Carolina Journal Radio No. 920: Teachers union fights efforts to reopen schools

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 Kocai. During the next hour, Donna Martinez and I will explore some major issues affecting our state. North Carolina lawmakers are likely to deal with issues linked to criminal justice and law enforcement reform in the new year. They might be wise to learn some lessons from one western state. You'll learn why.

The John Locke Foundation and Civitas Institute are joining forces in the new year. You'll hear what that means for the push toward free markets and limited government in North Carolina. One of the problems with today's political discourse involves grandstanding. We'll chat with one expert who explains the topic and tries to deal with it. And we'll hear from a legal analyst who thinks state policymakers should rein in the governor's emergency powers. Those topics are just ahead.

First, Donna Martinez joins us with the Carolina Journal headline. Sexism, racism, misogyny. That is how the Chicago Teachers Union described the effort to reopen schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's just one example of the pushback from teacher unions to in-person instruction for kids. So why is this the case? Well, Dr. Terry Stoops, who is vice president of research, also the director of education studies here at the John Locke Foundation, took a look at that very issue in a piece he wrote for CarolinaJournal.com.

Terry, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Sexism, racism, misogyny. What do those have to do with COVID-19?

Really nothing. And this is really the essence of the issue is that teacher unions, and in this case, the Chicago Teachers Union, really don't want to talk about the issues at play with school closures, with the effect of remote learning on students, especially disadvantaged students, with the fact that we have an international scientific community that says that schools should be open, and yet they are resisting the opening of schools in Chicago so much as to try to get the courts involved and to push back on plans to reopen schools in Chicago in January. And so we're seeing a pattern by teacher unions resisting school reopening. Chicago Teachers Union just tends to be the most extreme and the most fringe of the unions that are involved in this effort to keep school buildings closed. But there are teacher unions and teacher associations in other states and other communities that are working just as hard to keep school buildings closed and to keep students in remote learning environments as long as possible. And in fact, in your piece at CarolinaJournal.com, you noted that the Chicago Teachers Union description actually got a lot of pushback. Thankfully, people said, hey, wait a second, what does this have to do with it? But they persist in their general message that they don't want kids going back into school, presumably, Terry, because they're a workers rights group and it's all about the teachers, not the kids.

Yeah, that's right, because there are a few things that we know, there are a few things that the research tells us are true. The first is that the longer you stay in remote learning, the worse it is for kids, especially disadvantaged kids. The disadvantaged kids don't have the support at home that would allow them to thrive in online learning that they're forced into. They have unsatisfactory Internet connections.

They don't have technology that allows them to necessarily do as much as their more advantaged peers. But more importantly, the scientific community says that it's safe for employees, for kids to go back into school buildings and that the risks are actually very minimal. So the question is, why do they want to keep schools closed? One of the conclusions that I came to is that there's really very little incentive for them to want to reopen schools. How can that possibly be?

If the science is sound and everyone from an article in Nature, I believe you you noted in your piece also UNICEF touting the benefits and the need for kids to be back in school. It just seems crazy that they they would be pushing back against this. Well, it is a bit crazy. But when you think about it, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. It's logical for them because they get paid either way. The minuscule chance that they get infected by covid-19 is used as a justification to keep schools closed. And when schools are closed now, this isn't to say that teachers aren't working hard in remote learning environments, but they still get paid either way. Also, the fact that students are falling behind has no effect on teachers. If we had a performance based system and students were falling behind, then teachers would be eager to create an environment where students are working at grade level, that they're caught up, that they're doing all the work that they need to do. And that means in person learning. But there's no incentive for teachers to ensure that students are at grade level because they get paid the same one way or the other. So, you know, it is a matter of incentives of teachers that there really is very little incentive for them to push for remote for an end to remote learning.

And I'll add one more thing as well. The longer we stay in remote learning, the greater the justification for increased expenditures at the federal, state and local level. So when we come out of this pandemic, we are going to face a tremendous challenge with students that are so far behind that there is going to be a tremendous need for remediation of these students. And that means that there's going to be a call for sizable increases in taxes to pay for remedial programs for these kids. So in the end, they get exactly what they want. They get more money from government.

