Justin Harris

Justin Todd Harris (born 1975) is the owner and operator of a preschool in West Fork in Washington County in northwestern Arkansas and a Republican former member of the Arkansas House of Representatives. From 2013 to 2017, he represented District 81, which includes parts of Washington and Crawford counties. From 2011 to 2013, he represented District 87, which was moved to the domain of the since term-limited Republican Jonathan Barnett of Siloam Springs in Benton County.

A native of Muskogee in eastern Oklahoma, Harris was reared in Siloam Springs, where he graduated from Siloam Springs High School. He holds degrees in Human and Child Development and Human Environmental Science from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He is a member of the Arkansas and the Southern Early Childhood Education associations. Since 2003, he has owned Growing God's Kingdom Preschool in West Fork. From 2000 to 2003, he was director of the Living Faith Preschool. For some two years in the late 1990s, he was a merchandising assistant for JCPenney.

Since 2009, Harris has been a member of both the Washington County Republican Party and the Tea Party movement. He considers Ronald W. Reagan his favorite U.S. President.

In 2010, Harris ran in District 87 for the seat vacated by the term-limited Mark Martin, who was instead elected as the first Republican Secretary of State of Arkansas since Reconstruction. To win his House seat, Harris defeated Democrat Earl John Hunton of Prairie Grove in Washington County, 4,439 (56.8 percent) to 3,372 (43.2 percent).

Representative Harris served on these committees: (1) Legislative Joint Auditing, (2) Performance Review, and (3) Public Health, Welfare and Labor. Harris is Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, the committee which oversees the Department of Human Services. Through the Department of Human Services, Harris's pre-school, Growing God's Kingdom, has received more than $4.1 million in public funds since 2010. It was also this agency which Harris required to approve his controversial adoptions.

In 2011, Harris voted to set state standards for biblical instruction in public schools but opposed the authorization of dress codes. He voted against the prohibition of cell phone usage in school zones. He voted to prohibit state driver's license tests being administered in languages other than English. He voted for the Capital Gains Reduction Act and for the reduction of taxes on manufacturers' utilities. He voted against the congressional redistricting act.

In 2012, Harris was moved to District 81 for his second legislative term. The incumbent Republican, Representative Karen Hopper, was in turn switched to District 100. In the Republican primary, Harris defeated Lisa Marie France Norris of Alma in Crawford County, 1,578 (63.6 percent) to 904 (36.4 percent). In the general election, Harris prevailed over Democrat Wolf Grulkey, also of Alma, a supporter of Governor Mike Beebe. The tabulation was 6,891 votes (67.3 percent) for Harris to 3,355 (32.7 percent) for Grulkey.

In 2013, Representative Harris co-sponsored the amending of state income tax rates and supported the proposed spending cap on the state budget, but the latter measure failed by a two-vote margin in the House. He joined the majority to override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Mike Beebe to enact legislation to require photo identification for casting a ballot in Arkansas and to ban abortion after twenty weeks of gestation, despite Beebe's concerns that the bill was unconstitutional. He was a co-sponsor of both of those measures. Harris supported related legislation to outlaw abortion whenever fetal heartbeat is detected, to forbid the inclusion of abortion in the state insurance exchange, and to make the death of a fetus a felony in certain cases. In January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court's decision to strike down a twenty-week abortion ban in Arizona, leaving the legality of the Arkansas law in doubt.

Harris endorsed Asa Hutchinson in the 2014 Republican gubernatorial primary against Curtis Coleman. Hutchinson, a former U.S. Representative from Arkansas' 3rd congressional district, was the party's 2006 standard-bearer against Mike Beebe. He rebounded to win the general election in 2014 against the Democrat Mike Ross.

Harris and his family attend and are members of Cross Church of Northwest Arkansas (Church at Pinnacle Hills), whose pastor is Ronnie Floyd, the 2014 president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Cross Church is a Southern Baptist "mega-church".