When Pat Tillman ascended to the Guilford Board of County Commissioner, state law dictated that a Republican must fill his vacant seat on the county school board.
But the current school board had the right to refuse to seat this person. The law the GOP had years ago passed in Raleigh establishing partisan school board elections gave the school board this power.
They used this power when the GOP nominated Michael Logan earlier this year. Logan had been accused of making some impolitic statements on social media.
Jon Hardister then passed a new bill in the state legislature within the last month or so that prohibited the school board from refusing to seat the GOP designee.
In response to that law, Deena Hayes (the race-baiting school board chairwoman) in conjunction with school board attorney Jill Wilson floated a certain interpretation of Hardister’s new law. They used that interpretation to reject Logan once again and to seat instead a liberal-to-moderate Republican Bill Goebel.
Now there are rumblings that there might be a lawsuit.
I don’t know whether Hardister’s bill was sloppily drafted in a manner that gave Hayes and Wilson an opening.
Recall that the Republicans had passed a law granting the governor emergency powers, and then claimed the Council of State must concur with any emergency measures the Governor mandated. It turned out that, when the law was examined in court because of Cooper’s Covid authoritarianism, Republicans in fact HAD given Cooper unchecked emergency powers; and the law did not require concurrence by the Council of State. Cooper had gleefully used the powers the Republicans had granted him. In response, the Republicans adopted a talking point that was not supported by the actual text of the law they passed.
If a lawsuit is filed, given the history of GOP ineptitude, I don’t know how it will get resolved. The socialists are much more effective at using the levers of power to get their way than the Republicans are. And the Republicans tend to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The GOP should tell Deena Hayes.. ” See you in court “
I agree; but the question is if whether they truly have the law on their side. There is also the matter of “ex post facto”. It might be too late to clean up the mess they created for this specific case.