Two candidates vying for election in the upcoming midterm election were in Henderson recently and spoke to a partisan crowd about what’s at stake in November.
N.C. Sen. Lisa Stone Barnes, R-District 11, is seeking re-election, and she was welcomed at last month’s Vance County GOP fundraiser. Barnes faces Democratic challenger Mark Speed on the November ballot.
District 11 includes Vance, Franklin and Nash counties. She and her husband live in Nash County and grow sweet potatoes.
“This election is so important,” Barnes told the group of several hundred in attendance at the June 24 event. “We have a chance to regain the super majority in the House and in the Senate, she said, which would eliminate the conservatives’ worry about the governor’s veto.
“We have so much to be thankful for,” Barnes said, heaping praise on the U.S. Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that had come down earlier in the day. She called the Court’s ruling a “victory for the American republic (which) returns power to the states, where it belongs.”
Trey Allen, one of two Republican candidates for two N.C. Supreme Court seats, echoed Barnes’s sentiments for Republicans to reclaim the super majority in the General Assembly.
In his remarks, Allen reminded those in attendance that the State Supreme Court “has the last word in interpretation of state law.”
Allen, who currently is the general counsel for the state’s Office of Administrative Courts, said judges are the servants of the law not the masters of the law. As a state Supreme Court justice, he said it would be his job to “follow and enforce the law, not rewrite the law.”
Allen stressed the need for “strong Constitutional conservatives” serving both on the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court.
If voters elect Republicans in these races, Allen said “we’ve got the change to add to the majority on the Court of Appeals and to take the majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court.”
Allen will face Democratic incumbent Associate Justice Sam J. Ervin IV on the November ballot.
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