Podcasts Archives • NC Newsline

Galen Bacharier (File photo)

The new state fiscal year started July 1, and the state legislature is on vacation for most of the month, but that doesn’t mean we have a new state budget. Thanks to big disagreements between NC House and Senate Republicans, the state is listing along on its old budget and several major decisions – most notably around teacher and state employee pay – remain on hold.

Lawmakers will return to Raleigh the week of July 28th and at that time they’ll have a long list of potential agenda items, including the budget, several...

SEANC Executive Director Ardis Watkins (Courtesy photo)

Despite their failure to agree on a new state budget, North Carolina lawmakers are taking most of the month of July – the first month of the new fiscal year – off. Not surprisingly, this is not a situation that’s sitting particularly well with a lot of state employees as they wrestle with another year of declining pay, staff shortages, and soon-to-be-announced premium hikes for the State Health Plan.

NC Newsline’s Rob Schofield got the chance to discuss some of these issues and concerns with the executive...

Professor Michael Bitzer (Photo courtesy Catawba College)

North Carolinians received another powerful reminder recently that their state’s electoral politics are never boring, when Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis suddenly announced he will not seek reelection next year. The announcement has set off a flurry of activity in which it has sometimes seemed that more politicians are considering entering the 2026 Senate race than not.

So, what should we make of Tillis’s announcement and what it portends? And what do the latest polls say voters are thinking about Tillis and the people who m...

Sen. Buck Newton – seen here in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting — has reworked a House Bill intended to protect people from sexual exploitation to one that targets transgender surgery and access to public school library books. (Photo: NCGA video stream)

It’s no secret that bipartisanship is in short supply these days in state politics and that fact makes it especially tragic, as has happened recently at the state legislature, when opportunities for finding common ground are casually and cynically trashed.

See, for example, an important bill designed to prevent people from being victimi...

Children play at childcare center. (Photo: Stephanie Smith)

Early childhood education. Across much of the rest of the world, free, public early childhood education is a basic right.

At a time in which it’s necessary for almost all parents to work in order to make ends meet, these nations have long recognized that there’s no good reason to hold off on providing free public education until children enter Kindergarten.

If it hopes to continue to compete and advance, at some point, the U.S. simply must move to make free...

Chantal's floodwaters left significant damage to Camp Easter Rd. and N.C. 2 in Southern Pines, NC on July 8, 2025. (Photo courtesy of NCDOT)

North Carolina got yet another frightening wake-up call this week about global warming when a modest tropical depression suddenly exploded over the state.

Chantal dumped up to 10 inches of rain in some areas, causing widespread flooding and massive damage.

And while it’s true that there’s nothing new about bad weather, it’s also true that as scientists have repeatedly told us, the frequency and severity of modern storms...

The alcove of a vacant building in downtown Raleigh provides temporary shelter for North Carolina’s homeless population. (Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)

President Donald Trump may have only the faintest idea of what’s in the massive budget bill he signed into law last Friday, but sadly, the contents and the destructive impacts they’ll have are no mystery to the nation’s already beleaguered charities.

Last week, North Carolina food banks sent out an urgent alert explaining that the bill’s massive cuts to SNAP food assistance will have devastating effects.

While...

(Screenshot from Governor’s Office X video that accompanied vetoes issued on July 2, 2025.)

When North Carolinians elected Gov. Josh Stein last fall by a wide margin over former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, they made clear they wanted to put a check on GOP lawmakers’ ambitions to take the state down extreme right-wing paths.

And in recent days, to his great credit, Stein has validated the trust that voters placed in him by vetoing a series of extreme and ill-conceived bills.

As the governor made clear in rejecting bills that would, among other...

WCU political scientist Chris Cooper (Screengrab from News & Views interview)

North Carolina was rocked by a political earthquake this past week when its senior U.S. Senator, Republican Thom Tillis, broke with President Donald Trump and then announced that he will not seek reelection in 2026. Tillis’s announcement – which came on the heels of his decision to oppose Trump’s hugely controversial omnibus budget bill – initiated a chain of events that has just begun to play out both in Washington and here in North Carolina.

So, what will this chain look like? How will Till...

Mikaela Curry of the Sierra Club of NC (Courtesy Photo)

Among the flurry of bills approved by the General Assembly during the last week of June was an extremely controversial proposal that would make big changes to state energy policy, entitled the “Power Bill Reduction Act.” The bill would repeal a bipartisan 2021 law that committed our state to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 70 percent by the year 2030, as we move to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century.