They get remote learning and they get paid just the same as they would in any other situation. Do you think that coming out of this, there might also be a push from parents who are saying, hey, I want more control over this. I've now had to be very closely involved in my child's education.

I've learned a lot of things here. I've got a sense of how little Jill or Johnny does or doesn't do well. Could we actually see this from that lens as well?

I think so. And I think that is an important lens to look at the situation, because in the past, the primary justification for school choice is that there were kids that were stuck in schools that were not meeting their needs. And these were mainly disadvantaged and special needs children where they were getting an inferior education. And so the states were stepping up and providing taxpayer funds to allow these students to go to schools that did meet their needs. But when schools were closed, entire new groups of parents suddenly became invested in the school choice cause. And these are basically working parents, single parents, small business owners that didn't have the luxury of staying home with their child and therefore had to seek out options for their children, options that would provide in-person instruction. So whole new groups that in the past had been very satisfied with the schools that they chose to send their child to because they bought homes in neighborhoods with good schools are suddenly now involved in the school choice movement. And the reality is that we always knew the school choice was mainstream, but now it is a mainstay for whole new groups of parents that never in the past had to ever consider looking at school options for their children. So we see that growing group of people who are starting to kind of have the light bulb go off over their heads about what could be possible for their child if they just were empowered more, perhaps having the money follow the child into whatever venue it is or forum that the parent wants versus money just going into a system. So while that's happening Terry, we also have unions that are targeting North Carolina, all types of unions. Here in our state we have the North Carolina Association of Educators and they're an affiliate of the NEA, the big teachers union in the country. Should we expect that they will be seeking everything you described, more money, higher teacher pay, with a focus on really workers versus kids and parents? Absolutely. I mean, they are in step with the National Education Association, with their parent union, which is pushed for all of those things and really pushed back against efforts from parent groups and organizations such as ours to return to in-person instruction. So it's happening here in North Carolina, just not with the kind of bluster we see in Chicago and in some ways that's a good thing, but in other ways there is an attempt to try to subvert the will of parents here. But I think it's also important for us to pay attention about the incoming Biden administration and what role would the Biden administration have in the school reopening and the school funding debate.

We know that Biden likes the teacher unions is considering a former teacher union official as his secretary of education. Terry, thanks very much. Thank you.

Stay with us. Much more Carolina Journal radio to come in just a moment. Tired of fake news, tired of reporters with political axes to grind? Well, you need to be reading Carolina Journal. Honest, uncompromising old school journalism you expect and you need even better. The monthly Carolina Journal is free to subscribers. Sign up at Carolina Journal.com. You'll receive Carolina Journal newspaper in your mailbox each month.

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I'm Mitch Kochai. We've heard a lot in recent months about police and the relationships between law enforcement and minorities. This is true in North Carolina and across the country. And in this segment, we're going to talk about how one western state has tackled this topic. We're getting help from John Cook, assistant minority leader of the Colorado State Senate.

And if the last name sounds familiar, yes, he is the husband of the John Locke Foundation CEO, Amy Cook. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Mitch.

It's a pleasure to be here. So you in the state Senate and in the legislature in general in Colorado took a look at this issue of accountability and police and law enforcement and its relationships with the community. When this legislation started, you had some real concerns.

Tell us about those. Well, I had a lot of concerns. And because of my background, I did 30 years at the World County Sheriff's Office.

The last is the last 12 years as the elected sheriff. So I looked at this bill and I had a lot of concerns. I called it the revenge bill. I called it a punishment, punish the police bill.

I even said, you know, it's like I called it to some of my friends. It's the police bill. And so I had a lot of concerns because it really did punish law enforcement and punish victims of crime in a very serious way. So a lot of concerns with the bill. What were some of the problems with the bill?

The bill was 40 pages. And so there were a lot of issues, but some of them when it came to the victims, you had to have a body cam on the entire time. You were not allowed to turn it off. So every officer had to have a body cam on. Well, the problem with that is if an officer gets called to a sexual assault on a child and they walk in and there's a naked child there or there's a bloody scene of some kind, you could not redact it. You were not allowed to redact anything from the body cam. And it had to be released within seven days to the public and to the media.

