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Texas: Will There Be Accountability for the State’s Corrupt Attorney General?

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2023 //
6

Nancy Goldstein writes in the Texas Observer about her pleasure in watching the state’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives impeach Ken Paxton, the state’s Attorney General. Paxton, a stalwart MAGA-man, has been under indictment for corruption for eight years. Eight years! Paxton is the Trump ally who filed a lawsuit after the 2020 elections, joined by other Republican attorneys general, to throw out the votes of states that Biden narrowly won. The Supreme Court rejected his suit, saying that Texas had no standing to sue.

For another account of Ken Paxton’s pickle, read this story in The Texas Tribune.

Was yesterday’s performance by the Texas House of Representatives intended to restore public faith in the body’s commitment to the rule of law? Separate the good cops in the GOP from the bad cops? Or prove that a legislature that spent a year cravenly ignoring the pleas of Uvalde victims’ relatives for common-sense gun safety laws before rejecting them outright while rushing through an attempt to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom isn’t really the 10th circle of hell? If so, the hearing leading up to a 121-23 vote to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton for corruption was an epic fail.

What the public saw—regardless of the lawmakers’ intentions—were the open of fissures that have more to do with pride and power than justice. It was a cross between the state’s largest intra-party catfight and its most public self-inflicted gunshot wound, as the bad blood between Paxton and Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who serve as proxies for Trump and Republicans trying to distance themselves from Trump in advance of next year’s elections, finally spilled out into the open.

The lineup featured, on the one hand, GOP representatives who suddenly had a lot of worries about “due process,” “precedent,” and “evidence” that had not been evident while banning abortionand stripping transgender youth and their families of access to healthcare. Opposing them were those GOP colleagues who solemnly intoned about what appears to be their newly discovered “obligation to protect the citizens of Texas from elected officials who abuse their office and their powers for personal gain.”

Various media outlets, and a few of Paxton’s defenders, have made much of the lightning speed of this past week. But while it may have been mere days between the Republican-led House General Investigating Committee’s announcement of their investigation and their unanimous vote to introduce 20 articles of impeachment to the full House for Saturday’s hearing and impeachment vote, Paxton has been under felony indictment for securities fraud since he became attorney general in 2015. The FBI had been investigating Paxton on allegations that he used his office to benefit a wealthy donor, Nate Paul, since late 2020. Only in February of this year did the Department of Justice take over that probe, breathing new life into it.

Paxton’s overreach the next month, in March of this year, appears to have been the second-to-last straw. According to the committee’s own memo, released the day before the full House hearing: “But for Paxton’s own request for a taxpayer-funded settlement over his wrongful conduct, Paxton would not be facing impeachment.” Not, please note, the wrongful conduct—that is, Paxton’s firing of four whistleblowing members of his own senior staff after they accused him of using his office to help out Paul. Nor Paxton’s decision this past spring to pay $3.3 million to settle out of court. Or even the $600,000 the House spent defending Paxton. But Paxton’s request that taxpayers pay that $3.3 million—and that his fellow GOP colleagues go on record approving that request.

The final straw? Paxton, likely knowing that Phelan was going to try to gloss this most recent disgusting legislative term by ending it on a high note, called on him to resign last week over alleged drunkenness—via a tweet. Making it look super-extra-duper political when the House General Investigating Committee revealed that afternoon that it had been investigating Paxton in secret since March. The committee then heard a three-hour presentation from its investigators detailing allegations of corruption against the attorney general and voted to forward 20 articles of impeachment to the full House.

Believe me when I say that I, like many people who have been burned by the Texas GOP’s seemingly endless appetite for cruelty, ignorance, and hypocrisy, felt a certain satisfaction as I watched yesterday’s coverage of it setting itself on fire. Top moment? When the first group to appear outside the Capitol in Austin in response to Paxton’s call for supporters to turn out was around 100 people preparing for the “Trot for Trans Lives,” a 5K run held in support of transgender Americans affected by the waves of anti-trans rights legislation passed in recent years, including by Texas lawmakers.

Small pleasures aside, none of this is as satisfying as it sounds, nor do I think it will end well. First of all, because of all the bureaucracy that lies ahead. Governor Greg Abbott, who has remained curiously silent this past week while he sticks his finger into the political wind, has 10 days to tell the Senate to start a trial. A trial that would be presided over by Paxton buddy arch-conservative Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and that’s likely to be kicked down the road infinitely and/or end with an acquittal.

