Do the 5 Deputy Clerks Even Have the Authority to Issue Marriage Licenses over the Head of Clerk Kim Davis?

By Published on September 4, 2015

I guess this answers the question in the last post about whether they have the authority to defy Davis’s orders. Or does it? What if Davis attempts to fire her deputies for insubordination? If they could have defied her all along, why’d they wait until she was in jail to do so? Alternately, if the judge had the authority to order the deputies to issue licenses over Davis’s objection, why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of sending her to jail? Was jail possibly some sort of necessary prerequisite, to render her temporarily “unable to carry out her duties” as clerk, to empowering the deputies?

Davis, who was tearful at times, testified that she could not obey [Judge David] Bunning’s order because God’s law trumps the court. The sixth of her deputies who also said he would not issue licenses is her son…

Bunning warned other clerks — at least two other counties in Kentucky also shuttered their marriage-license operations for all couples — that his order applied to them, too. Five of Davis’ six deputy clerks told Bunning in an afternoon hearing that they would issue licenses, WOWK-TV, Charleston-Huntington, W.Va., reported; the holdout was Davis’ son, who works in his mother’s office.

As word of Davis’ arrest became known in the crowd that numbered more than 100 protesters outside the courthouse, cheers and chants erupted.

Read the article “Do the 5 Deputy Clerks Even Have the Authority to Issue Marriage Licenses over the Head of Clerk Kim Davis?” on hotair.com.

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