And that was a huge problem for victims rights and, you know, for privacy protection of victims and children. Body cams had to be on the entire time. So what if the officer had to go to the restroom? You know, he was not allowed to turn it off.

And if there was, it was it was a criminal penalty for turning off the body cam. They wanted to do away with the good faith exception for law enforcement and the qualified immunity. I wasn't too concerned about the qualified immunity, but the good faith exception I was going to die on my hill for because law enforcement operates on good faith every day by what victims or witnesses tell them. And they're operating on good faith. And if a witness tells an officer something and the officer makes an arrest based on that good faith and it turns out to be wrong, then the officer could be sued up to one hundred thousand dollars, not allowed to have insurance.

And the city could not indemnify him. So it was really punishing the the officer on the street for operating on under good faith. We're chatting with Senator John Cook of the Colorado State Senate.

And as we mentioned, he is the husband of the John Locke Foundation CEO, Amy Cook. Do you think that the problems with this bill were all because they were out to punish the police? Or was it a case of people who just didn't really have the background in law enforcement that that you did and didn't realize that we're going to be these problems? I think a little bit of both. And I think the way it started, you know, with the incident up in Minneapolis and it was like legislatures are knee jerk bodies.

You know, it's like, oh, something happened over here. We have to do something about it now. And so this bill was pretty much ramrodded through. And the ACLU, who is one of the main authors of the bill with the legislators, they admitted they just threw everything up on the wall to see what would stick.

And they wanted free flowing ideas from from their people. And so they just threw everything up and came up with this bill that was just horrendous. Well, we mentioned that the bill as it stood was a problem. You were not going to vote for it as it was originally introduced. It ended up passing your Senate 32 to one, got through the whole legislature, got signed into law. What happened to make it an acceptable and very acceptable bill?

Well, what happened was in committee, I was put on the state affairs committee because of my background in law enforcement. And we started picking the bill apart in committee with the bill sponsors. And I'll be quite frank, I don't think the bill sponsors even knew what was in the bill.

They didn't understand it because we were starting to ask questions. We were taking it piece by piece by piece of the bill sponsors. And after about an hour, the committee chair said, well, we're not going to take any more questions for the bill sponsors. We're going to go straight to witnesses now. I've never in my six years down there ever seen that happen as I feel we have a right as senators to ask the bill sponsors questions.

And he cut that off. And at the end, I said, this is a horrible bill. And, you know, I'd like to see some changes that and maybe have something I can support.

This is what you need to do. We need to have amendments to do this, take this in, take this out, put this in, rewrite this whole section. And pretty much they did everything we asked. And so when they came back, it was pretty much rewritten, totally 100 percent rewritten bill. Now, it's not perfect by any means. And but it was something that we could support. And because every Senate Republican was opposed to the bill as as written and they needed they needed Republican votes because some of the Democrats were getting a lot of pressure from their sheriffs. This bill you mentioned earlier is not a perfect one.

But what does it do that's good? I'm a big proponent of body cams because I think body cams exonerate law enforcement more than it does indict them. And so it requires every agency to eventually have body cameras.

And it worked out a system where the body, the footage can be redacted. And it also sets up a grant fund for the agencies that can't afford it to to buy the body cams. And the most expensive part about body cameras is the storage. It's not the body cam.

Some of the vendors were giving body cameras away for free if you use their system because the storage is so expensive. So it has a pathway for law enforcement agencies to get the body cams. And, you know, I think it does. It shows that law enforcement is willing to work with the communities in that the chiefs of police association, the sheriff's association and the DA's association in the final version all came out and supported the bill. And so I think the message is, hey, look, law enforcement, we're here. We want to work with our communities. We want to work with the legislature. And we're going to support these changes because we recognize the fact that even though this stuff happened up in Minnesota, we don't want it happening here.

So I think it sends a broad message. We've been talking largely about what's happened in Colorado, because that's what you have been working on. If you were giving some advice to people in North Carolina or other states about how to move forward with this, I suspect maybe one of the first things you would say is make sure law enforcement attorneys, the people who actually have to deal with this are part of the process.

