Carolina Journal Radio No. 908: Barrett nomination highlights left-wing attacks on Constitution

From Cherokee to Kuretuk, from the largest city to the smallest town, and from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, it's Carolina Journal Radio, your weekly news magazine discussing North Carolina's most important public policy events and issues.

Welcome to Carolina Journal Radio, I'm Mitch Kokai. During the next hour, Donna Martinez and I will explore some major issues affecting our state. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a lot of questions about North Carolina public schools, including the best way to help struggling students. You'll hear highlights from a recent legislative debate on that topic. You'll learn why a group of mothers went public with pleas to Governor Roy Cooper. They want the governor to reopen all public schools to in-person instruction. Repealing North Carolina's ban on public sector collective bargaining would cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

You'll learn why. And an expert from the Libertarian Cato Institute helps us look back at key cases and trends from the Supreme Court's last term. Speaking of the nation's highest court, Donna Martinez tackles that topic in the latest Carolina Journal headline. A 48-year-old Court of Appeals judge from the Midwest, a mom of seven, and a former law professor could become the newest member of the United States Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett is set to face incredible opposition from Democrats to President Trump's nomination of the appeals court judge to the court.

So exactly who is Amy Coney Barrett? John Guzay is director of legal studies at the John Locke Foundation. He's an attorney himself. He joins us now to talk a bit about the nominee.

John, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Donna. What do we know about Amy Coney Barrett? Well, she's really just an exceptional pick. She's a brilliant legal scholar.

Nobody argues that point. She's also just a wonderful human being, a remarkable human being, I'd say a great lady. Somehow she has combined an academic career, a judicial career, and a career as a homemaker. She's got seven kids, two adopted, one with special needs, and she's managed to raise them all beautifully and have two exceptional careers.

So I had it off to her. I just admire the heck out of her, and I really think she's a great pick. Do we know much about her judicial philosophy?

Well, we know a bit. We know that she is a self-affirmed originalist. She believes that the constitution and all laws should be applied as they're written, and that if there's any uncertainty about the meaning of the text, it should be interpreted as it was understood.

The meaning should be what it was understood to be at the time it was written or ratified as the case may be. I believe she's actually described herself as in line with the late Justice Antonin Scalia for whom she actually clerked. I think that's a very fair description from what we know. I think one of the things that means is she's probably going to be very better than some of the other conservative justices on things like searches and seizures. She's going to be a strict constructionist when it comes to the protections in the constitution. And from my point of view, that's excellent. Is it accurate or fair, John, to say that if she is confirmed to the Supreme Court, that it would transform the court?

Well, transform's a big word. The court has a lot of inertia. There's a lot of sense amongst all the justices that there's an institution here that they need to protect. So I certainly don't think it's going to be a revolutionary change, but it's very important all the same because it means that we, barring some unforeseen deaths or retirements, will have a good, strong originalist majority on the court for the first time ever.

And I think that will make a difference going forward. She is, of course, President Trump's nominee. Now, the national Democrats oppose not only her nomination, but the timing of her nomination due to the fact that an election is coming up. Tell us about the opposition. What is the concern of those who are Democrats or are to the left of center?

Well, I think there's some important background here that listeners may not all be aware of. A series of doctrines got implemented in the 1930s and 40s, which really transformed the court from what it was supposed to be, which is an institution that resolves cases and controversies that come before it based on the laws that's written into what amounts to a super legislature. Under the new doctrines, especially the so-called living document school of judicial interpretation, they can now make laws and they've done that. And unlike laws that are made by Congress, there's nothing that the public can do to undo them.

You can't vote them out of office because they're appointed for life. This is very frustrating for people who don't like those laws. And I think there's many, many laws that have gotten the public's attention.

But I think the one that's the most evocative, the most emotional is abortion. The Supreme Court created a national right to abortion out of whole cloth. There's nothing in the Constitution under any kind of reasonable originalist interpretation that would support a right to abortion. But they made that the law of the land in all 50 states.

