents. The subject of the Q&A was Senate leader Phil Berger...
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One of the more hopeful developments to take flower in American culture during the Trump era is the #MeToo movement. While women have been calling out and resisting predatory and inappropriate behavior by men since the beginning of time, there’s no denying that the emergence of Trump – that paragon of misogyny, sexism, malignant narcissism and exploitative inequality...
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It may seem like ancient history, but there was a time not that long ago in North Carolina in which Republican legislators were out of power and, alongside conservative advocacy groups, passionately promoting a “change” platform that blasted the incumbent Democrats for: 1) gerrymandering elections for partisan gain; 2) abusing power at the General Assembly...
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It’s no secret that the United States has a significant and growing problem when it comes to the matter of selecting judges. This problem was on vivid public display in 2016, when the Republican majority of the United States Senate refused to consider a highly qualified presidential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court for nearly a full year on blatantly partisan grounds.
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There’s an old adage in the law that’s often used to describe situations in which a judge jails someone for contempt of court. Because the jailed individual normally needs only to comply with the judge’s directive in order to be released, it’s said that they “have the keys to the jail cell door in their pocket.” Today in North Carolina, there is an analogous situation under way in state Superior Court
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It’s going to happen eventually. It may not be right away and it may not look exactly like it ought to look at first, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, North Carolina is going to expand its Medicaid program. The momentum to move forward is too strong and the arguments against doing so are just too weak. Consider the following:
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It comes as little surprise that the inhabitant of the second highest elected office in the state of North Carolina would stoop to engage in the kind of dog whistle talk that one would normally associate with white nationalists like Congressman Steve King and David Duke. After all, as Policy Watch has reported on multiple previous occasions, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest...
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