Judges Side With Cooper In Board Appointment Dispute

A panel of judges has found the makeup of a half dozen of North Carolina's boards and commissions to be unconstitutional. It's a part of an ongoing power struggle between the governor's office and the legislature.

The groups in question provide oversight of such things as child care, clean water and rural infrastructure.

The current fight is between Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and the legislature, which is run by Republicans. But the legal dispute goes back to the days when the GOP also held the Governor's Office under Pat McCrory.

Each of the six commissions is housed in a Cabinet-level agency. The General Assembly selects a majority of the members on each panel and the governor can neither easily remove them nor overturn their actions.

That violates the needed separation of powers, the judges ruled. The court rejected a request by Republican legislative leaders to hold off on a decision until after the November election.

The legislature had submitted a proposed constitutional amendment that if approved would have made clear the legislature controlled the appointments of boards and commissions it creates.

That amendment, however, has been scaled back due to other litigation initiated by Cooper. That was not mentioned in Friday's ruling, but the judges wrote lawmakers had more than two years since the McCrory lawsuit ruling to alter state commissions.

Cooper spokesman Ford Porter said in an email "it should not take court action to get legislative Republicans to comply with the constitution but this seems to be the only way to get them to follow the law."