That's been very frustrating. So, in fact, that law has been in place now or that ruling for roughly 50 years or so. And you have folks on the left who oppose the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett saying, hey, we think she's going to overturn it just for the sake of discussion. John, let's say that one day Roe versus Wade was indeed overturned.

However unlikely that that might be. If that occurred, wouldn't that just mean that it goes back to the states to decide for themselves? Of course it would, where it belongs. And even back then, 50 years ago, most states had already taken steps to liberalize abortion laws. And by now, it's clear that almost every state would have very liberal abortion laws. And it's hard to see why the left is worried about this. They've got large majorities of people all over the country who take the same view they do about abortion, about same-sex marriage, about all kinds of issues that the Supreme Court has weighed in on when it shouldn't. It should be a decision to be made by legislatures.

That's all. Host 1 John, there's also a lot of discussion from the opposition to Amy Coney Barrett that somehow or another this could be the end of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, that she could be a deciding vote that would throw out the constitutionality of that health insurance program. Thoughts on that?

John Ligato Oh, I don't think that's very likely. I think there is a question of severability. I think what's going to come before the court is the question about whether the mandatory coverage requirement survives. Host 1 The individual mandate?

John Ligato The individual mandate may not survive, but I think it's unlikely that would bring down the whole act. But really, this is a matter for Congress. And all the court has to do is interpret the laws as it comes before it. Host 1 John, we know, and our listeners to Carolina Journal Radio, who've heard you on this program before, know about your respect for the United States Constitution, also the North Carolina Constitution. You have written very eloquently at johnlocke.org and carolinajournal.com about concerns over the left's, and I'll use this phrase, war on the US Constitution.

You write about the early 20th century and how things seem to change. You kind of referred to it when you talked about the creation of sort of the super legislature at the United States Supreme Court. Help us understand more exactly what's happening and why we should be concerned about the progressive views of the court.

John Ligato Well, I'll say two things about it. It's certainly true that what happened in the starting in the teens, the progressive movement was very anti-constitution. They didn't like all these limits on government power. They worked and worked and eventually got the Supreme Court under pressure from the Roosevelt administration to adopt doctrines that would, so it was thought, weaken the court and make the court stop interfering in Roosevelt's economic regulations. Ironically, what it ended up doing is making the court more powerful because now the court can make laws the way it did in the abortion case and Congress can't do anything about it. And Congress and the president, the Congress could pass a law, the president could sign it, and the Supreme Court could still say it's unenforceable. Even if there's nothing in the Constitution that clearly prevents it, they can interpret the Constitution any way they want.

That was bad enough. But what worries me these days is we see a much more virulent kind of anti-American, anti-Constitution attitude, which says tear it all down. We can start over and do better. We see all these riots all over the country, hundreds and hundreds of them now by Antifa and Black Lives Matter and others. And these people, many of them are explicitly said they want to put an end to the American Republic. They think it's founded on racism. They think it's founded on sexism.

They think they can do better. But if history teaches us anything, after a revolution, we don't end up with something better. We end up with something terrible. Host 1 John Guse is director of legal studies for the John Locke Foundation. He writes frequently about not only legal issues, but the U.S. Constitution, the North Carolina Constitution, and very fascinating legal cases that come up as we make our way through 2020. John, thank you very much for joining us to talk about this.

Stay with us, folks. Much more Carolina Journal radio to come in just a moment. Tired of fake news?

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I'm Mitch Kogai. As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to head back to work, we're looking back at key rulings and trends from the high courts last term. And we're getting help from Ilya Shapiro. He's director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. He's publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. And he's author of the new book, Supreme Disorder, Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court. As you look back at what happened during this last term of the Supreme Court, what stood out most to you? First of all, this is the year it really became the Roberts court. Chief Justice John Roberts presided over Donald Trump's impeachment trial. Remember that?

That seems like a different world. And then he navigated the court through an unusual pandemic driven telephonic oral argument. And Roberts was in the majority more than anyone, including 12 of the 13 five to four decisions.

