SBOE Resolution to Nullify Federal Education Department

Cynthia Dunbar, who declined to run for re-election to her spot on the state school board, and who fancies herself a constitutional scholar, has decided that the legacy that she would like to leave behind at the SBOE should be nothing less than the nullification of the federal Department of Education.

As found at the Austin American-Statesman:

“Outgoing State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar offered a “parting gift” to her fellow board members in the form of a resolution declaring the U.S. Department of Education an unconstitutional bureaucracy with no authority to impose restrictions upon Texas or its school districts.”

An unconstitutional bureaucracy.

Unconstitutional because it’s not in the constitution.

Now, there is a difference, I think, between being unconstitutional and being, for want of a better term, non-constitutional. Cynthia Dunbar, being an assistant professor of law at the Liberty University School of Law, a law school by and for Christians, should know this, too.

Unconstitutional means that the thing or the act runs counter to what we read in the constitution. Like how full body pat downs at airline terminals is unconstitutional in that it violates a 4^th amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

Non-constitutional means that it isn’t found in the constitution.

There are lots and lots of things that we don’t find in the constitution. You know, like banks. The word “bank” is not to be found in the constitution. But we don’t hear about Cynthia Dunbar’s opposition to banks because she can’t find the word, not once, in the constitution.

But probably the most glaring of all omissions, because the constitution does enumerate the branches of the military, is the fact that there is no mention of the Air Force in our United States Constitution. The framers clearly meant our country to have a standing Army as well as a Navy (and by their association, a Marine Corps) when they specified that the President was “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states,” but never once is there mention of an Air Force.

According to Cynthia Dunbar then, because there is no mention of the term “Air Force” in the constitution that makes the Air Force unconstitutional.

Well, it seems that the school board won’t be meeting before the newly elected board members meet this January, so Dunbar will not be able to participate in the vote to adopt her resolution. That honor will go to her successor, Dr. Marsha Farney, and that is just fine with me. A vote for or against this idiotic resolution should be a bellwether for how the newly constituted school board, a board minus the presence of Don McLeroy and Cynthia Dunbar, will function.

Or not.