Budget Talks Break Down
Budget talks appeared close to breaking down in the state legislature Wednesday, as Republican leaders debate over how — or whether — to spend a $1 billion surplus for the new fiscal year that starts in July.
House Speaker Tim Moore said his chamber plans to make its budget proposal public early next week. Almost immediately, Senate leader Phil Berger said that proposal will be dead-on-arrival in his chamber.
Moore says his chamber’s spending proposal should be filed Monday night, with plans to debate it in committee Tuesday and vote to pass it on Wednesday. He expressed frustration that the current budget year ends in less than three weeks and yet the Senate, he said, has shown little urgency on negotiating a new spending plan.
"This is the plan B on the budget," Moore said Wednesday. "But while we've not been able to reach an agreement with the Senate, we're tired of waiting. We're going to move on, and get a budget done."
There is a tentative budget in place, but it doesn't contain the billion-dollar surplus in potential extra funding. Moore would like to use that surplus; Berger is less inclined to do so.
Raises or bonuses for state workers, extra funding for child care subsidies and a substantial boost to private school tuition vouchers are among the priorities Moore has highlighted — each of which could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
NC's budget surplus will be $430 million less than expected, officials say. Berger has said he supports boosting the private school tuition funding, but is more skeptical about extra pay for state workers or child care subsidies. If it comes down to it, he said, he'll walk away entirely from negotiations with the House, and let the entire $1 billion roll into the state's savings account instead.
"We've spent a decade and a half trying to make sure that we don't fall into the same trap that the Democrats fell into," Berger said, referring to the GOP takeover of the state legislature in 2010. "Which is, 'If you've got the money, spend it.' I'm disappointed that that's the position they've taken."
Berger added that he hopes to more or less end this year's legislative session on June 30, the last day of the fiscal year, whether a new budget is in place or not.
Moore, however, says state employee pay and child care subsidies are worthy causes. Many state agencies are dealing with skyrocketing vacancy rates as rising wages in the private sector entice state workers to leave. That's not only straining state services, advocates say, but also causing the state to spend extra on trainings, overtime and — in some cases — hiring private contractors to carry out the work of an agency for more money than it would normally cost.
As for child care, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid expires at the end of June. Hundreds of child care centers in North Carolina could close down almost immediately, according to industry insiders and business advocates like the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce.
That scenario could leave thousands of working parents scrambling to find options and possibly forced to quit their jobs — especially since many areas of the state already have months-long waitlists for child care openings — unless the state steps in to replace some or all of that federal funding, advocates say. “That was also a priority of the House,” Moore told reporters on Wednesday. “We know that’s critical.”
Last year an early draft of the budget by Republicans in the state House proposed an extra $10 million on child care — a fraction of the $300 million industry advocates say will be needed starting this year. The funding was cut from the budget at some point during the secret negotiations between House and Senate leaders.
It remains unclear if the two chambers will agree to any level of child care funding for this coming budget year, when the federal subsidies will be gone. "We're just not willing to bust the bank," Berger told reporters Wednesday.
(source: WRAL)
Draft DMH/DD/SUS Strategic Plan for 2024-2029 Posted for Public Comment
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is seeking public comment on the Draft 2024-2029 Strategic Plan for the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Substance Use Services, which shares the division’s mission, vision, guiding principles, priorities and goals for the next five years.
NCDHHS encourages all interested individuals and organizations to provide comment on the draft plan. The deadline to submit feedback is July 1, 2024. The draft is available to review on the DMH/DD/SUS website. Please share your feedback by filling out the public comment form available online.
Bills to Watch:
SB 718, Social Work Interstate Licensure Compact
Click Here to Access NASW-NC Social Work Compact bill webpage!
UPDATE: Rhode Island is now the 20th state to pass the Social Work Interstate Licensing Compact Bill into law on June 12, 2024!
NASW-NC holds in-person meetings with NCGA legislators & staff weekly during short session around passage of SB 718!
The Social Work Interstate Licensing Compact Bill has been signed into law in the seventeen states required for the Compact Commission to be established!
