From the text of H17, the bill transferring considerable power from the North Carolina State Board of Education to the state Superintendent:
There is hereby created a Department of Public Instruction. The head of the Department of Public Instruction is the
State Board of Education. Any provision of G.S. 143A-9 to the contrary notwithstanding, the appointment of the State Board of Education shall be as prescribed in Article IX, Section (4)(1) of the Constitution.Superintendent of Public Instruction.”
Just as simple as drawing a line. of course it’s not that simple, and I urge anyone to read the bill instead of listening to the alarmists in the mainstream media. On that subject, National Review’s David French addresses Democrats (and everyone else) crying wolf in here in North Carolina:
You would think tanks were in the streets. Or worse, tanks driven by men in white hoods. Writing in the Huffington Post and Slate, liberal pundits raised the specter of post–Civil War racial violence and, yes, even the Confederacy to describe a garden-variety partisan political maneuver. In Huffpo, Ben Railton, a self-described “public scholar of American Studies,” argued that the North Carolina legislature’s actions were “eerily similar” to an infamous massacre (yes, massacre) in Wilmington in 1898 when white supremacists overthrew the local government, expelled black leaders, and killed dozens of black citizens.
It’s difficult even to know where to start with rhetoric like this, except to state the obvious: Peace isn’t war; requiring senate approval for gubernatorial appointments isn’t a form of lynching; limiting a governor’s power over public universities isn’t like a race riot; making election boards bipartisan isn’t Jim Crow.
One guy from Slate even said the legislature’s actions were like something you’d see in Venezuela. Again–hard to know where to start—talk to me me when there are people starving and bodies are piling up in the morgues.