So he's really driving the court, not necessarily as a swing vote, but kind of an anchor or a driver of where the court will go as far and as fast as only he wants. The first case I want to mention is what we thought was going to be the first Second Amendment decision in over a decade. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus New York. New York City had an unusual rule that said you can't take your lawfully licensed firearms outside the city for any any reason. The city defended its rule through the through appeal to the Second Circuit. But once it got to the Supreme Court, they kind of chickened out and seeing the writing on the wall repealed the rule.

And then the state legislature said that no municipality can have such a rule. So it became a mootness question. And in the end, by a six to three vote, the court did rule that this was a moot case. Although Justice Kavanaugh writing in concurrence said, look, we have all of these good petitions coming up.

So I agree with the dissent that the court needs to address the issue soon and along the framework that the dissent suggests. Well, a couple of months later, the court denied all 10 pending cert petitions, raising the Second Amendment in a whole host of ways, whether the right to carry concealed or open restrictions on magazine capacity. Lots of different things the court could have chosen, but turned them all down, presumably because John Roberts told his colleagues that he was not a reliable vote on this issue, didn't want to take it up. In the same day, the court denied a slew of qualified immunity cert petitions.

The idea that government officials, I mean, it's very hard to hold them liable, whether we're talking about police, educational administrators, any kind of government officials holding them liable is very difficult because of this doctrine. Notably, Justice Thomas dissented both from the denial of the Second Amendment cases and the qualified immunity cases. And you know, Mitch, it was a big day because the same day that those denials were issued, the court decided Bostock, Bostock versus Clayton County, the big employment discrimination case where Justice Gorsuch writing for the majority found that Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination because of sex, already included protections on having an adverse employment action taken for sexual orientation or gender identity. This was a battle of textualists. And ultimately, I think Justice Kavanaugh in dissent probably had the better of it, saying, look, forget even trying to get into the minds of Congress in 1964 or what the words because of sex meant in 1964.

Even now, even in 2020, if someone's fired for being gay, we don't say that they're fired because of sex. So Gorsuch's take was kind of hyper literalist, literalist in a way that speakers of the English language generally wouldn't wouldn't use it. And there was a lot of concern after this decision and a lot of renting of garments, particularly among conservatives, about whether Gorsuch has shifted to the left or what this means for religious liberty. And it turns out Gorsuch in a trio of cases on religious liberty ended up the most protective of it. Most notably, there was a case called Espinoza versus Montana Department of Revenue, which by a five to four vote, removed what I consider to be the last federal legal obstacle to the expansion of school choice programs. Were there particular trends that you saw?

It was a term that was hard to characterize. I mean, every year reporters, pundits try to say, oh, the court moved left or oh, the court moved right. But it's not like over the summer the justices take a vote and decide or even each individual justice decides, OK, this year I'm going to be more liberal or more progressive or more conservative or what have you.

It's just a nature of the kind of docket it is. And those high profile cases, I didn't mention also DACA, where the court voted five to four, another John Roberts opinion preventing President Trump from rescinding DACA, even though President Obama put it in as a simple executive action. Also on abortion, the June medical case, where John Roberts again said, I disagree with that with a precedent from four years ago, but I'm going to hold to it and only on those lines prevent Louisiana from putting in a regulation that threatened to shut down some abortion clinics. But at the end of the day, when you go beyond those kind of very, very high profile culture war cases and you look at the numbers of the 13 five to four decisions, nine of them had the conservative justices sticking together and only three had one of the conservatives defect to join the progressives.

Compare that to the previous term, one of the twenty five to four cases, eight of them had one of the conservatives defect to join the liberals and only seven had the conservatives stick together. So this is why progressives surely breathe a sigh of relief, but aren't treating Roberts as the second coming of Anthony Kennedy, let alone David Souter. And I think should Joe Biden win this presidential election this fall, we'll probably see John Roberts vote in a more conservative direction. Now, you know, I don't think this is necessarily a good thing that he's voting, not necessarily on his legal theories or his his his vision of the Constitution or statutory interpretation, but that's the way that he sees his role as kind of a protector of the institution of the Supreme Court. And anybody can judge the court's so-called legitimacy or the public confidence in it. But these kind of machinations, to my mind, detract from the court being seen as a legal institution.

