Two recently proposed power plants illustrate the stark difference in land use and efficiency in power generation.

On June 17, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the denial of a special-use permit to a proposed solar facility by Pender County. It was the second time in two years that the permit denial was upheld by the appellate court.

The facility proposed by Coastal Pine Solar, LLC would have taken up 2,360 acres of timberland (about 3.7 square miles) and been rated at 200 megawatts (MW). That’s about 54 MW of nominal capacity per square mile.

The facility would have required a large amount of land for relatively little power, especially power that would be available only some of the time, less in the winter, even less during storms, and never in the late evenings through early mornings.

Meanwhile, Duke Energy Carolinas recently gained approval to build a large new natural gas combined-cycle facility in Anderson County, South Carolina. This natural gas plant will take up “nearly 200 acres” (about 0.3 square mile) and be rated at 1,365 MW. That’s at least 4,368 MW of nominal capacity per square mile.

This facility will feature a very minimal land footprint for all the power it generates. This power will also be dispatchable and reliable. Furthermore, the project will also serve, among others, customers of the North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation (NCEMC).

Among other things, the two proposed facilities illustrate the huge difference in efficiency between natural gas and solar facilities. The John Locke Foundation’s 2026–27 “North Carolina Policy Solutions” guidebook provided an extensive table comparing different electricity generating sources on several measures, including environmental ones, which included land use. Of interest here is that the Pender County solar farm would have required more land per MW than the chart showed, whereas the new natural gas facility will require less.

The following table combines part of the table from the policy guidebook with the site-specific information about the two facilities here:

Efficiency and land use: How much land do different electricity generating sources need to produce 1,000 MW?

Source: “North Carolina Policy Solutions,” author’s calculations

Also, with respect to environmental concerns, here are other factors to consider about the proposed facilities:

• The Pender County solar facility would have required clear-cutting 2,360 acres of timber
• It would also have necessitated adding one-to-one backup generation (i.e., 200 MW), preferably from a natural gas combustion turbine plant, based on information from Duke
• The new natural gas plant will have a longer life span than similar plants and will, according to Duke, utilize state-of-the-art environmental control technologies to minimize emissions, greatly conserve water, and avoid the need to treat water chemically

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One day when I was boy learning how to do multiplication, my mother asked me, “What’s 222 times 8?”

I thought about it for a second and realized it would be too hard to do in my head, so I wrote it down.

I came up with the answer: 1776. Of course I shouted out the answer as young boys do.

My mother responded, “That’s the spirit!”

She had learned this little interchange from the old timers in her day. Once the punchline was delivered, they would break into a smile and nod their heads, celebrating the cultural cry of “Spirit of ’76.”

That’s how America is. We love our freedom, our liberty, and the symbols that celebrate it.

Along those lines, have you ever seen this picture?

I always thought it was a painting done sometime around the time of the American Revolution.

I was wrong. It is actually a painting by Archibald Willard called “The Spirit of ’76,” which he painted in 1875 and exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. After an enormous response at this 100th celebration of the Declaration of Independence, the painting was taken on a tour across America during which it was viewed by large crowds to great acclaim.

If you run into an enterprising young person this week or simply want to spice up a conversation, smile and ask them, “What’s 222 times 8?”

As an aside, a similar bit appears in the 1936 Three Stooges short film called “Disorder in the Court.” While in court, Moe asks Larry, “I say, Jasper, what comes after 75?” When Larry answers, “76,” Moe replies, “That’s the spirit!”

Different setup, same result. Personally, I like to watch the person do the math in my mother’s version. Builds up the tension, you know.

Happy Fourth of July!

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Randy DeSoto writes for the Western Journal about US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ recent criticism of his colleagues.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a lengthy dissent, took the majority to task for interpreting the Constitution to mean that citizenship is automatically conferred on anyone born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of the parents.

Thomas argued that the ruling “devalues” what it means to be an American citizen.

