Over the past decade and a half, North Carolina’s policy environment has become increasingly favorable to growth, development, and progress. State lawmakers have improved how government taxes, regulates, budgets, and funds such services as transportation and education. Our universities are more efficient and friendlier to free speech. Our community colleges are better at targeting high-demand occupations and hard-to-serve populations. North Carolina ranks seventh in economic freedom, 13th in educational freedom and tax competitiveness, and 15th in economic growth (GDP adjusted for inflation over the past decade).
Many challenges remain, however. We overregulate healthcare, raising its cost by restricting competition. Our state budgets are increasingly stuffed with pork. Education reform hasn’t gone nearly far enough. And North Carolina has not been a leader in the fight against the federal government’s unwise and unconstitutional centralization of power in Washington.
That last fact, in particular, should trouble history-minded Carolinians. During the Founding Era, our state was a champion of constitutionalism and decentralization. We were the only state to hold a ratification convention and then refuse to ratify the original constitution, which left America’s third-most-populous state out of its first presidential election in 1788. Why? Because the constitution didn’t contain a bill of rights, as the constitutions of North Carolina and many other states already included.
Back then, our leaders believed in belts and suspenders. They recognized that the design of the U.S. Constitution would limit abuses of power by creating checks and balances among the three branches and enumerating a limited number of topics about which Congress should legislate. These were necessary safeguards, they reasoned, but not sufficient ones. North Carolina leaders insisted that the document should also specify individual liberties that even duly elected presidents and congresses could not restrict (what became the 1st through 8th Amendments), that specifying those liberties should not be construed as leaving other liberties unrecognized (the 9th Amendment), and that powers not specifically granted to the Feds would be retained by the previously constituted states and the people themselves (the 10th Amendment).
To embrace federalism (in the original, decentralized sense of the term) was not to deny the importance of an effective national government. It was, however, to affirm that self-government grew harder at a distance and at scale, and that what would become a continent-spanning republic should leave room for states and communities to choose differing paths so that Americans could themselves choose to live in polities most consistent with their own preferences.
Over the ensuing 250 years, Americans have amended our constitution to remove some matters from state-by-state discretion — and properly so. No state or locality should be permitted to deny the franchise or equal protection under the laws based on race, ethnicity, sex, or creed. In many other areas of public policy, however, Washington has supplanted the proper role of states. In some instances, Congress has done it by legislation. In others, presidents have done it by executive orders or administrative “guidance” that, their appointees strongly suggest, states and localities must heed in order to avoid litigation or retain access to federal funds.
The State Policy Network’s Center for Practical Federalism has been urging states for years to resist these and other national encroachments on their constitutional powers. They’ve urged state administrators to question so-called guidance and challenge other usurpations. They’ve urged legislative committees to investigate and hold hearings on these abuses. And they’ve created a tracker for evaluating how effectively states are pushing back against Washington’s excesses.
In SPN’s most-recent federalism scorecard, the six states with the highest ratings were Utah (86.9), Vermont (56.7), Tennessee (53.95), Idaho (50.15), Wisconsin (48.8), and South Carolina (42.45). North Carolina was in the middle of the pack, with an unimpressive 13.25.
I think the General Assembly, the Stein administration, other state executives, and local governments should make this a priority in 2027 and beyond. Forbid the automatic acceptance of federal grants and the strings that come with them. Challenge the Imperial City. It’s the Carolina way.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books "Mountain Folk," "Forest Folk," and "Water Folk" combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