What are some of the main things you're going to be looking at in the term ahead? A handful of really big cases, none of which are going to be ruled on before the elections, certainly. But, for example, whether Philadelphia can ban Catholic social services from participating in their foster and adoption programs because they won't place kids with gay couples.

That's Fulton versus Philadelphia. Or Delaware is one of a number of states and other government bodies that designate by political party members of, in this case, their three highest state courts. So no one party affiliated person can or no no no party that has affiliations can be more than a bare majority of the state Supreme Court, for example, reserving all other seats to the other major political party. So that kind of affiliation restricted limits does it discriminate unconstitutionally against, say, libertarians or independents or socialists or what have you. That's the case of Carney versus Adams. Obamacare's individual mandate, whether it's constitutional and if not, what of the rest of the law has to fall? Didn't we decide this eight years ago? Well, yes, but in the intermediate time Congress has changed, tweaked, zeroed out the John Roberts's tax penalty for not buying insurance. What consequence does that have? That's the case of California versus Texas. Very significant.

And they're going to argue, they're going to add other controversial ones as well, I'm sure. That is the voice of Ilya Shapiro. He is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Mitch. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in just a moment. If you love freedom, we've got great news to share with you. Now you can find the latest news, views and research from conservative groups across North Carolina all in one place. North Carolina conservative.com.

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I'm Mitch Kokai. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions about struggling public school students. Republican State Representative Craig Horn discussed the issue in a recent State House committee meeting. We have talked about how do we get kids that are behind caught up for years.

This is not a phenomenon of COVID, although certainly COVID has exacerbated. In my personal opinion, we've lost a year of education progress already. I understand it's arguable since we haven't been out of class a year or it's not been a year since we switched to online learning and the sequester with which we've been involved. But there's a number of things that we're going to have to look at, including the school year.

The House has always had a strong view about the school calendar. Others in some within the House have not necessarily agreed with changing the school calendar, school hours, as well as some other options in providing direct support to students. This is a challenge for the ages. This is not a challenge for just for COVID. It's going to take some very creative thought and a strong backbone because no matter what we decide, there's going to be a substantial number of people who are going to say, no, I'm not participating. I think the essence of it is we've got to be able to target the kids that need to help and deliver an education directly to them. And that's how do we do that?

Certainly, technology is going to help us a lot, but technology is not the only solution. There are we are gregarious people. We learn more face to face than we do at a distance. I wish we had a magic answer.

We do not. And we are anxious to engage in this conversation with every member of this committee and in fact, is every person in the state. But we also realize we don't have a lot of time to waste because we're already behind.

Horn's colleague, Representative John Fraley, offered his own thoughts about helping struggling students. What we do in 2021 and 22 in the summer is going to be critical to this and also say that there's discussion that goes back and forth of is the like reading camps in the summer. Are they more effective than us putting more funding into pre-K or do we have to have both? So I think there is a more in-depth discussion that needs to be held about that. You've been listening to highlights from a recent legislative debate.

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Both brought to you in the name of freedom by the John Locke Foundation. Welcome back to Carolina Journal Radio. I'm Mitch Cokine. Governor Roy Cooper announced plans to allow North Carolina elementary schools to reopen just one day after his Republican electoral opponent and a group of mothers publicly called for all school aged kids to return to classrooms. The mothers met with reporters in the state legislative building. They shared stories about children's problems with online learning.

Among them, Tara Dean. For those that want to keep their children home, I respect that we all have different situations, but I want a voice and a choice for my children. I'm sick of them being used as pawns in a political game. I have four children in the North Carolina public school system. Although they are all suffering today, I'm here to focus on my two youngest who are adopted from China with multiple special needs. They have albinism, autism, cognitive impairments, visual impairments, and are non-verbal.