But ultimately because the bottom line is that while Paxton burns—or simmers or escapes entirely—and intra-party fighting and dirty laundry airing be damned, the members of the USA’s largest, richest, and most powerful wing of the GOP have screwed Texas on such a large, systemic level that they’ll still prevail. In the state, through control of both chambers and the governor’s seat, held in place by voter suppression and gerrymandering. Nationally, with courts packed with ideologues, including a Supreme Court that has already demonstrated its willingness to let Texas gut constitutional rights, overturn precedent, and play an enthusiastic role in the new national sport: playing on whatever field offers your agenda the best advantage. That means valorizing states’ rights when it’s convenient, or passing the ball to the Supreme Court if a federal ban looks more likely or appealing.

Call this, with apologies to Taylor Swift, the “Errors Tour” or, in a nod to the Ziegfeld Follies, “Hypocrisy on Parade.” Or let’s go “Paris is Burning” and give the representatives a Realness Award for their impersonation of legislators who seriously care about integrity, democracy, and the will of voters.

But whatever you do, don’t hold your breath waiting for justice.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Texas

Vox: The Hilarious Reason a Wyoming Judge Blocked New Abortion Law

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2023 //
5

VOX reported on a peculiar twist of fate that temporarily saved abortion rights in Wyoming. Last week, Wyoming District Court Judge Melissa Owens blocked the state’s new abortion ban. The reason she did so was because the abortion ban violated an amendment to the state constitution intended to cripple Obamacare that passed in 2012.

This was the second time she blocked the abortion law, based on the amendment’s guarantee of the individual’s right to control their healthcare decisions.

On Wednesday, a judge in the deep-red state of Wyoming temporarily blocked a state law that would make performing nearly any abortion in that state a felony. She relied on a 2012 amendment to the state constitution that was intended to spite then-President Barack Obama.…

Wyoming district court Judge Melissa Owens’s Wednesday decision temporarily halting her state’s abortion ban is the second time she intervened to prevent this ban from going into effect. Wyoming’s abortion ban is quite strict, although it does provide exceptions for rape, incest, or when either a pregnant patient or the fetus has certain medical conditions.

Last summer, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, an array of patients, doctors, and nonprofit groups brought a suit arguing that Wyoming’s abortion ban violated the state’s constitutional provision protecting each adult’s right to individual health care decisions. That case is known as Johnson v. Wyoming.

Regardless of the political circumstances that led to this amendment being written into the state constitution, Owens reasoned that the amendment “unambiguously provides competent Wyoming citizens with the right to make their own health care decisions,” and she was bound by that unambiguous text. “A court,” she wrote, “is not at liberty to assume that the Wyoming voters who adopted” the amendment “did not understand the force of language in the provision.”

Just as significantly, Owens construed the amendment to give people in Wyoming a “fundamental right” to make their own health care decisions, including the decision to seek an abortion. This designation matters because fundamental rights can only be abridged when the state seeks to advance a “compelling state interest” and when it uses the “least intrusive” means to do so.

So the Wyoming legislature’s effort to hobble Obamacare turned into a shield for abortion rights, at least temporarily.

Categories Education Reform, Health, Humor, Obama, Wyoming

Texas: Independent Book Stores May Be Crushed by State Censorshup Laws

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
53

The state legislature in Texas passed a bill that will place an expensive burden on the state’s 300 or so small small bookstores. The mandate is not only costly but almost impossible to comply with. The state wants every bookstore to rate every book they sell by its “sexual content” and to refuse to sell books with sexually explicit content to teachers, librarians, and school libraries. In addition, the bookstores are supposed to report whether they have ever in the past sold books with such content to teachers or schools.

Independent bookstores around Texas warn that a bill designed to rid school libraries of sexual content could have unintended consequences that devastate their businesses.

The bill, which received final passage in the Legislature this week and is awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature, requires booksellers to rate every book they sell to a school, librarian or teacher for use in their classroom. Books can be without a rating, “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit,” and those with the explicit rating will be banned from schools entirely.

And by April of next year, every bookseller in the state is tasked with submitting to the Texas Education Agency a list of every book they’ve ever sold to a teacher, librarian or school that qualifies for a sexual rating and is in active use. The stores also are required to issue recalls for any sexually explicit books.

Many have expressed concerns that the bill is an effort to restrict books with LGBTQ themes or by Black authors. In addition, throughout the legislative process, independent bookstores repeatedly have warned that the bill misunderstands how book sales to schools work, is unworkable in its current form and could be harmful to small businesses.