Proponents like Duke Energy say the interim goal was unnecessary and that changes in the bill will help keep energy pric...

Phi Nguyen, Demos' Director of Democracy, and Sarah Ovaska of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (Courtesy photos)

A new report prepared by the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the national public policy nonprofit D?mos finds more than 1.5 million North Carolinians are eligible to vote but aren’t doing so. The report is entitled “North Carolina’s Missing Voters,” and it finds that these nonvoters — nearly 20% of the state’s estimated 8 million eligible voters — are more likely to be young, Black, or Latino.

What’s more, the report finds that the current situa...

The U.S. Capitol on June 30, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

Among the many remarkable news reports that emanated from Washington last week as Congress put the finishing touches on President Trump’s massive budget bill, one was truly shocking.

The day before its final passage, Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers that the bill should not touch Medicaid if the GOP hoped to win in the 2026 elections.

But, of course, as one of the members told Trump, quote: “We are touching Medicaid.”

Indeed, the word “touching,” is an all-t...

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., talks to reporters as he walks to the Senate Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on June 25, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Today is Independence Day – the holiday on which Americans celebrate the birth of our nation as a free country that’s untethered to any monarch or supreme ruler.

This year’s holiday seems especially important to lift up at a time in which President Trump continues to trash guardrail after guardrail in an unprecedented bid to exercise autocratic one-person rule.

One...

(Stock photo via Getty Images)

A study released this week by researchers at NC State University highlights the destructive impact that a bill sent to Gov. Stein by the General Assembly last week will have on electric ratepayers.

The bill, which bears the inaccurate and misleading title “Power Bill Reduction Act,” would repeal a bipartisan 2021 law that committed our state to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 70 percent by the year 2030, as we move to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century.

If the proposal were only about the environmental damage it will likely cause it wo...

Senate President Phil Berger (File photo)/ President Donald Trump (Getty Images)

President Trump’s massive budget bill moved one step closer to passage yesterday when the U.S. Senate approved it 51-50 over the objection of North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis.

If it becomes law, the bill will have devastating impacts in our state. Among other things, more than half-a-million people will likely lose their Medicaid health insurance.

Amazingly, however, some state politicians remain oblivious – or at least unmoved — by the disastrous storm that’s about to befall our state.

Take Re...

Image: Adobe Stock

It’s a sad commentary on the power of the right-wing misinformation machine in modern America that simple and enormously positive concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion have been twisted so that some perceive them in a negative light.

What’s next on the hit list? Words like love, tolerance and common ground?

Tragically, however, as North Carolina Republican legislators made clear last week, they’re serious about this perverse crusade – so serious that they recently passed legislation that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion in state government.

The...

Sen. Lisa Grafstein (Photo: NCGA)

A new state fiscal year commences July 1, but North Carolina will not have a new state budget to greet it. Plagued by major differences over issues like tax policy and pay for teachers and state employees, House and Senate Republicans were unable to reach agreement before commencing their summer break and so the state will continue to limp along on the old budget for the time being.

Republicans did however find common ground on several conservative culture war priorities like weakening gun laws, banning diversity, equity and inclusion, and targeting...

ACLU of North Carolina Policy Counsel Reighlah Collins (Courtesy photo)

Conservative culture war legislation has been front and center of late at the North Carolina legislature, with GOP lawmakers advancing, among other things, bills to limit the rights of transgender people, promote censorship in our schools, ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs in state government, and force local law enforcement offices to devote limited resources to immigration enforcement actions.

And recently, we got a chance to dig even deeper into some of these proposals with one of the state’s most active and art...

Equality North Carolina executive director Eliazar Posada (Courtesy photo)

The attacks on trans people at the North Carolina legislature are clearly part of a coordinated national campaign from the political right that has also impacted a number of other institutions. This week marks the end of Pride Month and it’s clear that the anti-LGBTQ movement led by the Trump administration has managed to temper the support of some traditional Pride Month supporters in the corporate community.

That said, as NC Newsline’s Rob Schofield learned in a conversation with Equality North Carolina execu...

North Carolina State Board of Elections members, left to right, Jeff Carmon, Chairman Francis DeLuca, Stacy "Four" Eggers, Siohban Millen, and Robert Rucho. (Photo: Lynn Bonner)

In recent years, North Carolina Republican lawmakers have perfected the practice of rigging elections through partisan gerrymandering.

The situation has gotten so bad that they don’t even pretend anymore. They not only openly rig districts to disenfranchise voters who don’t vote Republican, they openly admit and brag about it.