I promise when I adopt them to give them the best life possible. This includes access to every available resource that could help to improve the quality of their lives. However, I have not even been able to give them a basic education or desperately needed therapies in the last several months. Special needs children have been completely abandoned by the districts. My girls went from a critical routine and schedule of a full day of school in a self-contained special ed class with multiple therapies. These included speech, occupational, physical, vision, and orientation and mobility, to a day of total isolation with no in-person interventions.

The effects have been devastating and led to complete regression. Remote learning was never and will never be an option for them. I can teach a child how to add or subtract, but how do I teach a child to speak, interact, or use their best vision? Virtual learning cannot be accomplished when your child can't verbalize and won't look at the screen.

I need to get back to work. I will not have seven hours a day to dedicate as a one-on-one teacher to two children. I would rather use the money I earn to pay for private services that actually benefit them. COVID isn't killing my children right now, but they are dying inside from a lack of schedule, socialization, education, and due to total isolation.

Tracy Taylor is a parent and a healthcare professional. I have seen, especially the special needs population who have been ignored in this pandemic. But the fact of the matter is also that all students are being ignored. Several of the school districts in North Carolina, as well as across the Southeast, are seeking medical advice from a Duke group.

Three of them specifically said some things that I thought were very important to touch on. Dr. Benjamin said how the tests are administered, the COVID tests, and who takes them drives the metric. Over-reliance on metrics could be fraught with peril. Younger children are less likely to spread this virus than older children, which is very different than influenza. There will be COVID cases regardless of whether schools reopen or not. It's been safer in some districts that reopened that had good plans. They are mental health stressors and effects that are far worse than the physical effects of COVID itself.

This virus will be around for the long haul, and a vaccine will have supply chain issues. His point was that we need to get the kids back in school, and we can't wait on a vaccine, and we can't wait for the metrics to drop. My personal thoughts are that the academic effects are taking a toll on all students.

It doesn't matter whether you're under the bell curve to the left or to the right. All of the students are having way too much screen time. You're listening to highlights from a recent news conference featuring mothers who want their kids back in school buildings.

Michelle Morrow shared her concerns about the state's inconsistent policies. As a nurse of 27 years and a mother of 5, I can assure you that we can send our children to school safely. Since March 15th, the goal of our lockdown and subsequent school closures was understandably to protect our children and our school staff from infection.

Since that time, thankfully, we have learned that this illness rarely impacts individuals under the age of 20 and has been shown to actually be detrimental to those above 65 who have pre-existing health conditions, which frankly put them at all times at higher risk of dying from anything. Since the science now shows that the mortality rate for this disease is comparable to that of flu, and the youngest among us seem dramatically less impacted or even possible to spread this disease, we have to open our schools for in-school instruction. The decisions that have been made over the last four months specifically concerning what facilities can and cannot function are not only illogical, they're also inconsistent. One example of this is that preschools and daycares for months have been open to serve the needs of working parents, yet the children in these facilities are rarely toilet trained, explore their world by putting things into their mouths, and are in the same rooms together to play, eat, and sleep for hours a day. Why is it that the workers in these facilities have been expected to care for these, our most dependent and youngest members of our community, yet the teachers of elementary age children have been told to stay home and they have claimed that it is too dangerous for them to enter the school room? What about the use of our schools as daycares for teachers or even for parents who cannot stay at home for their students and to watch them and to be with them to teach them?

Well, I have this question. Are we expected to believe that the children of teachers are less capable of spreading a disease to the other teachers that are using their classrooms for online instruction than other children in the community? That, once again, is illogical and it's inconsistent. While I do understand and appreciate that there are teachers and school staff and parents at home who may be immunocompromised and are at greater risk of suffering complications from COVID, we must acknowledge that never before in the history of our nation have we closed down entire classrooms for a teacher who is ill. Usually when a teacher is ill, we find a substitute.

I am hopeful. I'm hopeful that this crisis is actually going to make us recognize the need for our education not just to be about putting information into the mind of a person and having them spew it back out. Education is so much more. The goal of our educational system should be to produce mature, well-rounded, critically thinking, financially independent, responsible, law-abiding people who can handle stress, can handle conflict, and when they get out at 18 years old, they should have an option for being financially independent individuals who have a goal.