Absolutely. Because that did not happen in Colorado. It was they came up with the bill. As a matter of fact, we didn't even see the bill until it got introduced. And then as soon as it got introduced, it was sent to committee. So we didn't even see the bill, had no idea what it was in it until literally about an hour or two before we had to go to committee. And so, yes, work with the professionals, work with them, get their buy-in. And the other thing is don't rush it. You know, we rammed this through in, like I said, 40 pages. We rammed it through in literally in about a week and a half at the end of session. So start early is what I would suggest to the legislature. Start early if you're looking at something like this and work out all the bugs.

So that way you don't have to come back the next year and clean it up. And like you said, get the buy-in of the professionals. That is the voice of Senator John Cook of the Colorado State Senate, Assistant Minority Leader, a Republican. And he is the husband of the John Locke Foundation's CEO, Amy Cook. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me.

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I'm Mitch Kokay. Amy O. Cook, the right AOC, recently offered her North Carolina audience an important update. I've got some exciting news for you about North Carolina and about two of the state's premier most prominent state-based free market think tanks. And to share the space with me, Donald Bryson, CEO of the Civitas Institute. The big news is the fact that the John Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute will be merging capabilities going into 2021. And so we will be bringing all the great things that you love about both organizations such as Carolina Journal and the Civitas Poll, the hard-hitting analysis on whatever bill is at the General Assembly combined with the deep research at the John Locke Foundation. All of those things will be under one roof and working together going forward into 2021.

It's really exciting, Donald, that we get to do this. And really, we found this out how well we work together, not just the two of us, but our organizations over the summer and into the fall as we both focused a lot on educating voters on the fact that they could even vote on judicial races. And that was really where we sort of got a first taste of how these two organizations work together, how they collaborate, and just how good they are together. We are so much better together.

We are absolutely better together. And we've seen the massive investment that the left is putting into North Carolina. We know that that is not going to stop anytime soon. It's time to adapt and come together and actually concentrate on moving free enterprise, individual liberty forward in North Carolina in the most effective way possible. And in that way, we think that that's being better together.

Absolutely. The other thing that we'll be doing too, we'll be expanding our grassroots outreach, getting outside of Raleigh and going throughout the state. That is something Civitas has always done. But the nice thing about that, that mentality will come over to this new organization, which by the way, will have a new logo, we will be going out to every part of the state of North Carolina. So for the Locke Foundation, which has traditionally been a state capital sort of think tank, providing that deep analysis, the research that legislators and opinion makers need to make wise public policy decisions, we're going to be able to utilize that capacity that Civitas has done so well, and get this out to everybody across the state. There won't be a part of the state of North Carolina where we won't go and visit and get your feedback on what we're doing. That's absolutely right.

And that way, we're converting two think tanks into one single battle tank for the right. We're very excited about the future of North Carolina, what the future of public policy could be in North Carolina, and we're satisfied that the best days of North Carolina are still ahead of us. That's Donald Bryson.

You also heard from Amy Cook. They're the leaders of the combined John Locke Foundation and Civitas Institute. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in a moment. We're doubling down on freedom. At Carolina Journal Radio, we're proud to bring you stories that impact your life and your wallet. And now, get twice as much freedom when you also listen to our podcast, Head Locke, available on iTunes and at johnlock.org slash podcast. Now, Head Locke is a little bit different.

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I'm Mitch Kocke. Today's political debates are infected by grandstanding. What does that mean? Bowling Green State University philosophy professor Brandon Warmke explained during a recent online presentation for the John Locke Foundation. My friend Justin Tosi, we were both grad students together, we noticed at the time on Facebook that that a lot of moral and political discussions seemed to us anyway to be getting more toxic, more poisonous, and spending some time thinking about, you know, what was might be causing these really unpleasant, gross conversations. It looked to us like a lot of people were engaging in discussions of morality and politics to show off how good they were.

Saying things not so much to forward a conversation, not to present an evidence or an argument or data, or even just to express what they think. It seemed to us that a lot of people were trying to impress other people. They were trying to use moral discourse as a vanity project. And so over the next year or so we wrote a paper.

That paper turned into a book. And the basic idea of the book is that moral discourse, our discussions about morality and politics, is a really valuable resource. It's how we solve social problems.

It's how we, you know, recognize injustices, recognize people who are worthy of trust. It's how we figure out how to solve the big problems, both of local, you know, local association and local politics, but also, you know, across the nation. And that tool, that tool of moral and political discourse is a really valuable tool.