And now, in a bill rammed through a House committee last week in record time...

Tax season with wooden alphabet blocks, calculator, pen on 1040 tax form background

Tax policy can be maddeningly complex and confusing. Indeed, keeping it that way is one tool the super-rich use to avoid paying their fair share.

As Alexandra Sirota of the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center recently observed, however, it doesn’t have to be that way.

As she notes, there’s a simple and commonsense solution that would dramatically improve our state’s regressive tax system and raise close to a billion dollars per year – a millionaire’s tax.

Democratic Senator Sophia Chitlik addressed a bill that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in state government. (Screengrab NCGA)

It’s not that often that floor debates in the North Carolina legislature shed much light on important subjects.

One impressive exception to this rule took place this week, however, when Durham Democratic Senator Sophia Chitlik addressed a bill that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in state government.

In her remarks, Chitlik pointed out a glaring problem that has afflicted numerous bills advanced by Republican lawmakers this year – bills that...

An incarcerated person working at a North Carolina prison. As a workaround to a labor shortage, North Carolina is relying on some of its incarcerated workforce to install air conditioning in prisons. (Photo from the Department of Adult Correction website.)

There are many things that have changed for the better in North Carolina prisons over the last century.

That said, it’s also true that North Carolina summers have always been miserably hot and that commercial air conditioning was first introduced nearly a century ago — facts that render the lack of air conditioning in ma...

Patients have their blood pressure checked and other vitals taken at a mobile dental and medical clinic. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A new report from researchers at the national Commonwealth Fund finds that North Carolina has made enormous strides in assuring that people receive the right health care at the right time and are able to avoid hospital stays and emergency room visits by receiving timely care.

The percentage of North Carolina adults who reported that there was a time in the previous year that they didn’t go to the doc...

Rep. Marcia Morey (Photo: NCGA)

In 2025, few societal phenomena pose a greater or more immediate threat to the mental and physical wellbeing of Americans than gun violence. Gun violence is now, quite shamefully, the leading cause of death for children and youth in our country. And when this sobering fact is combined with the ongoing rise in political violence – a fact brought home by the recent horrific political assassinations in Minnesota – it’s hard to describe the situation as anything other than a crisis.

Fortunately, despite the gun lobby money that continues block the enactment of san...

Kris Nordstrom

“A new report from the state Department of Public Instruction confirms what school voucher opponents have been saying: universal voucher programs are a wasteful giveaway to disproportionately wealthy families who have already enrolled their children in private schools.” That’s the opening sentence from a recent essay authored by North Carolina Justice Center senior policy analyst, Kris Nordstrom.

And when one digs deeper into the data Nordstrom analyzed, it’s clear that his assessment is on the mark. The numbers reveal that, in the current school year, only a tiny percentage of vouche...

MaryBe McMillan, president of the NC State AFL-CIO (File photo)

For the past two decades, no single individual has played a more prominent or important role in championing the rights and wellbeing of average working people in North Carolina than MaryBe McMillan. McMillan, who grew up in Hickory, served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the North Carolina AFL-CIO from 2005 to 2017, at which point she was elected as the first woman president of the federation in the state’s history – a role that she has served in ever since and will retire from later this summer.

And...

Sen. Buck Newton --seen here in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting last week -- has reworked a House Bill intended to protect people from sexual exploitation to one that targets transgender surgery and access to public school library books. (Photo: NCGA video stream)

Bipartisanship is in precious short supply these days in politics and that makes it especially tragic when elected officials waste rare opportunities to advance it.

Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening in the North Carolina Senate.

In its original form, House Bil 805 was a commonsense proposal to crack down...

Cleanup workers search for contaminated sand and seaweed in front of drilling platforms and container ships about one week after an oil spill from an offshore oil platform on Oct. 9, 2021, in Huntington Beach, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

It’s summer beach season again. Over the coming months, millions of visitors will flock to the North and South Carolina coastlines and fuel a tourism-based economy that’s critically important to both states.

Unfortunately, powerful forces could soon jeopardize this amazing natural and economic resource by opening it to offshore oil and gas d...

State Rep. Julie von Haefen Photo: NCGA

These are passionately divided times in our country.

And at such a moment, it’s imperative that all Americans – and especially our elected leaders – disavow violence or even the appearance of endorsing it.

And it’s in light of this that Wake County State Rep. Julie von Haefen was clearly in error recently for briefly posting an image on social media of a protester’s sign that portrayed a guillotine and a head resembling President Trump.