The first bill to pass the legislation was Missouri on July 7, 2023. The other bills where it is law are South Dakota, Washington State, Utah, Kentucky, Virginia, Kansas Nebraska, Vermont, Iowa, Maine, Georgia, Alabama, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Minesotta and Colorado. Thank you to the NASW chapters who took the lead in each of the states that have both ratified and introduced the compact in each of these states.
Additional states will be able to join the Compact Commission as soon as the legislation is passed in their state. The legislation has been introduced in 19 other states, including here in North Carolina. Senate Bill 718-Social Work Interstate Licensure Compact was introduced during the NC General Assembly Long Session in 2023 and is currently in the Rules Committee. NASW-NC has been working all year to ensure the Social Work Licensure Bill is passed during the short session which begins on April 24, 2024. Please be on the lookout for Advocacy Alerts & updates from us on how you can help us reach out to your legislators at the right time to help get it passed.
You can learn more about the Compact Bill by reading the NASW Press Release.
H1056, PA Licensure Interstate Compact
Should this bill become law, it would make North Carolina a member of the Physicians Assistant (PA) Licensure Compact, affording PAs in this state the ability to practice in any state within the Compact. This bill passed the House and its first reading in the Senate on June 13.
Supreme Court Rulings
Bump Stocks Ruling
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the Trump-era federal ban on bump stocks, declaring that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority when it banned the devices. The vote was 6-3, with the court’s three liberals in angry dissent.
President Trump ordered the ban in 2017 after a single gunman at a Las Vegas concert used multiple guns modified by bump stock devices to kill 60 people and injure 400—all in the space of 11 minutes. The subsequent ATF regulation banned bump stocks on grounds that they transform legal semi-automatic weapons into illegal machine guns. But on Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down the law.
Writing for the dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the conservative majority of once again turning a blind eye to the reality of gun violence, and making it yet more difficult to adopt measures aimed at preventing bloodshed.
The dispute between the majority and the dissent centered on how a bump stock-modified weapon operates. Joseph Blocher, co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, explains that with a bump stock, the shooter puts his finger on the stock’s finger rest, and pushes the stock forward. “What the bump stock does essentially is bounce the gun,” he says. “That’s the bumping back and forth against your trigger finger. So, as long as you keep the finger held and the stock is working, it’ll keep firing itself. So functionally, it’s a machine gun and nobody seems to disagree about that.”
But Justice Thomas, speaking for the majority, said the bump stock doesn’t change the internal firing mechanism, so it can’t be classified as an illegal machine gun.
Justice Sotomayor In a rare oral dissent from the bench, called it “myopic” to “fixate” on the internal functions of the gun and not the rapid- shooting function that is added by a bump stock, a mechanism that allows the shooter to fire as many as 800 rounds a minute. Concluded Sotomayor: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
The decision was a bitter disappointment for gun-control advocates. Kari Kuefler, who survived the Las Vegas shooting along with her three-month-old baby, teared up Friday as she talked about the Supreme Court decision, and its ripple effects.
“People are finding it hard to have safe spaces anymore, from their homes to their churches to their schools to their workplaces,” she said. “Where do we go?” she asked. “We need to know that our government is fighting to get that back for us.”
Read full article here: WUNC
Abortion Pill Ruling
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills.
By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game.
The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.
Writing for the court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh dismissed every conceivable argument that the anti-abortion doctors had advanced claiming they had a right to sue.
They had contended that there is a statistical possibility that some physicians would be called upon to treat emergency room patients suffering from complications after taking abortion pills. But Kavanaugh noted that federal law explicitly says that doctors cannot be forced to perform or assist in abortions, or to treat patients with complications from mifepristone. Moreover, he said, doctors "have never had standing to challenge FDA drug approvals simply on the theory that use of the drug by others may cause more visits to the doctor."
The court’s unanimous decision amounted to a legal off-ramp, leaving the FDA rules in place, without directly addressing the regulations themselves.
The decision also avoided, at least for now, a challenge to the entire structure of the FDA’s regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety — a system that for decades has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation.