“The First Amendment person in me says, ‘Why do we have to mark the books at all? ’ The business person in me says, ‘that’s going to be very hard to administer for the middle vendor,’ which we are,” said Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Book Shop in Houston.

Owners and employees of bookstores around the state have said they don’t have the staff or expertise to read and rate every single book they are selling to an educator, and they have no records to retroactively rate every book they’ve ever sold to a school. If the TEA finds that bookstores have been incorrectly rating books, they can be banned from doing business with charter schools or school districts, which might make up between 10 percent and a third of their business.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco. He dubbed it the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources act, or READER Act. The measure was born out of conservative fears in the last few years of sexual content in public schools. Many of the books that were subsequently identified as inappropriate were written for LGBTQ children and teenagers.

Patterson has said the bill was inspired by “Gender Queer,” a coming-of-age graphic novel that explores the author’s gender identity and personal sexuality.

“We’re not talking about a certain type of sexual activity. We’re talking about sexually explicit of any sort. It doesn’t belong in front of the eyes and in the minds of kids,” Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said during a Senate debate Tuesday night. Paxton shepherded the measure through that chamber. [Senator Paxton is the wife of State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was just impeached for multiple financial crimes by the Texas House.]

Paxton said the bill will mostly affect large vendors, as just 50 companies sell most books purchased by Texas public schools, and three giants are responsible for the bulk of titles in campus libraries.

“If vendors want to sell books in Texas, they certainly have a vested interest in making sure it’s done properly,” she added.

But while those large vendors may be able to more easily bear the extra costs associated with this bill if it becomes law, it will be more difficult for the roughly 300 independent bookstores in Texas that have much smaller profit margins overall than the giants.

It’s common for stores to offer discounts for teachers, librarians and schools, which means the margins on those sales are lower.

For example, a librarian might give the store a list of 150 books they want to buy, at an average of 200 pages each. If this bill becomes law, the store will need to pay someone to read and rate each of those books, and run the risk of being punished by the Texas Education Agency if they get it wrong.

This could either make it more expensive for schools to buy books or make such sales infeasible for small bookstores, said Elizabeth Jordan, general manager of Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio. Her store had a goal of increasing its share of sales to schools to about 15 percent of its total business, she said, but that will no longer be possible.

“If I am selling a book to a school, I will have to have read the whole book to determine if it’s sexually relevant or sexually explicit. And both of those things, I think, are pretty subjective, and I might rate them differently than others might,” she said. “I don’t see why I would put myself at risk to do that. If all the onus is on me, all the liability is on me, and it’s not a job I’m trained to do or my employees are trained to do….

In addition, the bill requires stores to retroactively rate every book they’ve ever sold that is still “in active use by (a) district or school.”

“The way the bill is written right now is that not only can we get in trouble for what we sell to a school, we can get in trouble for something we sold 10 years ago to a school,” Koehler said.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Libraries, Lies, Literature, Texas

Book-Banning in Florida Is Contagious in Other Red States

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
24

The Associated Press published this article about how DeSantis has unleashed a nation-wide zeal for censorship. It appeared in newspapers across the nation.

TALLAHASSEE — As he vies for the Republican presidential nomination, laws pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis have led to an upswing in banned or restricted books not only in Florida schools but also in an increasing number of other conservative states.

Florida last year became the first in a wave of red states to enact laws making it easier for parents to challenge books in school libraries they deem to be pornographic, deal improperly with racial issues or are in other ways inappropriate for students.

Books ensnared in the Florida regulations include explicit graphic novels about growing up LGBTQ+, a children’s book based on a true story of two male penguins raising a chick in a zoo and “The Bluest Eye,” a novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison that includes descriptions of child sexual abuse. Certain books covering racial themes also have been pulled from library shelves, sometimes temporarily, as school administrators try to assess what material is allowed under the new rules.

While efforts to ban books or censor education material have come up sporadically over the years, critics and supporters credit DeSantis with inspiring a new wave of legislation in other conservative states to regulate the books available in schools — and sometimes even in public libraries.

The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.

EveryLibrary, a national political action committee, said it’s tracking at least 121 proposals introduced in state legislatures this year targeting libraries, librarians, educators and access to materials. The group said 39 of those proposals would allow for criminal prosecution.

“He really is blazing a trail,” said Tiffany Justice, the Florida-based co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, whose members have filed challenges to books in libraries in several states. “What Ron DeSantis does that I think is effective is he uses all the levers of power to make long-term change happen.”

“Other governors,” Justice said, “are paying attention and following suit.

