Carolina Journal Radio No. 921: Chief Justice Newby takes over as top N.C. court official

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 Kochein. During the next hour, Donna Martinez and I will explore some major issues affecting our state. With American history under attack, a recent textbook titled Land of Hope aims to tell a more balanced story.

We'll chat with the author, noted historian Wilfred Maclay. COVID-19 will continue to cause challenges for the University of North Carolina system throughout the rest of the academic year. You'll learn about some key issues university campuses face. North Carolina voters have added some new faces to the roster of statewide elected executive branch officials. You'll hear directly from the new state superintendent of public instruction, and you'll hear an expert assessment of the new state labor commissioner. How will these two new figures affect North Carolina public policy?

Those topics are just ahead. But first, Donna Martinez joins us. She has the Carolina Journal headline. Well, it took several weeks back in December to determine the official winner who would be the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, but it is a done deal after a recount.

And the Republican Paul Newby is the chief justice of the state's highest court. Rick Henderson is editor in chief of Carolina Journal. He's been watching not only the race closely, but what's ahead for the North Carolina Supreme Court. And he joins me now. Rick, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Donna. First of all, why was this race for chief justice of the court so intensely watched, not only in North Carolina, but across the country? There was a lot of interest in the race across the country because the Democratic Party, especially a group led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, poured a lot of money into these races. Holder runs a group that's trying to affect redistricting and to make sure that states that go through the redistricting process after the next census draw districts as favorable as possible to Democrats. And so he targeted his group, targeted Republican led states. Exactly. And they wanted to make sure that there was a Democratic Supreme Court in North Carolina, because that's almost certainly where judicial challenges to redistricting will wind up, because the U.S. Supreme Court has basically said this is a state matter.

We're not going to deal with these anymore, largely. And so they so what what this was was an effort to make sure that there were as many friendly votes for Democrats as possible on the courts. And Justice Beasley was the highest profile race, because as the chief, she does have more authority to policymaking in other areas than the associate justices did. She was the head of the Supreme Court. She was the Democrat in the race, but she's now been defeated by the Republican.

That is correct. And she was there were a lot of machinations in getting her into this position because the initially she was an associate justice on the Supreme Court. Her term was supposed to run out in twenty twenty two.

But when Mark Martin, Republican, retired from the bench in early twenty nineteen, Governor Roy Cooper elevated Sherry Beasley to the chief's position. And what that did was that opened up her seat as an associate justice. But it also meant that she would have to defend that seat in the next general election. So it opened up two seats. And because of that, in a year that if they thought they were going to do the Democrats thought they were going to do really well, they'd have an opportunity to have all seven seats on the Supreme Court because they had six of the seven at the point of the twenty twenty election. But now that Paul Newby is the chief justice and we've had several other Republicans win seats on the Supreme Court, what's the makeup now is now for three Democratic. But the the thing is that Newby had already announced the second Martin retired. He announced he was going to run for chief in twenty twenty because he was passed over, for one thing, by Cooper, a whole nother story, a separate story.

But nonetheless, his seat was going to be open regardless. Democrats saw it as an opportunity to take total control of the court and said it completely backfired on them. You know, I've mentioned the story I wrote that has been termed as an own goal by Cooper, that Governor Cooper could have at a minimum kept two Democrats on the court. But instead, he now has only five Democrats on the court.

He said he has four. And the most important one is in Republican has most important seat. And by the way, you mentioned an article you wrote that's available at Carolina Journal Dotcom.

So going forward, twenty twenty one, it's here. And so we have four Democrats, three Republicans sitting on the state's highest court with Republican Paul Newby as the chief. What does the chief do?

Why is that so important? He is the chief. He's the head of the administrative office of the courts. And that's the that's the body that sets policies and procedures for all the courts in the state.

There's an administrator who who he hires also, who's his choice to handle those details. The chief also assigns opinions when the Supreme Court hears a case who's going to write the majority minority opinions. He he also is in the role of picking the chief judge of the Court of Appeals. He picks the senior judge on the superior courts around the state. And he also selects judges for things like business court, which is a very important court in which district or superior court judges will hear cases involving questions of regulation or business disputes or things like that. He actually selects the judges who will hear those cases.