In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the majority held that an executive order President Donald Trump issued on the first day of his second term violated the Constitution. The order directed that only children born on American soil to legal residents are automatically citizens of the United States.

The Fourteenth Amendment states, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded, “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

Thomas, in his dissent, in which he was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, noted, as Trump previously argued, that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. It was in direct response to the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision of 1857, which held that blacks were not citizens. …

… “Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority,” he added.

Thomas further contended that the Supreme Court majority in its decision “repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text. Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.”

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M.D. Kittle of the Federalist critiques the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts.

In his brilliant dissenting opinion eviscerating the majority’s legal gymnastics on birthplace citizenship, Justice Samuel Alito warned the court not to “adopt an erroneous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment simply out of fear of the consequences of ‘rocking the boat’ or as a reaction to current immigration policy.”

But fear and politics, it seems, drove the specious legal reasoning of the  “conservatives” who joined the court’s three liberals in killing President Donald Trump’s executive order ending squatter rights citizenship. A reluctance to “rock the boat” of more than a century of bad law permeates the thinking of Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the 5-4 ruling declaring unconstitutional the campaign promise Trump kept on the first day of his second term in office. 

Such cowardice in guarding the Constitution has too often marked Roberts’ tenure as the chief of the nation’s high court. From his similar constitutional contortionist act in 2020 Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California to his ridiculous reinvention of the established understanding of a “tax” in playing savior to Obamacare, Roberts has sacrificed judicial courage at the twin altars of comity and continuity. 

President George W. Bush’s nominee for chief justice has described himself — and all judges — as “umpires.” They don’t make the rules, he said. They apply them. 

“They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire,” he quipped. 

His latest opinion, Trump v. Barbara, reads more like an umpire who has ignored the foul lines. 

Donald J. Trump was born to rock the boat. The open border left and the Chamber of Commerce, cheap labor crowd railed against the president’s executive order aimed at “Protecting The Meaning And Value of American Citizenship.” The order asserts what many constitutional law experts — including Justice Alito — understand the 14th Amendment to mean.

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Jon Levine writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the reaction to recent election results in the nation’s largest city.

Democrats in New York City and beyond remain wary and far from sold on a trio of far-left candidates who swept city primaries last week, two of whom knocked out establishment Democratic incumbents.

The New York State Democratic Party chair distanced himself from the insurgents—specifically from perhaps the most radical of the troika, Darializa Avila Chevalier—in comments to the Washington Free Beacon. And Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) told the Free Beacon that nominee Claire Valdez “will perfectly fit with the pro-Hamas caucus.”

Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York State Democratic Party, said he had not called any of the triumphant insurgents nearly a week after the primary earthquake, telling the Free Beacon, “I’ve been very busy on personal issues this week.”

When pressed on whether he would be endorsing Chevalier, a virulently anti-Israel socialist City University of New York Ph.D. student who has criticized interracial relationships and bragged about using the American flag as a washrag, Jacobs demurred.

“What I’m going to say to you is that I’m willing to work with her, okay, and whether I endorse her or not, we haven’t had that conversation and frankly she hasn’t asked for my endorsement,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs took pains to insist that Chevalier was not representative of the whole Democratic Party.

“To use a broad brush and say that the Democratic Party has moved far to the left because of the results in a couple of very progressive districts, which are distinguished from other competitive districts, I think this is inaccurate,” he said. “What I would say is that in those districts we tend to have, as in all primaries, a lower turnout. It favors activists, the activists tend to be more progressive.”

The chair said he thought Chevalier’s past posts on social media were “reprehensible.”

“Apparently, she does too, because she’s removed them,” he added.

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Ann Marie Pocklembo writes for National Review Online about one prospective candidate for a top national union job.