In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law, set to take effect this summer, that could impose criminal penalties on librarians who knowingly provide “harmful” materials to minors. The law also would establish a process for the public to challenge materials and ask they be relocated to a section minors can’t access.

“It’s a perverse world when we’re talking about trying to criminalize librarians,” said Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock, which is expected to sue over Arkansas’ law.

In Indiana, school libraries will be required by July 1 to publicly post a list of books they offer and provide a complaint process for community members under a law Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed this month. In Texas, a bill creating new standards for banning books from schools that the government considers too explicit has been sent to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

In Oklahoma, the state school board has approved new rules that prohibit “pornographic materials and sexualized content” in school libraries and allow parents to submit formal complaints. The rules still must be approved by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt.

DeSantis insists books aren’t being banned, preferring to call the forced removal of some books “curation choices that are consistent with state standards.”

“There has not been a single book banned in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Wednesday. He later said, “our mantra in Florida is education, not indoctrination.”

Librarians, free speech advocates and some parents and educators say the push is driven by a small, conservative minority that happens to have outsized clout in Republican primaries like the one DeSantis is now competing in.

“This is all part of his plan to run for president, and he believes his vilification of books and what’s happening in public schools is his path to the presidency,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s main teachers union.

Kasey Meehan, who directs the Freedom to Read program at the writers’ organization PEN America, said that, when books are targeted in Florida, they later become the subject of complaints filed by parents in other states.

“It’s something that continues to cause alarm for individuals who are advocating for the freedom to read or for a diversity of knowledge, ideas and books to be available to students across the country,” Meehan said.

There have been challenges to books in schools for decades — “The Bluest Eye” has been targeted in various states for years, long before DeSantis became governor.

But the restrictions accelerated in Florida after DeSantis signed bills last year barring discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, a ban that has since expanded through 12th grade. He also created a mechanism for parents to challenge books in school libraries and has targeted how race is taught in Florida schools.

Many teachers and districts complain that the laws’ standards are so vague they don’t know what books might place them in legal jeopardy.

Michael Woods, a special education teacher in Palm Beach, said new rules compelling him to catalog books in his classroom led him to empty a small library he set up where students could choose to read something that interested them. Now those volumes are stored in a box he’s stashed in his closet for fear of getting in trouble.

“That kind of positive connection to reading is no longer there,” he said.

The individual challenges to books might be coming from a fairly narrow segment of the population, according to PEN and the American Library Association, which track requests to pull books. The library association said 40% of all requests challenged 100 or more books at a time.

Raegan Miller of Florida Freedom to Read, a group fighting the book restrictions, said she has talked about education issues with fellow parents of all political persuasions for years, and no one has ever complained about inappropriate material in their children’s schools. She contends the issue has been ginned up by a small group of conservative activists.

“Do you really think we are all just happily dropping our kids off at Marxist indoctrination and pornography?” Miller said. “You only hear this stuff at school board meetings.”

Moms for Liberty, which boasts 285 chapters, has a strong presence at school board meetings in the state and nationwide. It also has successfully backed several candidates for school board.

Categories Censorship, DeSantis, Education Reform, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read

Florida: The Banning of Amanda Gorman’s Poem Is Shameful

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
64

Greg Sergeant of the Washington Post reviews the decision in Florida to ban Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem, keeping it out of the reach of elementary age children. Librarians are just following orders, as DeSantis knew they would. He doesn’t need to name the books. Hyper-vigilant parents do his dirty work for him.

At this point, it should be obvious that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture-war directives are designed to encourage parents to indulge in book purges for sport. Precisely because removals have become so easy, lone right-wing actors are feverishly hunting for offending titles, getting them pulled from school libraries on absurdly flimsy grounds, sometimes by the dozens.

A new turn in the explosive saga involving the poem that Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration underscores the point. DeSantis is now defending a Florida school’s decision to restrict access to “The Hill We Climb” — a move that has become a national controversy.

“It was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library,” DeSantis told a convention on Friday, though it was in fact one poem. DeSantis insisted the school district in question merely “moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library,” and ripped “legacy media” for calling this a “ban,” complaining of a “poem hoax.”

That’s a shameless but revealing characterization of what happened. It’s true that Gorman’s poem was removed from the elementary school section of the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes and that access was preserved for middle school students. But this came in response to an objection from one parent.

The woman who complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem filled out a card. She thought the poem was written by Oprah Winfrey. She admitted that she had not read Gorman’s poem.

It turns out that Amanda Gorman’s poem is not freely available to students in middle school. As the Washington Post reported, a student must request it from a media specialist, then prove that they can read at a fifth-grade level. Otherwise it is restricted.

