Supreme Court: Voting Law Changes Are Enforceable

The highest court in the land has weighed in on North Carolina’s election reform law. Critics of the changes continue to say the legislature that passed the law, are disenfranchising voters. Carolina Journal’s Rick Henderson explains the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that two provisions of the law that have been challenged are enforceable for the 2014 midterms. Next is a look at the state’s Medicaid program. North Carolina lawmakers and Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration continue to haggle over the best way to control costs and improve service in the Medicaid program. You’ll hear highlights from a recent legislative meeting on the topic, including interchanges between top legislators and state Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Wos. Then we turn to a status report from a key state agency. Legislators voted last year to move the State Bureau of Investigation from the N.C. Department of Justice, under control of the elected state attorney general, to the N.C. Department of Public Safety, which oversees other state law enforcement agencies. Acting SBI director B.W. Collier offered a recent public progress report on the bureau’s move.That’s followed by a humorous look at a very serious problem. Critics of an overly large federal government occasionally refer to government agencies growing like weeds. Jim Geraghty of National Review has taken that argument one step further, writing a novel called “The Weed Agency” that tells the humorous story of a fictional government agency with weeds that takes root in Washington, D.C., and grows exponentially over the course of decades. And finally, the phrase “women’s issues” is tossed about frequently in our public discourse, especially at election time. But John Locke Foundation Vice President for Outreach, Becki Gray, isn’t pleased at how some on the Left seek to box women into a very small area of issues. She explains why women are interested in a broad array of policy areas that impact their lives just as they impact a man’s life – economics, transportation, energy, and more.