State Policy

April 4, 2013 - An effort to kill North Carolina's renewable energy law is meeting resistance from a politically powerful rural constituency.

April 2, 2013 - A hearing is set for tomorrow on legislation to repeal North Carolina's renewable energy standard -- part of a nationwide attack on such laws being mounted by groups with fossil-fuel industry ties.

March 29, 2013 - An email exchange between John Droz of the fossil fuel-funded American Tradition Institute and an attorney with the North Carolina Public Staff led to the introduction of a controversial bill that would have made it harder for the agency to do its work on behalf of the public.

March 29, 2013 - The state's Republican leaders are trying to solve a problem they created so they can help themselves politically by solving it. They might be undermining democracy, but you have to give them credit for their brazenness.

March 27, 2013 - Should the Supreme Court strike down bans on same-sex marriage, it would bring big changes across the South, where all states limit marriage rights to heterosexual couples -- and it wouldn't be the first time it took a high court ruling to change the region's marriage laws.

March 26, 2013 - A provision of the North Carolina constitution designed to suppress the black vote is no longer enforceable under the Voting Rights Act, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to give voters a second chance to remove it.

March 20, 2013 - Legislation that would ban racial, ethnic or gender history studies from counting toward basic history requirements at Texas universities was spurred by a controversial report from a conservative education policy group that helped get a Chicano newspaper defunded at the state's flagship school.