What really distinguishes North Carolina is that it is a quintessentially purple state, with voters almost evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliateds. “That’s what contributes to the meanness and paralysis of North Carolina politics,” says public policy professor Mac McCorkle, a former Democratic political consultant. “… We’re so closely pitted, everything’s a battle.”
U.S. Climate Policy in the Trump Administration
In a newly released policy brief, law professor Jonathan Wiener, Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Rethinking Regulation co-director, provides context on the complex web of climate change policy, written for the Climate Economics Chair in Paris. Wiener’s essay covers a range of topics related to U.S. climate policies in the wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Read More at Kenan Institute
NC Sex Offender Social Media Ban Ruled Unconstitutional
Law professor Stuart Benjamin discusses a decision in the Supreme Court case Packingham v. North Carolina, which ruled that the state’s ban on sex offenders using social media platforms violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.
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‘Do No Harm’ And First Amendment In Cyberspace
The Supreme Court has invalidated a North Carolina statute making it a felony for a registered sex offender “to access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor children to become members or to create or maintain personal Web pages.” Law professor Stuart Benjamin examines the First Amendment in a time of changing phenomena such as cyberspace.
Read More in The Washington Post
Senate Republicans Plan Even Harsher Cuts To Medicaid Than House GOP
The Senate is contemplating a change in Medicaid that would cut it even more than the $830-billion proposed by the House, according to a proposal leaked from an Obamacare repeal bill. Lowering the growth rate of Medicaid is “a massive cut of future growth,” says health insurance expert David Anderson, a researcher at the Margolis Center for Health Policy.
Read More in The Los Angeles Times
The Architect of the Radical Right
Historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, “Democracy in Chains,” examines the Southern roots of modern conservatism. A reviewer notes that what sets it apart from other recent books on this topic, “is that it begins in the South and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan.”
Read More in The Atlantic
The Hardest Part of Trump’s National Security Strategy to Write
Sometime this year, the Trump administration intends to release the legislatively mandated National Security Strategy (NSS). “… The very act of drafting the NSS serves as a (modest) disciplining device on an administration, obliging the team to confront hard truths about previous policy statements and efforts,” writes political scientist Peter Feaver. “Which brings me to the question I have been pondering for quite a while: how hard will it be for President Trump’s team to draft such an NSS? The answer I keep coming to is: pretty hard.”
Read More in Foreign Policy
Is Trump ‘Disrupting’ His Own Foreign-Policy Team?
“What’s unusual here is that the Trump team is facing this significant diplomatic challenge before they’ve got their roster on board,” says political scientist Peter Feaver. “It’s like attempting to do a difficult synchronized swimming maneuver, with half the team not yet in their bathing suits and others not even named to the team yet.”
Read More in The Christian Science Monitor
Can Sessions Discuss Conversations With President Trump?
“In terms of the law of executive privilege, it belongs to the president, and he has not asserted it. General Sessions sought to preserve the president’s ability to assert it, but that is not how it works,” says law professor Lisa Kern Griffin. “… The president could have instructed him not to answer any questions about their conversations because of executive privilege. That, apparently, did not happen, and no privilege was asserted.”
Read More in Vox
Russia Probe: Possible Explosive Moments
Investigators looking into whether Trump’s team worked with Russia to win the White House could go down a path defined by other showdowns, where there’s little history beyond Watergate or Monica Lewinsky to guide them. “A set of two precedents is not a big set of precedents,” says law professor Samuel Buell. “You also have to say whatever the Trump story ends up being, it’s probably going to be something else.”
Read More in Politico
GOP’s American Health Care Act Will Cost Lives
“With Senate Republicans gearing up to pass a healthcare reform bill that will likely maintain the deep cuts to Medicaid, low-income households and minorities are most likely to lose insurance and their lives will be more endangered,” writes Mark Paul, an economist and a postdoctoral associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
Read More on Dollars and Sense
Time to Hold Legislators Accountable in Redistricting Process
“People have to pay attention to redistricting and to line drawing and to the way that districts are constructed, and they ought to demand fairness from their legislators,” says law professor Guy-Uriel Charles, founding director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics.
Read More in The Progressive Pulse