As this blogger wrote:

Imagine having to take a test to check out a book with one poem in it!

The reality of what DeSantis and Moms for Liberty are doing is now clear to everyone: With a combination of lies, misinformation and intimidation, they want to create an America where it’s easier for a white supremacist to ban a book than it is for a Black child to read a poem.

Categories Censorship, Education Reform

DeSantis: “There’s No Book Banning in Florida.” Really?

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
29

When Ron DeSantis launched his candidacy on Twitter, he scoffed at the notion that schools were banning books in Florida. That alone should disqualify him, based on what we have seen, heard and read about the state’s encouragement of banning books that refer to gays or racism. A complaint by a single parent is sufficient to get a book removed from the school library. Most recently, a parent at an elementary school complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at President Biden’s inauguration. The poem is now available to middle school children, but not to those in the elementary school.

The Miami Herald published this editorial about the phenomenon that DeSantis says is non-existent, a hoax.

Perhaps it’s because of how Amanda Gorman alluded to the Jan. 6 attack in her famous poem, finished the night after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.”

Or maybe she wrote too bluntly about race and the legacy of slavery:

“We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”

Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, watched by about 40 million people. She wrote the poem so “that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,” she posted on Twitter Tuesday.

But Gorman’s poem is now deemed not age appropriate, one of four library titles Bob Graham Education Center banned, following a parent’s complaint, for elementary school students, the Herald reported. The books are now available only for middle-schoolers at the public school in Miami Lakes, even though some of them were written for younger children.

The school committee that reviewed the material didn’t offer an explanation for its decision. We’re left to wonder: What in the children’s illustrated book “The ABCs of Black History,” written for children ages 5 and up, made it so inappropriate?

Perhaps it was the mention of iconic author James Baldwin’s sexual orientation: “And he was a gay man who believed that when it comes to love, you should ‘go the way your blood beats.” Or the mention of the Little Rock Nine, the “first Black children in all-white schools,” or the Black Panther movement. Or were the colorful drawings of Black female icons like Michelle Obama and Toni Morrison — described as “ queens”— too much?

One thing is clear: Books by Black authors — and about the Black American experience — make up three of the four titles deemed inappropriate for young children at Bob Graham Education Center. The other one, “Cuban Kids,” uses photos to describe the lives of children in Cuba in the early 2000s and how different or similar they are to Americans, according to the author’s homepage. Learning about the lives of their counterparts in a socialist country — including how they got around paper shortages — is sure to turn our kids into communists.

We knew that the movement to “sanitize” school libraries that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature unleashed would eventually catch up with Miami-Dade. Our melting pot, after all, might not be so different from Escambia County in the Panhandle, whose school board has been sued for removing books about race and LGBTQ topics.

Florida’s laws have emboldened parents and activists like Moms for Liberty to challenge materials dealing with these topics. Most recently, DeSantis signed a bill that empowers one person to file a complaint and ban a book, at least temporarily, while a district reviews it. Parents not satisfied with how a district ruled on the challenge can appeal to the state. That is bound to make schools acquiesce to offended parents.

The result, as Gorman wrote on Twitter after her poem was restricted, is that “most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves.”

Elementary students were not required to read Gorman’s work or any of the challenged titles. These were options at Bob Graham Education Center’s library. Those options also should be available for the children of all parents, not only those offended by certain content or groups skimming books to find any remote reference to race or LGBTQ issues.

“Love to Langston” was written at a second-grade reading level but no longer is accessible to second-graders at Bob Graham. The illustrated biography of Harlem Renaissancewriter Langston Hughes describes his own elementary school experience, tainted by racism, in the early 1900s:

“In Topeka, Kansas the teacher makes me sit in the corner; in the last row; far away; from the other kids.”

The parent who filed the complaint said “Love to Langston” contained critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, the Herald reported. It’s unclear how.

It is curious, however, that “indoctrination” and “hate messages” seem to be flagged mostly when when Black authors write about being Black, or when LGBTQ authors write about being queer. The adults must ask themselves why that’s the case before making them inaccessible to children.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Hoax, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literature

Memorial Day: Dangers to Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
52

Memorial Day is a day to remember and pay tribute to the men and women who gave their lives to defend our democracy. Because of their sacrifice, we enjoy our freedoms. We are called upon not only to respect them and their sacrifices, but to be alert to today’s threats to the freedoms and rights we treasure. Voting rights are under attack. Censorship and book banning are on the rise. Red state legislatures are trying to control the blue cities in their midst. Red state legislatures are passing cookie-cutter laws to fund private and religious schools despite the opposition of the public. A woman’s right to control her body has been eliminated by red states. In a sad irony, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has long been the ultimate defender of our rights—is eroding democracy, under the control of rightwing ideologues, three of whom were appointed by Trump after being chosen by the extremist Federalist Society.

