RALEIGH – As the General Assembly convenes this week in Raleigh for a special session to consider amendments to the state constitution, President Barack Obama will be making a return trip to North Carolina on Wednesday to promote his “new” job-creation plan.
These two events aren’t just contemporaneous. They are connected. How they are connected, however, is a matter of some controversy.
If you are a partisan, you may be inclined to consider the event you don’t like as purely political. Democrats see Republican support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as little more than a means of turning out social conservatives in the November 2012 election. Republicans see President Obama’s repeated trips to North Carolina not as attempts to promote legislation in Washington but instead to promote his reelection in a battleground state.
So if you want to be purely cynical about it, both events have the same goal – maximizing votes for their respective sides next year.
But that doesn’t mean that Republicans pushing the marriage amendment or Democrats pushing Obamastimulus II are playing games. Many conservatives do believe that same-sex unions constitute a significant threat to the health of the American family (I’m not among them). Many liberals do believe that the only reason the president’s previous stimulus efforts have fallen short is that they were too small and cost too little.
In my view, the real connective issue between the General Assembly’s special session and President Obama’s economic agenda is the idea that constitutions ought to serve as constraints on the exercise of political power.
In a constitutional republic, gaining a majority of votes or seats at a particular point in a time may give you access to governmental power – but it does not give you license to do whatever you want with that power.
Constitutions aren’t majority-rule documents. They are supermajority-rule, minority-rights documents. They require more than a simple majority of the voting public to be ratified or amended (in the latter case, you need a supermajority of lawmakers before the public votes). Constitutions exist to ensure that no one person or faction can force everyone else to capitulate, and that the rights of individuals and numerically inferior groups cannot blithely be trampled.
Of the three constitutional amendments the General Assembly may vote to put on the ballot this week, the one with the clearest intent to restrain the abuse of governmental power is a measure to impose term limits on legislative leaders. I think this is an excellent idea, by the way, and I’d like to see North Carolina reconsider its late-1970s decision to allow governors to serve more than one consecutive term.
One might also argue that the amendment making North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction the chairman of the state board of education would also help to restrain abuse of power by clarifying the role of the superintendent, a constitutional officer. In my view, however, it would make more sense to eliminate the elective office altogether, allowing governors to appoint superintendents to carry out the education agendas that governors will inevitably run on, anyway.
In fairness, supporters of the marriage amendment say they are heading off a potential threat to constitutional separation of powers that has already occurred in other states: judges striking down statutes and formulating marriage policies as if they were members of the legislative branch.
As for President Obama, the constitutional issue is one of enumerated powers. While attempting to tinker around the edges of the economy with new fiscal-stimulus programs, the president has smashed business confidence with his regulatory agenda and health-insurance mandates – both assertions of power for which there is no valid authority to be found in the federal constitution.
Perhaps this week of political activity in Raleigh will prompt North Carolinians to think about their state and federal constitutions. If they’d like more information about them, I have a few suggestions.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.