At the National Education Association’s annual meeting early this month, delegates will pick a new president to lead the nation’s largest teachers’ union. New Jersey’s Sean Spiller, one of four vying for the position, may seem like a model candidate. He’s a former college hockey star, mayor, science teacher, and statewide union president who recently ran for governor. I also agree with his campaign rhetoric that teachers need leadership that “defends our rights” and “elevates our voices.”

But as a New Jersey teacher and union member for the past three decades, I believe his actions as New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) president contradict his message and disqualify him from this leadership position. In fact, those actions ultimately prompted me to sue Spiller and the union he led, which was his biggest political benefactor.

In last year’s Democratic primary, Spiller ran for governor and brought in minimal direct financial support. But pro-Spiller ads still flooded the airwaves and swamped mailboxes. I had no plans to vote for him, so it was no big deal, I thought.

Then I found out teachers like me had funded those ads, whether we liked it or not. Behind the scenes, the NJEA had allegedly funneled tens of millions of dollars in mandatory teachers’ dues to a super PAC supporting Spiller’s gubernatorial campaign. Spiller says he wants to “elevate our voices,” but he coopted mine.

I know unions engage in political advocacy, but contributions to the NJEA’s political action committee are supposedly separate from regular dues — that’s what the union has said in its membership materials. There’s a separate box for political contributions on our membership application, and I clearly didn’t sign it. The NJEA’s own website even said, “By law, dues money cannot be used for partisan political campaigns,” until the union stealthily changed it in the months leading up to the primary.

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Editors at National Review Online analyze the impact of a major US Supreme Court ruling.

Donald Trump’s challenge to the status quo on birthright citizenship for the children of birth tourists and illegal aliens was always a long shot. Now that it has been rejected by the Supreme Court, the big question is what to do next.

We do not blame Trump for the attempt. Presidents are entitled to make their case in the courts for a change in the reading of the Constitution. But the view that birthright citizenship is near-universal and subject only to very limited exceptions has been deeply entrenched since United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). Chief Justice John Roberts and the four justices who joined him in the majority declined to stray from the logic of Wong Kim Ark even though that case dealt with a different situation: the child of Chinese nationals who were long-time legal residents rather than transients or illegal immigrants. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who disagreed with their constitutional analysis but joined the result, concluded that Congress had ratified Wong Kim Ark and that it was not the Court’s place to revisit it unless and until Congress did so first.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment provides: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The Court took the traditional view of this broad language that most people in the country are “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law unless they are members of a sovereign Native American tribe or represent a foreign government (such as foreign diplomats). …

… The Wong Kim Ark rule has the advantage of ease and clarity, and that plainly gave the Court pause in unsettling it. In the specific case of parents traveling through the country, how long do they have to be here to be considered legally domiciled in the United States, and what other factors would weigh in such a decision? The majority was not persuaded that an alternative test could easily be located in the Constitution.

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• Teachers would receive a pay raise of 8 percent on average, while most state employees would receive raises of 3 percent
• The Opportunity Scholarship program generates tens of millions in savings for public education
• The proposal includes more than 700 earmarks to local governments and organizations

At long last, a budget proposal has been presented by the North Carolina General Assembly. Ours was the only state to go the entire fiscal year of 2025–26 without a comprehensive budget bill, with spending continued at prior year levels.

Making this budget proposal yet more unusual, the legislature bypassed the long-standing legislative tradition of one chamber first submitting a budget proposal, the other chamber following with its own plan, and then both chambers selecting certain members to form a “conference committee” to iron out the differences between the two proposals.

This traditional process allowed legislators and the public time to review the different proposals, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each, and have input into crafting a final plan.

Instead, we were presented with one budget bill that is expected to speed through both chambers with very little discussion or debate and be sent to Gov. Josh Stein in a matter of days. Differences between the chambers were largely hashed out in private.

Coming in at 643 pages, the budget bill includes a lot of policy changes that should be proposed in separate bills. A budget is supposed to be focused on revenue and spending changes, not turned into an omnibus bill affecting a wide swath of policy proposals with no direct budgetary impacts.

