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

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

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

One leader who should be especially attuned to this situation and the need for strong action to curb Trump’s ambitions is North Carolina U.S. Senator Thom Tillis.

Earlier this week, Tillis took the honorable path of voting against Trump’s disastrous mega-bill and then announcing he will not seek reelection next year. And this presents him with a unique opportunity for independence from the Trump machine in the 18 months he has left in office.

The bottom line: With both houses of Congress divided by razor-thin margins, Senator Tillis’s declaration of independence gives him the chance to be the most important and impactful politician for good from North Carolina in decades. One prays he rises to the challenge.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

(Stock photo via Getty Images)

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

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

If the proposal were only about the environmental damage it will likely cause it would be bad enough, but as the NC State professors found, the bill will also significantly increase electricity bills for average households.

This is because it will incentivize Duke Energy to build more natural gas-fired electric generation plants—the price of natural gas is notoriously volatile—and shift the allocation of fuel costs from industrial to residential customers.

The bottom line: A bill this bad for consumers and the environment is richly deserving of a gubernatorial veto.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

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

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

Take Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger. He authored a Facebook post that read quote: “I support President Donald J. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the legislature will work through any implementation issues.”

Uh…earth to Senator Berger: describing the loss of health insurance by hundreds of thousands of people as “implementation issues” is like calling a leg amputation a minor scratch.

The bottom line: The senator and other bill supporters will soon find they are like the proverbial dog that’s caught the bus they were chasing. And all North Carolinians will suffer as a result.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

Image: Adobe Stock

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

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

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

The bill is so ill-conceived and poorly written that it would likely prohibit state agencies from recruiting employees at women’s colleges and HBCU’s.

Even programs to help accommodate the needs of veterans and people with disabilities would likely be unlawful.

The bottom line: The sponsors of this legislation claim that their attacks on DEI are about promoting equal opportunity. In truth they’re about promoting three words that are the opposite of DEI – call it UIE: uniformity, inequity and exclusion.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

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

And now, in a bill rammed through a House committee last week in record time, they’re bringing the same approach to election laws and the people who administer them.

Under a bill unveiled last week right before lawmakers commenced a summer break, the staff of the state Board of Elections – a group that’s always been scrupulously nonpartisan – would be transformed so that more than a third of existing staff positions would be converted to political appointees selected only by Republicans.

The bill includes other objectionable provisions too, including one that, –I’m not making this up– prevents local election boards from encouraging people to vote.

The bottom line: Election rigging through gerrymandering in our state is already scandalous. The new proposal is simply a travesty.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

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

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

By raising the state personal income tax rate on annual incomes over a million dollars to seven percent – a rate that would still be lower than what millionaires paid as recently as 2013 – North Carolina would realize an annual boost in state revenue of around $980 million. That would be enough to help insulate the state from the massive cuts in federal dollars that are about to be enacted in Washington.

The bottom line: Right now, North Carolina taxes people of fabulous wealth and those living in poverty at the exact same rate. A simple millionaire’s tax would do much to cure this grave inequity.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

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

In her remarks, Chitlik pointed out a glaring problem that has afflicted numerous bills advanced by Republican lawmakers this year – bills that that they, the sponsors, claim are designed to end all discrimination and promote quote “equal opportunity.” Namely, they were all drafted and sponsored exclusively by white men.

As Chitlik’s remarks served to highlight, the Senate features several members from groups long targeted for blatant discrimination in our society – women, people off color, LGBTQ people – and it only stands to reason that any bill worth its salt on the subject would include at least some involvement from them. But of course, they don’t.

The bottom line: The anti-DEI bills aren’t about ending discrimination — they’re about protecting it. Arguments to the contrary are simply delusional.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

An incarcerated person working at a North Carolina prison. As a workaround to a labor shortage, North Carolina is relying on some of its incarcerated workforce to install air conditioning in prisons.

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

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

The Department of Correction has been pursuing an initiative to finally end this tortuous situation, but there remains a long way to go as many facilities remain unairconditioned.

And that harsh reality is a threat to everyone in the facility – guards and incarcerated people alike – especially men and women prisoners who are elderly and in bad health.

The bottom line: As with the lack of adequate staff and so many other inhumanities in our prison system, it’s our cheapskate legislature’s refusal to appropriate adequate funds that is ultimately to blame. One wishes each lawmaker would have to spend a summer night in one of these facilities to experience the cruel and unusual punishment their inaction is inflicting.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

The percentage of North Carolina adults who reported that there was a time in the previous year that they didn’t go to the doctor when they needed to because they couldn’t afford it dropped by almost half between 2013 and 2023.

The main reasons for the progress – enactment of the federal Affordable Care Act and other improvements to the Medicaid insurance program.

Unfortunately, the report also notes that much, if not all, of this progress is placed in jeopardy by the Republican mega-bill making its way through Congress that would slash Medicaid funding and enact new and bureaucratic work requirements.

The bottom line: Now is the time to build on past success in improving health care access, not backtrack. Senators Tills and Budd should oppose the proposed cuts.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.

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

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

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

In its original form, House Bil 805 was a commonsense proposal to crack down on the sexual exploitation of women and children. It passed 113-0.

Last week, however, Senate Republicans took this important bill and loaded it up with several deeply controversial and divisive items from the far right social agenda.

Among the changes: provisions designed to make it harder for transgender people to get the health care they need and a series of new burdens on public school teachers and librarians that will create banned book lists and allow parents to veto instruction in subjects (like evolution) they claim offend their religious beliefs.

The bottom line: The Senate amendments ruin an important bipartisan bill with divisive and ill-conceived changes. The House should reject them.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.