And so it's a it's a very important role. Fair to say then that the chief justice's philosophy and we know that Republican Paul Newby's philosophy is very much about constitutional interpretation, constitutional government, making sure that you read a law essentially as it is rather than making law, since you're a member of the judiciary, not the legislature. Fair to say that that whole philosophy is going to be reflected in all those appointments that he makes.

I would certainly say so. I also think that Justice Newby is somebody who has been in the judiciary for quite a while and he knows the other judges. I think he will be in the position to pick people he thinks are knowledgeable and appropriate for the different positions because they are different roles that they play.

So it's not just necessarily want to be picked. The people who he thinks are the most conservative on every issue for things he's want to pick experienced judges who who are going to be effective in administering the roles that they play. But also, it's going to be interesting, too, because the Supreme Court has sided very tightly with Governor Roy Cooper on several separation of powers lawsuits that have been filed in recent years. And Justice Newby was on the opposite side of those majority opinions by the Democrat led majority. And so now with two other allies who both Tamara Beringer and Phil Berger Jr., who both ran again as constitutionalists and textualists and not as judicial activists, plus a couple of moderate Democrats on the court as well. Centrist in Sam Ervin, the fourth and in Mike Morgan, you've got possibility for some coalition building and some consensus building on this new court that almost certainly would not have existed had had Justice Chief Justice Beasley been reelected.

Rick, we know that the covid-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of life. What about the court system? Is there going to be a difference in the way Chief Justice Newby approaches access to courts in opposition to the way that the former chief justice, Jerry Beasley, approached it? I think that's going to probably happen and we'll probably see that fairly quickly, because one of the things that Chief Justice Beasley did immediately after she conceded was that she continued to extend a closure of the courts over another period of time in which all actions are going to be taking place virtually, electronically, with very little human interaction taking place in the courts.

And so that's really, really difficult. I mean, it's almost impossible to conduct jury trials virtually, for one thing. And secondly, it does tend to slow the operation of justice. What Paul Newby has said is that he would like to see a situation in which places where there aren't major covid outbreaks or where the courts themselves are set up so that you can handle issues of social distancing and the like better. He would like to have those courts more open faster to the public as long as the proper precautions are taken. And he's somebody who certainly doesn't believe in a one size fits all role for the administration of justice during this pandemic. And so that's going to be one of the real noticeable things people will see.

That'll be very interesting to see how that plays out also. We also know that he is very much a proponent of civic education. Should we anticipate that he'll be out and about talking about those issues, trying to help educate the public about what the court system does? Yes, he's very much someone who likes to make sure that people understand what the courts do, why they're there, why they do some things and not others, and what the role of a judiciary in a constitutional republic is. So I think we'll absolutely see that. And also, he might go and tell the story about how he saved our copy of the Bill of Rights from thieves when he led that sting operation.

That's another story, the fascinating one. It is indeed. We'll have you back on Carolina Journal ready to talk about that one for sure. So we have a new Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

It is Republican Justice Paul Newby. Rick Henderson is Editor-in-Chief of Carolina Journal. Of course, carolinajournal.com following all the opinions that come out of the state's highest court. Thank you, Rick.

Thank you. We'll have much more Carolina Journal radio to come in just a moment. Tired of fake news?

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I'm Mitch Kocai. American history is under attack. Critics dispute the notion that this country is special and great. On the opposite side of that argument, upholding a traditional understanding of America's positive role in the world, Land of Hope. It's a text from University of Oklahoma historian Wilfred Maclay.

He recently visited Raleigh to discuss the book for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Why write another textbook about American history? When the College Board changed their AP U.S. history standards in a direction that was just kind of mind-numbing, de-emphasizing the Constitution, the Constitution Convention, the Founders. They backed off from that. There was a group of us, I was very much a part of this, that wrote a letter asking them to reconsider their standards. They never acknowledged the letter, but they did back off. But we could see the handwriting on the wall.

The European exam similarly has become politicized. So we saw there was a need for a balanced, accurate, fair-minded, non-political textbook. When people started asking me if I would be interested in doing it, I said, oh, no, no way. I would rather be writing my scholarly monographs and that kind of thing. It's a great idea.

I hope you find someone to do it. But eventually it sort of dawned on me that I'd been complaining about history instruction in textbooks and this sort of thing, both orally and in print for years. And when was I going to do something about it instead of just complaining? So it's a very accessible book that's written to be read. I think that's one of the distinctives about it. And I insisted on doing it that way. I didn't want to have a lot of sidebars, a lot of gizmos and gimmicks.

