14:27
Brief
North Carolina took another worrisome step into dangerous and uncharted today when state Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse issued a thinly veiled, Trump-like threat at state judges that they could be impeached if they take action to remove the blatantly dishonest and deceitful constitutional amendments that Republican lawmakers are seeking to place on the November ballot.
As Lynn Bonner of Raleigh’s News & Observer reports:
“The state Republican Party executive director raised the possibility that state Supreme Court justices could be impeached if they ruled against legislative leaders in a lawsuit over constitutional amendments.
Dallas Woodhouse made the remarks at an NC Free Enterprise Foundation event Friday. In a later interview with The News & Observer, he said he wasn’t threatening the justices, but is concerned about what would happen if they rule against legislative leaders. ‘It would be an evisceration of separation of powers,’ he said.”
Woodhouse followed up the comments with a rambling post on Facebook in which he seemed to both deny the threat and reiterate it. Meanwhile, former Civitas Institute executive director and longtime conservative operative Francis DeLuca endorsed the impeachment idea in a tweet.
The bottom line: If there is any kind of “constitutional crisis” in North Carolina surrounding the proposed amendments, it is Woodhouse and his allies at the General Assembly who are its authors. It commenced when they rammed through a slate of six ill-conceived and deceptively labeled amendments in just a few hectic days at the end of the 2018 session that could radically reorder North Carolina state government. What’s more, the best way to ease the crisis is for state judges to step in ASAP and derail this silent and underhanded coup d’état. GOP leaders at the General Assembly must disavow Woodhouse’s inflammatory threats immediately.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.
