Forest on Suing Cooper: ‘No one, governor, or citizen, is above the law’

RALEIGH – Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest held a press conference at the legislature Monday morning to explain the reasoning behind taking Governor Roy Cooper to court over his executive orders. It is not necessarily the content of those orders, which are also problematic, but rather Cooper’s refusal to follow the process for enacting those orders as spelled out in law, Forest said.

“No one, governor, or citizen, is above the rule of law,” Forest asserted.

From the very first executive order, Cooper has ignored the necessity of concurrence from the Council of State as required by the NC Emergency Management Act. When he shut down restaurants and bars for the first time, the majority of the Council disagreed; Cooper plowed ahead anyway, unilaterally.

At the presser, Forest alluded to the General Assembly adjourning with out an action that would resolve the lawlessness with which Governor Cooper is issuing his decrees, so he felt legal recourse was the only one left. Far from a political stunt, Forest said Monday that suing the governor (one with decent approval numbers) is not politically advantageous, but he felt accountability to the rule of law is too important.

Reporters, keen that they actually had a politician there in front of them answering questions that weren’t pre-screened, wasted little time in getting in the punches prescribed by the Cooper campaign.

‘Why have you not been presiding over the Senate?’ The lieutenant governor has a constitutional role in presiding over the Senate. That’s why the Senate leader is actually the ‘President Pro Tempore’; the lieutenant governor is ‘Senate President.’ This is one of those completely superficial veins of criticism that even the questioners know is absolutely meaningless, and inevitably hypocritical.

‘Why did you not vote for school reopening plans at Board of Education?’ Forest said he did not vote for any of the three school reopening plans produced by the Board of Education because they were absent of real goals, and probably created more of a mess. Besides, Forest thinks the closure of schools was a completely misguided policy.

“I think it’s important for all parents to know out there; there has not been one serious outbreak in a K-12 school anywhere in the world. To suggest our kids need to go back wearing masks everyday…that’s nonsensical.” 

Yet the nonsensical has been cemented into the commonplace wisdom of the Left over the pat few months. It’s all merely an extension of the resentful, self-loathing nonsense that makes up the collectivist schools of thought that inform their politics.

Our kids are not getting sick, as a general rule, according to the data. They are not passing on the virus, infecting other people, for the most part, according to the science. If science and data were the determining factors, schools would not be closed. But their closure arguably compounded the economic toll of the panic more than most other factors.

The crux of Monday’s presser being the lawsuit against Governor Roy Cooper, though, is a welcome development. Even if it’s coming from his 2020 opponent, it is high time that Cooper was held accountable for at least one of his many overreaches. The impetus to take a stand for rule of law is vital in this current environment, where it seems to have been actively subverted in the interest of mob rule and force compliance.