I wanted to have a readable book. What about that title, Land of Hope? There's the land part, actually. I don't subscribe to the notion that America is primarily an idea. I think we are an idea, but we're more we're also a country. We're also a land that has a specific history and that learning that history is part of what being a citizen is about.

I had in the back of my mind in all these materials, the preparation of young people for citizenship. So that's really what's one of the things I had in mind with Land of Hope. But hope, that's obviously the key noun. I think America is best understood as an aspirational nation. We are an aspirational people. To understand America, it's not enough to tote up the data, the statistics in nice, neat columns. You have to look at a kind of spiritual quality for lack of a better term.

Maybe it's not always sometimes it's in the drive to be the best and the wealthiest and whatever. But that's part of hope, too. What is American, it seems to me, about this is that we are we are a people that is that are committed to the idea that no one should be confined to the conditions of his or her birth, that everyone should have opportunity to to rise in the world and the running room within a free society and a free economy to do that. And that's that's one way of thinking about hope.

Hope is not acquiescing in the hand you've been dealt, but entertaining the hope that something better can be found. That's the voice of historian Wilfred Maclay, author of the American history text Land of Hope, recent featured speaker for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. You believe the American story is a great story.

I want to emphasize this. I think we do our young people, maybe our whole society, a great disservice by failing to see and point out and acknowledge the elements of greatness, of incomparable greatness in our history, along with an honest reckoning with our many faults. And the book is full of faults. And it is it's not a sermon in one way or the other, but it it is not a a prettifying of the American past and particularly slavery, Indian removal, the general shameful history of treatment of the native, the indigenous peoples.

That's all in there. Maybe not at the length that some people would like who would like to make that the focus. The great American story is a story that needs to be told. I think I fear that young people are only getting what I call the inglorious story. The story of America as a land of perfidy and malice and oppression and injustice. And while you can find all of those things, the question is, is that is that the overall theme? Is that what we want to the image of ourselves that we want to have, that we want to convey to the young as a way of giving ourselves the material to move forward?

I think not. What's your response to the controversial and largely anti-American 1619 project? I think the 1619 thing is so unfortunate. It's such a missed opportunity because I'm all for the idea of emphasizing that the history of African peoples in America, in the Americas and particularly in what became the United States, is not an asterisk. It has a central importance. There's been a lot of criticism of the 1619 project's historical inaccuracies. And basically the Times and the chief editor and the person who put the project together have simply failed to deal with those challenges, which is that's part of what scholarly discourse is about.

If you make a bold claim, you back it up. How has the book changed your thinking about important historical events or figures? I have a much more favorable view of the presidents of the 1920s, the Republican presidents, even Harding, but certainly Coolidge, less so Hoover. I see Hoover much more as already assimilated to progressivism.

But yeah, you look at the successes of those years and I think we tend too much to cast the shadow of the depression over them. Every time I work through what I think about Lincoln and the sequence of things that I think are important for people to know about him, the more impressed I am with him, I think actually this is going to sound like nothing much, but I had to spend a lot of time with George Washington. My goodness, I think I underestimated him.

He's even greater than I thought he was. I'm not inventing a radically different account of American history. I'm trying to restore some sense of this as a story. And so I kind of feel the way Jefferson said about the Declaration, that he wasn't trying to come up with anything original. He was trying to give a sense of the American mind. What I'm trying to do with Land of Hope is similar. I'm trying to restore and put into a more palatable form, informed by some of the critical scholarship of the last 30, 50 years, a view of American history that can make sense to particularly young people.

I mean, that's who this is really written for. It's for young people. Professor Wilfred Maclay, historian and author of Land of Hope, an invitation to the great American story. Thank you for joining us. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in 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 Kocay. COVID-19 will continue to present challenges for the University of North Carolina system. Those challenges will extend throughout the rest of the academic year.

System President Peter Hans offered a recent update for the university's Board of Governors. I ask for your patience as we plan for a spring semester that will once again test our discipline and flexibility. We have learned a lot. Humbly, I think we can admit that we have learned a lot this fall from the very different approaches taken across the system. And we'll be applying all of those lessons to the upcoming semester. As with the fall semester, you'll see a mix of online, in-person, and hybrid learning, depending on local circumstances and the needs and capacities of each campus.

