Harnett Dispatch

Was Harnett County Constitutional Rights Violated by HB1108

D Glover
editor

In a recent article the Dispatch reported on a bill that was introduced in the NC house by House Member David Lewis (Rep) of Dunn. This bill was put in place without the knowledge of County Commissioners or County school board. The matter in which the bill was introduced was by attaching it to a bill that was created for Duplin County. That bill was intended to clear up technical language which had already been in place for Duplin County’s school board. Mr. Lewis attached a section to the bill that was made just for Harnett County and goes affects both the county commissioners and school board.

The bill states that elected officials holding office on the school board or county commission board would not have the ability or power to negotiate, terminate, or extend contracts to the school superintendent or county manager.

In one section the bill states that if an elected official after the primary elections has only 7 months of their remaining term left that a vote would have to be unanimous in order for the board to take action. This would in hand throw out the majority vote of the board that controls the actions of the board.

So the question is being asked did this bill introduced by Rep. David Lewis in fact violate the US constitution and the NC constitution in which every elected official must take during their oath of office. In their oath it states that they will uphold and defend the constutions of the US and NC.

What does the constitution say about this power move?

Article II Sec 24: Sec. 24.  Limitations on local, private, and special legislation.

(2)        Repeals.  Nor shall the General Assembly enact any such local, private, or special act by the partial repeal of a general law; but the General Assembly may at any time repeal local, private, or special laws enacted by it.

§ 153A-76.  Board of commissioners to organize county government.

The board of commissioners may create, change, abolish, and consolidate offices, positions, departments, boards, commissions, and agencies of the county government, may impose ex officio the duties of more than one office on a single officer, may change the composition and manner of selection of boards, commissions, and agencies, and may generally organize and reorganize the county government in order to promote orderly and efficient administration of county affairs, subject to the following limitations:

The Local School board is subject to the same power and privileges as the county commissioners.

The US Constitution in most cases overrides the states constitution

The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “the equal protection of the laws”.

A primary motivation for this clause was to validate and perpetuate the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed that all people would have rights equal to those of white citizens. As a whole, the Fourteenth Amendment marked a large shift in American constitutionalism, by applying substantially more constitutional restrictions against the states than had applied before the Civil War.

The meaning of the Equal Protection Clause has been the subject of much debate, and inspired the well-known phrase “Equal Justice Under Law”. This clause was the basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision that helped to dismantle racial segregation, and also the basis for many other decisions rejecting discrimination against people belonging to various groups.

This clause applies only to state governments. However, the requirement of equal protection has been read to be judicially enforceable against the federal government as well, beginning with the controversial opinion in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954). Additionally, the judiciary has read this clause as requiring not just legal equality with white people, but also legal equality among white people, controversially extending the clause even beyond the equality among white people that existed in any state when the clause was written.

So as you can see in the above references of the US and NC constitutions that we must have equal protection under the law, HB1108 does not allow equal protection because it lacks uniformity for all counties and elected boards. If this bill was in compliance with the constitution then that would mean that all elected officials would fall under the same clause and would lose voting power in the last 7 months of their term. This is not about Republicans,Democrats or anything else, it’s about the rights of the people of Harnett County under the law.