The budget plan would spend a total of $34.37 billion, sort of (more on that later). Compared with current year budgeted appropriations of $31.92 billion, the proposal would increase spending by 7.7 percent. Comparatively, Gov. Josh Stein’s budget proposal of $35.44 billion would have resulted in an increase of 11.0 percent.

It is important to note, however, that the legislative budget would set aside roughly $3 billion of discretionary funding into special “reserves,” a shell game that obscures the true amount of spending.

Following is a list of notable items included in the budget proposal, followed by two items notable by their absence from the budget.

Pay raises for teachers and other state employees

• Give teachers a pay raise of 8 percent on average , plus bonuses based on years of service, at a total cost of $598 million this year.
• Raise salaries for beginning teachers to $48,000 (not counting local supplements).
• Give assistant principals a pay increase of 6.3 percent on average.
• Correctional officers would receive a pay increase of 15.4 percent on average.
• Provide most other state employees a 3 percent pay increase, and also give many bonuses based on their salaries.
• Include no cost of living increase in pension payments for state government retirees, instead the budget provides a one-time payment equal to 2.5 percent of their annual payment.

Opportunity Scholarship program

• Reinvest the $35.8 million in savings generated by the Opportunity Scholarship program over the last two years. These savings come about from scholarship awards being less than the average state per-pupil allocation for traditional public school students. The funds would be reinvested in one-time bonuses for school nutrition and custodial personnel, middle-school literacy professional development, and K–8 math curriculum work through the North Carolina Collaboratory. The acknowledgement of such savings flies in the face of critics who claim that school choice programs drain funds from public schools.

• Signal legislative intent to continue this practice of redirecting savings resulting from Opportunity Scholarship students transferring from a public school.
• Require administration of standardized tests, along with disclosure requirements, for private schools enrolling students receiving Opportunity Scholarships.
• Increase funding to the Personal Education Student Accounts for Children with Disabilities program by $17.5 million in order to clear that program’s waitlist. The increase would bring total funding for the program to $94 million.
• Establish a public school open enrollment study by the NC Collaboratory to look into how Local Education Agencies (LEAs, also known as school districts) can allow students to attend any school in the LEA. The report would be due April 15, 2027. Open enrollment, which allows students to move to another public school in their home district or even another district that has capacity to enroll them, is the next frontier in school choice for North Carolina.
• Provide $300,000 for a working group at the UNC Collaboratory  to study a 3 year transition to weighted student funding model. Current funding formulas are highly complex and reform is long overdue. 

Hurricane relief and rainy day funds

• Dedicate $706 million to additional Hurricane Helene relief funding.

• Set aside more than $450 million for the state’s Rainy Day Fund (the Savings Reserve) in addition to the $12.9 million required by statute, which would bring the fund’s total up to just over $4.2 billion.
• Slate another $1.3 billion into the Inflation and Stabilization Reserve Fund, which would bring the fund’s total to more than $2 billion. Like the Rainy Day Fund, this money is critical for helping North Carolina handle future economic downturns without resorting to tax increases for revenue.

Tax changes

• Repeal the sales tax exemption on electricity for data centers, estimated to generate $21 million in revenue this year. Remaining in the tax code, however, are nearly 180 specific sales tax exemptions, totaling more than $7 billion.
• Remove the current revenue triggers in place to allow scheduled personal income tax rate reductions, which would guarantee the rate drops to 2.99 percent by 2032. Additional rate reductions of a quarter of a percentage point apiece are scheduled to take place dependent upon newly established revenue triggers being met, with the final destination of 2.49 percent by 2040. By comparison, Gov. Josh Stein’s budget proposal would have made tax changes resulting in a net tax increase of nearly $500 million this year alone.
• Increase the sports wagering tax rate from 18 to 23 percent, which would bring in an estimated $22.4 million in the coming year.
• Establish a tax on prediction markets equal to 6 percent of net trading fee revenue apportioned to North Carolina. This change would bring in a projected $1 million in the coming year.