No two institutions will look exactly alike in how they continue to deliver a world-class education, and that's by design. Because our role here at the system level is to provide resources, guidance, coordination, and that's what we'll continue to do as chancellors develop and implement their spring plans. The plans, of course, are still being refined. They're subject to change, depending on circumstances and evolving public health guidance. But we know the start of spring semester classes will be delayed by around two weeks. That's more time to weather a difficult stretch with improved treatments and safe vaccines, some of which are being researched at our own institutions. There will be wellness days spread strategically throughout the semester in lieu of spring break to avoid the traveling back and forth. There'll be reduced residence hall occupancy, particularly at those large campuses that may have single occupancy only in on-campus residence halls. There'll be increased on-campus bed space for isolation and quarantine with backup surge capacity, expanded and ongoing surveillance testing, and improved symptomatic testing in student health centers.

And there will be reentry testing, either prior to or upon arrival at move-in. There are no perfect solutions for the dilemmas we face. People's lives aren't on indefinite hold, which means we have to keep offering the education and research our students need. We have to do it in a way that balances public health with the very real long-term consequences of cutting off avenues of opportunity for a whole generation of students.

Every one of us is facing versions of that dilemma in our work, in our lives, and I hope and pray we're making all the best choices we can under circumstances that none of us wanted. That's Peter Hans, president of the University of North Carolina System. During a recent meeting of the system's board of governors, he discussed the university's ongoing reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. We'll return with more Carolina Journal Radio in a moment. We're doubling down on freedom.

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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 Kokay. North Carolina voters elected Republican Katherine Truitt to serve as the new state superintendent of public instruction and education advisor to former Republican Governor Pat McCrory. Truitt most recently served as chancellor for the online Western Governors University in North Carolina.

Truitt discussed her new role during a recent online presentation for the John Locke Foundation. I am working diligently already with the State Board of Education to examine issues that are facing us right now. For example, our accountability and testing issues that we've got going on where parents are incredibly concerned about some of the things that are happening with testing right now.

Just just as one example, I'm building a team, I would say as the expression goes, have hit the ground running. Truitt wants to get students back into classrooms, but she can't make that decision on her own. I've had some great conversations with the governor's office and with DHHS about what's happening in our schools and have made my position clear, which is that I want to see us continue to go in this direction of more local control. As I've said throughout the campaign, the decision to reopen schools should be should rest with local health officials, local superintendents, local school boards.

Right now, we've got about 80 percent of kids in our state are in some form of in-person or hybrid learning. What we've got to do now is give that same level of control over to high schools. So what what I would like to see is for the governor's office to lift the restriction on returning to Plan A for grades 9 to 12. And but then I'm in a difficult situation because although personally I feel that it is actually safer for our kids to be back in school, we do have the issue of what our local districts decide to do. My own children are in Wake County Public Schools, and I would love for them to be in school more than they are. But as the superintendent, I will need to accept the decisions that are made at the local level.

And I think that's hard for for for folks to get their head around that, you know, as the state superintendent, I don't have regulatory authority over our local superintendents. Truitt emphasizes the impact of school closings during the time of COVID-19. In the United States, over a million low to middle income women have lost their jobs because of heavy handed government shutdown, namely because of school closures.

And parents having to choose between their children and a job is an untenable situation. And I am going to continue to advocate that our schools reopen. We have a lot of schools that have reopened. We are are the cases of COVID that we've seen are primarily in our private schools, not in our public schools. And they are instances where adults are bringing COVID to school, not children spreading it to adults. And so I have every every confidence that our schools can be when they follow the guidelines set forth by DHHS are not only safe, but safer than most other places. That's Katherine Truitt, newly elected North Carolina's superintendent of public instruction.

She's speaking during an online presentation for the John Locke Foundation. Truitt wants to focus attention on early literacy. Right now in North Carolina, two thirds of eighth graders headed into high school are not reading and doing math proficiently. So that's an incredibly high number, 67%. And when we disaggregate that, we find that it disproportionately impacts low income students and specifically Hispanic students are only a third or less than a third. Twenty eight percent are reading and doing math proficiently headed into ninth grade and only 14% of African-American students are.