The goal is not just to get something out on a test and to be able to put us on a high level for how people are testing. Education is so much more, and our children deserve to be put first. Sandy Joyner discussed her family's challenges with COVID-19. I have three sons and I'm a parent of a senior in the Wake County Public Schools. I can tell you, as so many other parents can tell you, that remote learning has been detrimental to the well-being of our kids. Yes, they can attend virtual classes, complete assignments and projects, and even take tests, but school is so much more than that. For seniors, their social fabric is at its peak.

They are naturally a social bunch, and this is their last year with many of their friends. The isolation that they are experiencing is wearing them down mentally and physically, and our worry for their stability and long-term harm in school is causing. Of course, we must take precautions with this virus.

There are ways to provide safeguards and mitigate the risks, as everybody has talked about up here this morning. School systems around the country are making it work. We should be able to do this in North Carolina. I implore our leaders to find a way. My son asked me every week, Mom, when can I go back to school?

He's ready to go, my senior. We need our children in school. You've been listening to highlights from a recent news conference. Mothers urged Governor Roy Cooper to allow North Carolina public school students to return to their classrooms.

One day later, Cooper opened the door for elementary school students to head back to in-person classes. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in a moment. Real influence. You either have it or you don't, and at the John Locke Foundation, we have it. You'll find our guiding principles in many of the freedom-forward reforms of the past decade here in North Carolina. So while others talk or complain or name-call, we provide research, solutions, and hope. Our team analyzes the pressing issues of the day, jobs, health care, education, and more. We look for effective ways to give you more freedom, more options, more control over your life. Our goal is to transform North Carolina into a growing, thriving, economic powerhouse, the envy of every other state. Our research has helped policymakers make decisions that ensure you keep more of what you earn, expand your choice of schools for your kids, widen your job opportunities, improve your access to doctors. The recipe for stability and a bright future. For truth, for freedom, for the future of North Carolina. We are the John Locke Foundation. Welcome back to Carolina Journal Radio.

I'm Donna Martinez. For more than 60 years, North Carolina has prohibited public sector unions from collective bargaining, but some North Carolina lawmakers are actually mulling the idea of repealing the collective bargaining law. Our next guest is urging caution on a move like that. He says it would cost North Carolinians big time. Terry Stoops is the vice president for research, the director of education studies, the author of a new report on this issue, and he joins us now to talk about it.

Terry, welcome back to the show. Thank you. You did really extensive analysis of extensive modeling on different scenarios of what would happen for North Carolina if the law on collective bargaining were repealed and if that were made legal. Tell us what it would cost.

It would cost between 889 million and 1.3 billion. And the reason why there's a range is because there's different ways to collectively bargain. Some collective bargaining laws do not have rules that make it binding for the parties to collectively bargain for their pay and benefits.

And then there are some where it is binding, and of course that would cost a lot more. So it would really depend on the scope of the law that the General Assembly would pass and sort of the parameters that they would establish for the collective bargaining law. Now, most of the laws that have been proposed to get rid of the collective bargaining prohibition simply get rid of the line that says you can't collectively bargain if you're a public sector employee. But I suspect that if that were to occur, then there would be more added to the legislation that would perhaps change the cost of the potential cost to the state of allowing our public sector employees to bargain collectively. We're talking about 60 years here of prohibition on collective bargaining.

So I guess the question is really why now? Why is North Carolina now a target not only for unionization efforts but for collective bargaining efforts? Well, there's a belief and this belief has actually been around for decades that if you turn North Carolina into a union state, then you can turn any state into a union state. We're really a bellwether for unionization.

