Fellow Labor & Employment Law Professor Eric Fink has decided to challenge the President Pro Tem of the NC Senate, Phil Berger (R). Berger is widely regarded in these parts as the chief legislative architect of the massive and regressive rewrite of many NC statutes since the Tea Party wave of 2010. As a native North Carolinian and North Carolina lawyer, HB2 (the recent statute referred to very misleadingly as the "Bathroom Bill") is but the most recent of a series of extremely troubling legislation in the Tar Heel State. Much of it thanks to Phil Berger, who was a reasonable and capable small town lawyer in Eden, NC before becoming a professional politician.
More on Eric's run is here. Cribbing a bit from the article:
“The fact that Phil Berger is running unopposed, the more I thought about it and talked it over with friends, it struck me as something that was not good,” Fink said during a phone interview from his home on Wednesday morning. “Given my views, the fact is that he’s been a leader for things that have happened in Raleigh that I think are going in a bad direction.”
Fink said he expected a Democratic challenger to take on Berger and was surprised when the primaries came in March and no one had stepped up. With the swift passage of House Bill 2 at the end of March, Fink said things became more urgent.
“That’s just such a strong new example of the kind of measures they have been adopting that I think are just not good,” Fink said. “My goal is to challenge the direction that the Republicans have been moving in and also to put forward an alternative, in broad ideas and concrete real ideas for restoring public schools and making sure everyone in the state is treated with full and equal respect.”
Eric has to get 5000 signatures from voters in the Senate District to get on the ballot as an Independent.
Why are NC's General Statutes that create extra hoops for independent candidates to jump through no a violation of a person's equal rights to participate in government, or an abridgment of the equal protection provisions of the US Constitution? Makes no sense that a person can't just declare themselves an independent candidate, as other large party candidates are able to do.
Posted by: Peter Templeton | April 16, 2016 at 08:53 AM