And it's a very fragile tool. And we can use it for good ends and we can use it for poor ends. And one of the things we suggest in the book is that one way to abuse our discussions of morality and politics is to use those for self-promotion. To use our discussions of immigration or COVID restrictions or family values or abortion, to use our discussions of these things to try to show off to people that to people that we want to impress, that we have the right moral values, that we're morally impressive specimens. And we call this grandstanding. Now that it has a label, what is this grandstanding all about? Our theory is that a lot of people are engaging in moral grandstanding.

They're using these discussions not so much to actually have a conversation and present data and give evidence and interact with people and have a shared understanding, even if you disagree. What a lot of people are doing is they're trying to raise their social status. They're trying to make themselves look good or they're trying to dominate their enemy. They're trying to gain the upper hand socially and morally to make other people look bad.

Why do people grandstand? A lot of us think we're morally better than average. In fact, lots of studies show that most people think that they're morally better than the average person.

Even violent criminals in prison rate themselves as better than average morally. On every trait except law-abidingness, we tend to think very highly of ourselves. And we also want others to think well of us.

This is a pretty natural desire, too. We want others to admire us, think well of us. Psychologists call that impression management. And so what a lot of us are doing is we're morally enhancing.

We think really well of ourselves. And then often what we really want is the recognition of others of how good we are. And 100 years ago, if you wanted to have an audience to praise you and make yourself look good, you had to be a politician or maybe a minister or stay on the street corner. But now any one of us can fire up our phones and talk to an audience of hundreds or thousands or millions. And so one of our hypotheses is that a lot of people are more grandstanding now just because it's easier to do so.

It's easier to fire up your phone and speak to speak to people and try to get the likes and the retweets to make yourself look good. That's philosophy professor Brandon Warmke of Bowling Green, co-author of a book on grandstanding. He identifies five basic forms. One of those forms is what we call piling on. Piling on is when people, especially if you've seen people engage in sort of like shame fests, someone will say something, some really minor indiscretion or peccadillo, and then the entirety of Twitter jumps on. And a lot of grandstanding takes this form where people are trying to get in on the action, make themselves look good, seem like they're on the right side of history.

It also takes the form of what we call ramping up. So ramping up is what happens when Donna might say something like, I'm really appalled by the Senator's behavior. She should be censured. And I say, Donna, you've got to be kidding me. If you really cared about injustice, you would call for the Senator to resign and she should step down from her position and hashtag do better. And then Justin Tosi, my co-author, jumps in and says, I cannot believe what I'm hearing.

You are all disgusting. The Senator should be put in jail. We must remember the world is watching. So there's a kind of one-upsmanship. I think we've seen this in the last few months when it comes to discussions of police. So earlier in the summer, there were discussions of reforming the police.

And I think a lot of people were like, yeah, I think that sounds like a good idea. And then like within 48 hours, we went from reform the police to defund the police, to abolish the police. And so there's a kind of moral arms race of people competing to take the most extreme stance. Another one we named before, we named this before 2016, it's called trumping up. And trumping up is basically the princess and the pea phenomenon.

So a lot of grandstanders act like they're morally affected by the tiniest moral wrongdoing or injustices that fall below the eye of everyone else don't fall below the eye of the grandstanders. So I can't believe you watch that movie. That movie that movie is racist.

That movie is sexist. And it's like Finding Nemo or something. Another form grandstanding takes is what we call excessive outrage or excessive emotions. So one thing we know from psychology is that one way to show people that you have strong moral convictions is to get outraged about them. And so a lot of grandstanders exploit this feature.

And what they'll do is they get outraged about everything. And then the last form that grandstanding often takes is what we call dismissiveness. And grandstanders are often very dismissive. So the thought is something like, if you can't see what I see, I'm not going to explain it to you.

We don't have anything to discuss here. If it's not obvious to you, I'm not going to waste my time, you know, go away, right? The basic idea in discourse for these grandstanders is to seek status, to make themselves look good, to impress other people. Warmke says grandstanding has plenty of negative consequences. It's leading to polarization, it's leading us to hate each other more as it pushes us further apart. It's leading to cynicism about public discourse.