We have one of the lowest rates of private sector unionization in the nation and we're often identified with South Carolina as being places where unions have the least fortune. So that's certainly one area where I think that there are national groups, national unions and employee associations that are looking at North Carolina and thinking that there could be inroads here. And if you look at what happened in 2018 and 2019 with the Red for Ed movement, these were walkouts coordinated by the North Carolina Association of Educators where thousands of teachers and advocates came to Raleigh to protest the General Assembly. There's a belief that that might be a signal that North Carolinians are ready for public sector unionization to expand and the way to expand that of course would be to allow collective bargaining. What you just brought up is really interesting because the North Carolina Association of Educators calls themselves an association but they have been moving closer and closer to that line of union. They are the state affiliate of the biggest teachers union, right? That's right and they want to be called union. They have advertisements that say, join our union. So there's a real push to not only identify as a union but to get the powers that unions have and one of the most obvious powers that unions have is to collectively bargain and that is something that they seek and that's something that is really part and parcel with their efforts to get certain individuals elected to public office is to make sure that they have pro-union legislators and council of state members that will be there to begin dismantling North Carolina's wise prohibition on collective bargaining for public sector employees. I know this has consequences as we all know but this is just one more aspect of what potentially we could see in North Carolina should the legislature for example turn on its political ideology and the leadership there. Right now it's under Republican leadership.

If it turns to Democrat leadership, things could be different. Your report is really interesting because it's not limited just to looking at the education sector in North Carolina. You explore the whole field of unions. Help us understand the union situation in our state. Sounds like we've got private sector unions, public sector unions but collective bargaining is something different than that. Yeah, the collective bargaining that we're talking about is for our public sector employees which are mostly teachers and state employees and there are some other sectors in the public with firefighters and police. There are some employee associations there. So that's really the dynamic that we're talking about.

It's more than just teachers. It's public employees in general and there are really two mechanisms by which the cost of the collective bargaining prohibition repeal would impose itself. The first of course is that the public sector employees would bargain with their employer. You think about what collective bargaining is. It's a negotiation between the employees and the employer dealing with working conditions, salary and benefits.

But the other part about it and this is something that I highlight in the report is the accumulation of political power. That's really where the cost increases arise because as these unions get the ability to collectively bargain, they are able to accumulate more money and then secure political power that allows them to later on accumulate more money from their employers. This is something that's distinct from the private sector where it's all about bargaining with the employers and there are really very limited benefits to accumulating political power if you're a private sector employee union.

If you're in the public sector, it means everything to make sure that not only do you have the ability to collectively bargain but you use that money to elect people that will continue to feed the beast, continue to feed money to the union members and to provide more expansive benefits and improved working conditions. Of course once that occurs, if that does occur in North Carolina, that is so difficult to claw back once that bargaining power has been instituted and the political power has built up and that's one reason that you're highlighting all of this in your report. It's called Big Government, Big Price Tag, Collective Bargaining Equals More Power to Unions and Higher Costs for North Carolinians. Talking about political power, Terry, I thought it was fascinating in your report.

I'd encourage folks to go to johnlock.org and read this. You talk about the history of unions in North Carolina and interestingly enough, it was actually Democrats in North Carolina who were behind the push to outlaw collective bargaining. Yeah, that's right and first, when you look at the history of unionization in North Carolina, people believe that there hasn't been much unionization but if you look in the earliest 20th century, for example, private sector unions were pretty powerful and the textile industry and various industries, especially in the western part of the state. So unionization has been part of North Carolina's history for a long time but looking at the public sector unionization and the prohibition on collective bargaining, that was coordinated by a Democratic member of the General Assembly from Mecklenburg County who was fearing that Jimmy Hoffa would organize the police in Charlotte and there were some efforts to do that.

The courts got involved and rather than try to do something in the courts, they just said we're going to ensure that this can't happen through an act of the General Assembly and in 1959, they passed that. Dr. Terry Stoops. Terry, thank you.

That's all the time we have for the program this week. On behalf of Mitch Kokai, I'm Donna Martinez. Hope you'll join us again next week for another edition of Carolina Journal Radio. Carolina Journal Radio is a program of the John Locke Foundation. To learn more about the John Locke Foundation, including donations that support programs like Carolina Journal Radio, send e-mail to development at johnlock.org or call 1-866-JLF-INFO.

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