Since the court reversed Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion in 2022, pills have become the most popular abortion method in the U.S. More than half the women who choose to terminate a pregnancy use a combination of pills approved by the FDA, including mifepristone, manufactured by Danco Laboratories and marketed as Mifeprex.
Thursday's Supreme Court decision reversed a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, widely viewed as the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. Of the 61 cases before the court this term, ten are appeals from the Fifth Circuit. The abortion pill case was the third reversal, and there are still seven Fifth Circuit appeals remaining
Siding with the FDA in the case were virtually all the major medical associations in the country, as well as almost all the pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies, big and small, that are regulated by the agency, making this the rare case in which a government regulator and the industry it regulates were on the same side. Dr. Jeremy Levin, the CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, one of the many pharmaceutical companies that sided with the FDA, earlier this year called the case “a dagger at the heart of the entire industry.”
For now, though, the prospect of dismantling the regulatory powers of the FDA has been averted. But the direct challenge to abortion pills and their accessibility has not been resolved, and could be revived in a different case.
Read full article here: WUNC
June is #PrideMonth
Pride Month, celebrated every June, is a time set aside to celebrate self-acceptance, equality, and love, particularly among those in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s an occasion where LGBTQ+ people can reflect on how far they’ve come and how much ground they’ve achieved for equality, while also realizing that there is so much more work to be done.
What if I identify as LGBTQ+ but I’m struggling?
If you’re having a hard time celebrating this month, you are not alone. Mental health conditions among the LGBTQ+ community are rising, and are twice as likely to happen compared to heterosexual adults. However, there are mental health resources specifically tailored to LGBTQ+ people that can provide safe spaces and affirming mental health care. Click here for a list of those resources.
How can I be an ally during Pride Month?
- Educate yourself. Learn about the history of LGBTQ+ people and the issues that are important to them. Talk with your LGBTQ+ friends or coworkers and learn how to address or describe them. Become familiar with appropriate and inappropriate language and why it matters.
- Share resources. Use your social media platforms or personal relationships to share mental health resources with LGBTQ+ people in your life.
Demonstrate your support. Share news of Pride celebrations in your area. Write letters to your local legislators requesting that they support LGBTQ+-affirming policies. Highlight LGBTQ+ voices and successes through your networks. Support a local LGBTQ+ charity or small business financially. There are many ways to make your support visible and helpful to those around you.
Find LGBTQ+ Mental Health Resources
(from NAMI-NC)
Upcoming NASW-NC Opportunities:
NASW-NC 2024 Essentials on Aging Conference
Older & Wiser: Social Work Approaches to the Modern Aging Era
Join NASW North Carolina for our Essentials Conference on Aging being held virtually on August 7, 2024. The conference theme is “Older & Wiser: Social Work Approaches to the Modern Aging Era”.
Today, one in five North Carolinians are aged 65 and older. As North Carolina's Aging population continues to rapidly grow, social workers must be prepared to effectively support the aging population, as well as learn to navigate their own aging journey and those in their families and communities. This conference brings together a variety of aging experts to delve into the multifaceted areas of aging impacting our society today and explore the challenges and opportunities social workers may face with serving older adults. We will explore the topics of Kinship Care (grandparents raising grandchildren), navigating Dementia, Solo Aging, and End-of-life Care and the grief process. Everyone is aging, and it is never too early to educate ourselves on critical topics that will impact our lives at some point on the aging journey.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Virtual on Zoom
8:15am - 5:15pm EST
8 Hours of CE
Registration Fees:
NASW Members $125 $75
Not yet a member? $200 $150
NASW members from other states can contact education.naswnc@socialworkers.org for assistance in registering.
Take advantage of the Early Bird Discount! Register before July 12, 2024 and receive $50 off!!!
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!!!
Thank you to the members of NASW-NC for supporting the advocacy work we do. We would not be able to advocate for the social work profession or social justice issues in North Carolina without a robust and engaged NASW membership. If you are a social worker and not a member, we ask that you join NASW today. Our voice is louder with your membership.
Learn more about NASW-NC membership here.
Want this information sent directly to your inbox? Sign up for weekly NASW-NC legislative updates: https://votervoice.net/NASWNC/home