We know what the root cause analysis of this is already. It's that we're not using research backed methods of early literacy instruction when children are in an elementary school. This is something that can be fixed, but it's going to take the legislature and as well as the UNC system and educate our colleges of education, as well as the state board adjusting policies. And it's going to take some changes in the way we assess as well our students. So there already is work being done at the state board and the Department of Public Instruction as well as in the legislature and the UNC system to bring everyone together to coalesce around solving an issue, which really is tantamount to education malpractice, that we have not been able to, no matter how much money we've spent the last 35 years, have not been able to move the needle on student achievement for all students in our state. And it's time to recognize that this is not just about money. This is about looking at outputs as well as inputs. And this is something that everyone can agree needs to be fixed.

And that is the first thing that I'm going to start working on. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted parents' critical role in education. I always, you know, as a teacher, thought of parents in two buckets. You have this group over here that is just not, for whatever reason, able to engage in what's going on at school. It could be that they're not educated themselves.

They're in survival mode, whatever the issue is. And then on the other side, you've got a group of highly engaged parents who are on a weekly basis engaged at their children's schools with their teachers, et cetera. And then you've got the squishy group in the middle. Now we're going to see an even greater divide into those two groups. You've got more and more parents ever before moving into this group over here because they know more, they see more, but then we're going to continue as the digital divide becomes even more prevalent because the digital learning is not going away.

This remote instruction is not going away even when kids are back in school for various reasons. So we are going to have to start at the state level prioritizing parent voice in a way that hasn't before. And I certainly intend for that to be a hallmark of my administration. Truitt knows schools are going to have to address learning loss linked to COVID-19. The learning loss is going to be most acute with our low-income students, which is why we've got to get kids back in school.

We are seeing divergent groups being affected differently, which is why I don't understand groups that are continuing to push for kids not to return to school, making false claims that this is about safety of children, not using data and science to support their claims that schools need to remain shuttered. That's Katherine Truitt, North Carolina's new elected state superintendent of public instruction. She delivered these remarks 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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For freedom. For the future of North Carolina. We are the John Locke Foundation. Welcome back to Carolina Journal Radio. I'm Donna Martinez. He is one of the North Carolina Republican Party's new generation of statewide leaders. Josh Dobson, a veteran state legislator, is now North Carolina's Commissioner of Labor, having defeated Democrat Jessica Holmes in November. Becky Gray of the John Locke Foundation knows Josh Dobson, and she joins us now with a look at the new commissioner and what's ahead in the labor arena. Becky, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Donna. Tell us about the new commissioner. Well, first of all, the way that I know him is he served in the North Carolina General Assembly for eight years, four terms. He was elected from McDowell County in the western part of the state. Formally, he was a McDowell County commissioner. So I always love those legislators who come with some some experience like that, particularly county commissioners putting budgets together and those kind of things.

And Josh Dobson was quickly identified as a leader. Through those years, he served as the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. So and also took a real interest in health care and a leadership position there. And so I got to know him when he was in the General Assembly as a very thoughtful, methodical member who we have a great relationship with him because he relied on the information that we provide at the John Locke Foundation, but not solely on the information that we provide. He was always very interested in bringing different groups with expertise and different ideas to the table. That was one of the things that I admired about him as a member of the General Assembly. He was very much a coalition builder and really wanted to not just, you know, listen to a stakeholder and go that way for the sake of, you know, a campaign contribution or, you know, other things. He always wanted to get all of the information at the table and encourage people to listen to each other.

We need more of that now. So I am delighted that he will now be, is now our labor commissioner, will be for the next four years, takes the place, of course, of long serving Sherry Berry, whose picture was in elevators across the state. Everybody knows that Rob is the elevator person. Right.

So we may see Josh Dodson's picture in the elevators very shortly. His campaign was rather interesting. And sometimes the activities of the labor commissioner having to do with worker freedom and right to work laws, et cetera, doesn't get a whole lot of news media coverage because it's not real sexy, frankly, but it's really important. Well, it is very important. And I think one reason why it doesn't get a lot of press and information is a lot of what the labor commissioner does is they enforce national federal workplace and employee laws, OSHA and those kind of things. And so, you know, for a large part, it's not a big policy making organization. It's more of an enforcement kind of watchdog kind of urging things along.

I mean, some of the things that I mean, what they do is very important. One is when there are disputes with employees about whether or not they get wages, whether their wages are paid. And that's one thing that goes through the Department of Labor. And Josh Dobson has already said, you know, he believes strongly that if somebody has done the work and been promised they're going to get paid for it, they ought to get paid for it. And so I expect him to be a strong advocate along those ways. And as we see in so many things, it's that balance between the role of government and the private sector, because a lot of these rules and regulations have a tremendous impact and a cost for the juror.