To her credit, though, von Haefen quickly realized her mistak...

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

One of the most disturbing developments of the second Trump administration has been the President’s clear effort to encourage U.S. military service members to endorse his political views and exhibit loyalty to him personally.

This pattern was on display last week at Fort Bragg where Trump inappropriately sought to engage the troops in booing former President Biden and other elected leaders.

This represents a deeply troubling break with 250 years of well-established law and tradition in which servicemembers swear loyalty to the Constitution – not any i...

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein signs a bill into law at the governor's mansion on June 13, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)

The first months of North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein’s administration have been marked by a striking lack of hostility and conflict. To his credit, Stein has worked diligently to build bridges and find common ground with Republicans – both in Raleigh and Washington. He’s yet to veto a bill.

Unfortunately, this move toward the center has won little reciprocation from the GOP and this fact is evidenced in a bill approved by the...

Common Cause of North Carolina Policy Director Ann Webb (Courtesy photo)

Gerrymandering: it refuses to go away. Despite widespread and growing public awareness and outrage, North Carolina Republican lawmakers continue to use it to rig our state’s elections by drawing districts guaranteed to give themselves large majorities and dilute the power of Black voters. Fortunately, voting rights advocates and good government groups are refusing to give up in their efforts to end this pernicious practice and this week, they’ll be back in federal court in Winston-Salem.

The case is known as Willi...

Professor of law and policy Sara Rosenbaum (Courtesy photo)

One of the more remarkable facts about some of the policies that state and federal lawmakers adopt for public benefit programs these days is that they’re based not on facts or data, or the money and lives saved, but on gut feelings about the worthiness of the people who would be helped. Nowhere is this better evidenced than in the ongoing effort in Congress to mandate work requirements for low-income people enrolled in the Medicaid health insurance program.

The massive budget and tax bil...

Dr. Helen Egger and Rebecca Egger (Courtesy photo)

One of the most vexing societal problems of the modern, social media-driven era is the ongoing crisis in youth mental health. The latest data on the number of children who suffer from depression and other symptoms – and who even contemplate or attempt suicide – are staggering.

Happily, a small ray of light in this dark situation is the promising growth of new tools to provide online mental health care from a new firm known as Little Otter offering coverage for virtual mental health care for children and t...

A student works in a biology laboratory. (Photo by Jess Daninhirsch/Capital News Service)

Americans have long maintained a healthy instinct to be skeptics. We pride ourselves on demanding proof.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the explosion of social media in which every person has a public platform has allowed this natural skepticism to fuel a situation in which distinctly unscientific conspiracy theories get way too much attention.

And this, tragically, has led millions of people to waiver in their faith in science.

This trend is on display right now i...

Immigration officials, their backs turned to hide their identities, pose with an Australian citizen who faces possible deportation back to his home country. A list of “sanctuary” jurisdictions accused of failing to cooperate with immigration arrests, including the state of Colorado, was taken down after protests about its accuracy. (Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

As long as the United States is going to maintain immigration laws, it’s a given that unauthorized people will be subject to arrest and deportation. This fact is not terribly controversial.

That said, there should be enor...

Photo: Getty Images

Ever since North Carolina legislators established the so-called “Opportunity Scholarships” school voucher program, sponsors and proponents have pitched it as a means of helping low-income students escape struggling public schools.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, a new report from the Department of Public Instruction shows that this was all baloney. The DPI researchers found that just sixty-seven hundred of the state’s eighty-thousand-plus vouchers in the current school year went to students who had attended a North Carolina public school in the prior year.

And while the data for kinderg...

Packages of the injectable weight-loss medication Wegovy are shown (Photo illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

If North Carolinians lived in a perfect world, everyone would have easy access to plenty of healthy and affordable food, the self-control to resist junk food, and genes that would let them stay active, trim and fit throughout their lives.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a world.

And it’s in light of this that it was a no-brainer for state Health and Human Services officials to make prescriptions for weight-loss drugs a cover...

The North Carolina Advisory Council on Cannabis will hold its first meeting in July. (Photo: Getty Images)

If ever there was a once controversial issue in modern society that has since become a settled matter, it is the question of cannabis legalization. While there’s no doubt that cannabis – that is, marijuana and THC products – raises important public health challenges, it’s also clear that this cow is not going back in the barn.

Indeed, with cannabis possession and sales now fully legal for most Americans, it’s absurd and unjust that a few states...