Health care

• Fund the increasing cost of the state’s Medicaid program with an appropriation of more than $1 billion, which is the state’s share of a total increase in Medicaid expenditures of $2.7 billion. This appropriation would be helped by a transfer of $200 million from Medicaid Contingency Reserve Fund.
• Provide funding to maintain North Carolina’s participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than $5 million in combined recurring and nonrecurring funds would be appropriated for administration this year, which is needed to improve the state’s payment error rate. Per the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, if the error rate is not improved, the federal government will require the state to begin paying a share of the program’s cost.
• Repeal the state’s archaic certificate of need (CON) laws for inpatient rehabilitation services, facilities, and beds. This would be a small but positive step in the right direction for expanding the supply of medical care, thus improving access and lowering costs. Legislators should consider full CON repeal in the near future.

Corporate Welfare

• Allocate $133.9 million to fund the JetZero project, which has already announced delays, at Piedmont Triad International Airport.
• Appropriate $30 million for an aircraft facility construction at the North Carolina Global TransPark Authority.
• Expand the size of potential handouts in the Film and Entertainment Grant Fund.
• Allocate $400,000 to the Department of Commerce to contract with an organization to conduct a study of the economic impact of motorsports in the state.
• Provide $1.2 million in recurring funds for awards for microbudget film productions through the Film and Entertainment Grant Fund.
• Pave the way — via specific language changing Job Maintenance and Capital Development fund qualifications — for a corporate welfare giveaway to a potential pharmaceutical manufacturing corporation.
• Eliminate the $5 million recurring appropriation for the Esports Industry Grant Fund.

A $3 billion shell game

• Move $3 billion in discretionary reserve funding into special reserves, such as the Regional Economic Development Reserve and Stabilization Inflation Reserve, “above the line,” which means that those funds would not be counted in the General Fund spending total of $34.37 billion. Instead, the money would be directed into the reserve funds, some of which would then be used to finance various funding activities that are counted as “receipt supported” expenditures and technically not new spending. This is a deceitful shell game that has proliferated in the last handful of years, obscuring the actual amount of spending in the budget proposal.

Earmark extravaganza

• Include 727 line items labeled “special appropriations” that would direct state tax dollars to local governments and charities. These targeted earmarks should be funded by local taxpayers, if they are funded by government at all. Earmarks would range from local Boys & Girls Clubs to athletic fields to direct grants to local governments, some with no purpose specified. Roughly $350 million would be directed to these special appropriations, most of it funded from “receipts” from two special reserve funds, so the spending would not show up in the General Fund’s bottom line.

Two noteworthy items not in the budget

• Funding for a major league baseball stadium: At the last minute, and riding the high off the Carolina Hurricanes’ Stanley Cup victory, lawmakers discussed the prospect of funding for a new baseball stadium in Raleigh in order to attract a major league franchise. The funding likely would have been a combination of hundreds of millions of state taxpayer dollars and the implementation of new local taxes. Reportedly, Senate leadership was in favor, with House leadership opposed. Fortunately, this measure was left out of the budget bill, but the issue may crop back up at a later date. Taxpayer dollars should not be used as the plaything of billionaire sports franchise owners.
• NCInnovation: Despite much discussion of clawing back the $500 million in taxpayer dollars given to NCInnovation, the organization is not mentioned in the budget and therefore still keeps the half a billion dollars awarded it in the 2023 budget.

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The following represents model legislation for North Carolina to establish within-district and cross-district open enrollment. 

The post Open enrollment model legislation appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Within-district open enrollment is a form of school choice that lets parents choose any traditional public school within their child’s resident school district if there are open seats. The following model policy can be adapted by school districts to implement within-district open enrollment and provide more educational options for the students within their boundaries.

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