So when a lot of discourse is seen as nasty and nasty, you know, nasty self-promotion, people check out. Grandstanding influences political discourse. We explain how grandstanding affects politics.

It pushes us further apart and makes it harder to compromise. And it actually makes it harder to solve social problems. So grandstanders have an interest in keeping moral problems alive instead of solving them. Once they solve a moral problem, there's nothing more to grandstand about. And so there's a kind of paradox built into grandstanding about these social issues. So if you ever get the sense that maybe some of these people aren't really interested in solving the problem, our explanation is, well, maybe they are. Maybe they have an interest in keeping their problem alive to keep their livelihood, their status, their popularity.

If you solve the problem for which you're famous, you don't have any reason to be popular and famous anymore for keeping that problem alive and discussing it. What should we do about grandstanding? It's probably not a good idea to go around calling people out for grandstanding for various reasons. So it's very tempting and you see people you think are grandstanding to say, oh, you grandstander, you know, shut up. But it's actually very hard to tell whether someone's grandstanding.

You can't tell just by what they're saying. What we do recommend is instead of looking at other people and trying to figure out who the grandstander is, to turn our gaze inward, looking in the mirror and asking ourselves, you know, why am I engaging in public discourse? Am I doing this to do good? Am I actually going to successfully help someone or do something good with this?

Or am I just trying to look good? That's Bowling Green State philosophy professor Brandon Warmke, co-author of the book Grandstanding. He discussed his work during a recent online presentation for the John Locke Foundation. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in a moment. Real influence.

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I'm Donna Martinez. Governor Roy Cooper has since the early part of 2020 used the state's Emergency Management Act to impose restrictions on our movement, restrictions on business, commerce, all sorts of things. Now our next guest is very concerned about the governor's muscular reliance on this law, not only now, but for the precedent this could actually set for future governors. John Guse is director of legal studies for the John Locke Foundation. He joins us now with a look at the issue of the power of government. John, welcome back to the program.

Thank you, Donna. One person essentially controlling the lives of more than 10 million people, it seems like an idea that you really don't want to buy into no matter who that person is, Democrat, Republican. Certainly not. It's the very definition of tyranny. That's the whole reason we have a separation of powers under our federal constitution and emphatically under our North Carolina constitution. The governor ordinarily doesn't have the power to make these rules.

That power lies with the General Assembly the way it should. It's a legislative power, not an executive power. So the Emergency Management Act is the issue here and how it's being interpreted by Governor Cooper. He is saying that it gives him the right to make all these decisions in a situation that is out of the ordinary, and we're talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. What is your read of the Emergency Management Act? Well, this is an act, there's similar acts in every state. It does seem to make sense, on its face at least, to give the governor some extraordinary powers in an actual emergency to enforce, to make and enforce orders without going through the whole legislative process. That's what Emergency Powers Acts are for, and that's what our act is for.

But you don't want to give them unchecked powers, and it's important that any good well-crafted emergency act provide those kinds of checks. Now, ours is particularly good because in North Carolina we have something called the Council of State. We don't have a unitary executive the way many states do. Executive power in the state is dispersed over 10 different executive officers, each of whom is elected by the people. These are all the statewide elected officials, agriculture commissioner, lieutenant governor, those types of positions.

That's right. And because they come from more than one party, they're pretty equally divided right now between the Democrats and Republicans, because they hail from different parts of the state, and because each of them is elected by the people, that's an important check on executive power. So what we've got in our Emergency Power Act is a provision that says, yes, the governor can declare an emergency, yes, he has certain standard powers, but he also has extraordinary powers that he could exercise with the concurrence of the Council of State. When he issued his very first one of these lockdown orders, the one that closed the bars and restaurants, he actually sought approval from the Council of State, and he claimed in the order itself that he had obtained it, but in fact he hadn't.