So there's a protection for both in there. And it's that balance that he's going to be working with. And in fact, like many of the elected statewide officials in North Carolina, he's got COVID-19 to deal with. And already some issues have come up having to do with worker rights and labor relations and the environment that people are working in, particularly in some of North Carolina's agricultural communities.

Right. And we saw the latter part of the year, there was a petition for making and enforcing much stricter rules that have to do with the COVID pandemic protections for people in meat processing plants and in migrant workers is what it was kind of directed at. But when you got into the meat of the rules that they were requesting, it really would have affected every single business across North Carolina.

Cherie Berry declined that request for rulemaking. The Lot Foundation submitted a letter saying that there ought to be some other considerations and we ought to go slow on this and then we ought to look at the impact that it would have on the enforcers as well as the enforcers and that perhaps it just needed some more thought. But that is still very much at the forefront. And what Josh Dobson has said in his response, because, of course, he has been asked, well, what would we see what the former commissioner did?

What would you do under those circumstances? And what Josh Dobson has said on that is that, you know, he addresses and understands the problem that it is for workers as well as for employers, and that his intent would be the same way as he worked through many important issues through the General Assembly. And that is to bring lots of different people to the table and to hear the complaints and the concerns of those representing the workers, but at the same time to hear from the businesses and the employers as to what the impact on them would be.

Again, that balance that you're finding. And also, I think that something that Josh Dobson really brings to the table that we're going to see, too, is the economic impact with his familiarity being the appropriations chair and the leader in putting North Carolina's budget together. And I'm guessing that the General Assembly will lean somewhat on Josh Dobson as the labor commissioner now for help in distributing some of the COVID money that we anticipate to come in during this next year and additional appropriations that may go for things that impact workers and employers. So I think his voice and the role that the labor commissioner is going to play in these things, given his experience, his relationship with the General Assembly, I think that we're going to see more coalition building and bringing things to the table and looking at the whole picture as these decisions are made. He's also going to have to deal with the targeting of North Carolina by a number of labor unions across the country.

They see North Carolina as a potential for expanding the union influence. But we're a right-to-work state. We do have a ban on collective bargaining by public sector unions.

But there are some Democratic state legislators who very recently within the last couple of years have filed bills seeking to repeal that ban. Do we have a sense of what the new commissioner thinks about those types of issues? Not only do we have a sense, but he has been absolutely adamant on this particular topic from during the election since he's been elected is that he is 100 percent in support of North Carolina's very strong right-to-work laws, those rights and freedoms for workers that they don't have to belong to a union. And also, he is opposed to collective bargaining.

When I asked him about it recently, I thought it was interesting. He worked his way through college as a public safety officer. And so he brings a very personal perspective to this notion of collective bargaining and for state employees to be able to strike, to walk out. And he said he sees this as a public safety issue of, you know, what if in the middle of this, what if during those riots, police officers had decided to go on strike to just walk away?

You know, I mean, what if that kind of thing happened? So he is very adamant. He's made his position clear.

And I don't anticipate him veering from that at all. Now, what he can do specifically in his role as the commissioner, it may just be the megaphone that he now has to talk to. And again, his relationship with legislators and talking to people across North Carolina that as the commissioner of labor, he believes strongly in the right-to-work and how North Carolina's laws are set now. Becky, I know that you will be following his work as the new state labor commissioner. Carolina Journal, I'm sure, will be reporting on issues that trend into his area and on which he uses that bully pulpit to comment. We're talking about Josh Dobson. He is North Carolina's new commissioner of labor.

He is a former state legislator from McDowell County. Becky Gray, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

Always a pleasure. And that's all the time we have for Carolina Journal Radio this week. Thank you for listening. On behalf of my co-host, 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 email to development at johnlock.org or call 1-866-JLF-INFO.

That's 1-866-553-4636. Carolina Journal Radio is a co-production of the John Locke Foundation, North Carolina's free market think tank, and Carolina Broadcasting System, Incorporated. All opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of advertisers or the station. For more information about the show or other programs and services of the John Locke Foundation, visit johnlock.org or call us toll free at 1-866-JLF-INFO. We'd like to thank our wonderful radio affiliates across North Carolina and our sponsors. From all of us at Carolina Journal Radio, thank you for listening and please join us again next week.