Six members refused to go along with this order, and he went ahead anyway. And he claimed he could do that because there's a separate provision that pertains to local authorities and their powers, they have their own set of powers. And in that provision, it's Section 1930c, it says that if the governor finds that local control is insufficient to deal with the emergency, he can exercise another set of powers. And so now, ever since that first order, he's been relying on those powers under 30c, the problem there is that if all he has to do is simply say, oh well, local authority, local control is insufficient, then he's got unlimited powers and he doesn't need the Council of State. I don't think that can be the right interpretation, but that's the interpretation he's taking. Here's what I find curious, John. If initially Governor Cooper did go to the Council of State to try to get their approval, doesn't that indicate you to you by his actions that his own administration's view is that he wanted and needed their approval?

Well, yes. I mean, if you read that first order, that's very clear that that's how he thought this is supposed to work. And he's just changed his position ever since because he couldn't get the approval that he wanted. It was interesting as well that the current Lieutenant Governor, Dan Forrest, who at the time was challenging Governor Cooper for the governor's seat. Dan Forrest, of course, lost that race.

Governor Roy Cooper will serve a second term, but that was an important issue to Lieutenant Governor Dan Forrest. And didn't he challenge that legally? He did. He filed a lawsuit saying that all these orders were illegal because they were issued without Council of State concurrence.

He took it a good deal of the way. But when he got a first adverse ruling from a court, not on the merits of his complaint itself, but simply on his request for an emergency or a temporary injunction to stop enforcement, when the court ruled against him there, he just dropped the suit, which was, I thought, very disappointing. So the General Assembly, the legislature makes the laws in the state. Does that mean then, John, that the General Assembly could take this up and amend this act to make it very clear that one person doesn't have sole control? They could.

And in my opinion, they should. Of course, if they do it in the next session, likely outcome is that the governor will just veto it. But they might be able, if they have it any sense, the members of both parties will see that this is a case of the governor usurping their legitimate powers under the Constitution. I would think at least some Democrats might see that that's not what we want. They might override a veto. And even if they don't, we just have to start the process. Sooner or later, I think, we'll get to the point where our governor will go along with this. Because it's obviously what we needed. That's not the only thing that's wrong with the Emergency Management Act.

What else? Well, one of the biggest problems that I see with it is open-ended. Most states Emergency Management Acts have a time limit, 30 days in some cases, 90 days in some others. But at some point, the governor has to go to the legislature and say, I need you to extend my powers. They don't just allow the governor go on acting like a tyrant or a dictator or a king indefinitely.

There's a fixed limit on the duration of his powers. Our act doesn't have that. And I think we need to add it.

I think that's very important. I wonder about the precedent that's being set here, John, because let's say it's a future governor. Maybe it's a governor I agree with. Maybe it's a governor I disagree with. But let's say that he or she decides that climate change is the emergency that is occurring in North Carolina or it's another public health issue.

Maybe it's the flu or something we don't even know about yet. Aren't we really setting ourselves up here for people in that position feeling that, well, Roy Cooper did it, so I'm going to do it too? I think we absolutely are setting ourselves up for that. That's exactly the prospect we've got ahead of us all over the country. In fact, governors have clearly been relishing all these extensive powers, and it's going to be hard for them, I think, to relinquish them once the pandemic is over.

I'm hoping that not just in North Carolina, but all over the country steps will be taken to rein in these powers so that we don't end up in this situation, again, where governors can just exercise to radical powers unchecked. In fact, you have been writing about the fact that it is the burden of government to illustrate to the people that this is necessary at this time. Talk a little bit more, if you would, John, about the relationship between the governed and the government. Well, our country was founded on what I call the presumption of liberty. All else being equal, people should be free to do, to act, to think, to talk, and to act as they please without government interference. Anytime the government wants to interfere through regulation and other kinds of directives on how people behave, the burden is on the government to prove that this is an important interest at stake here, that this is the most efficient and least restrictive way to accomplish what needs to be done and so forth.

Unfortunately, courts have stopped enforcing that the way they should, but I'm hoping it'll make a comeback. John Guse is the director of legal studies for the John Locke Foundation. He's been writing about these really consequential issues of the relationship between government and the governed, and particularly the Emergency Management Act that Governor Cooper has been relying on for months and months now in order to dictate what more than 10 million North Carolinians can and cannot do during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's all the time we have for Carolina Journal-Radio this week.

Thank you for listening. On behalf of Mitch Kokai, I'm Donna Martinez. 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 email to development at johnlock.org or call 1-866-JLF-INFO.

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