In that spirit, I post a comment by the polymath Bob Shepherd, who contributes his wisdom to us as a reader of the blog..

Pardon me, but this is so important that I want to make sure that I say the whole properly. So, some repetition here:

The Extreme Court decisions that just wiped out much of the power of the EPA to regulate air pollution (West Virginia v. EPA) and water pollution (Sackett v. EPA) in the United States are PART of an overall effort, begun in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, to ERASE much of the authority of the United States federal government on the basis of a NOVEL reinterpretation of the Constitution that ELIMINATES THE ABILITY OF THE EXECUTIVE TO EXERCISE UNENUMERATED POWERS–powers not SPECIFICALLY given it by the Constitution. This would reduce the federal government to a SHADOW of its former reach. Ron DeSantis just gave a speech in which he discussed precisely this, which he described as the necessity of “Reconstitutionalizing” our government:

“There’s a lot that the executive branch can do, and all I will say when it comes to these agencies… [is] buckle up when I get in there because the status quo is not acceptable, and we are going to make sure that we reconstitutionalize this government, and these agencies are totally out of control. There’s no accountability, and we are going to bring that in a very big way.”

In connection with this envisioned vast overhaul of U.S. governance, DeSantis made this chilling promise:

“Even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge when I tell people I’m going to do something, I don’t make promises or say I’m going to do something lightly.”

Here’s what I think is happening: Repugnican leaders have recognized that if Jabba the Trump wins the nomination, they will lose again. So, the current plan is to remove Trump by standing aside and letting the judicial process do that for them via the various cases now pending against the Orange Idiot. That way, they can take him out of the picture while not alienating the Trumpanzees from themselves–they can blame the fall of the Glorious Leader on some Deep State conspiracy led by Biden. Then, DeSantis will assume the Orange mantle and carry forward, in the Executive branch, the agenda that the Reich-wing cabal at the head of the Judicial branch has set for itself. (NB: the Orange Idiot Trump was extremely useful to The Federalist Society because he, knowing nothing himself, simply rubber stamped putting those people in place–the ones now reenvisioning U.S. government entirely).

It is worth remembering in this regard that the revolution in Germany that scuttled democratic government there and put the Fascists under Hitler in power took place BY LEGAL MEANS. And so the history we haven’t learned from repeats itself. Couple this legal implementation of the no unenumerated powers theory with the independent state legislature theory also being endorsed by the Extreme Court (a theory that holds that state legislatures, which are predominately Repugnican, can hold do-overs if they don’t like election results) and you get the recipe for the end of democracy and the onset of Fascist governance in the United States.

This is how these traitors overthrow democratic government. In the background, not via some sort of January 6th event.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Justice

Texas: NO VOUCHERS IN TEXAS! ABBOTT VOWS TO CALL SPECIAL SESSION!

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
13

The Texas legislature refused to pass voucher legislation!

Governor Greg Abbott said that getting a voucher law was his #1 priority in this session of the legislature. Republicans have a supermajority in the legislature but rural Republicans and urban Democrats blocked the bill. He pressured every Republican to back his bill.

Once again, vouchers failed to pass!

In rural Texas, public schools are often the only school in town and the biggest employer. Public schools are the heart of the community. Parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins went to the public school. The teachers are well known and respected. Rural Republicans said no to vouchers.

The Pastors for Texas Children have worked diligently to stop vouchers in Texas. PTC issued this press release today:

 

No Vouchers In Texas!

The Texas House of Representatives has once again stopped a private school voucher program in Texas.

Rep. Ken King’s public education funding bill, HB 100, was saddled in the waning days of the session by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick with a one-hundred page Senate substitute calling for universal ESA vouchers. When the House refused to concur with the substitute, the bill was sent to conference committee where it died.

Although Gov. Greg Abbott made private school vouchers his #1 priority this legislative session, the House was crystal clear in their opposition to it. Three times throughout the session, they repudiated a voucher proposal.

First, the Herrero Amendment prohibiting tax money for private school vouchers passed the Texas House of Representatives during the budget debate on an 86-52 vote. Second, the House refused to grant the Public Education Committee permission to hold an impromptu meeting to push out Senate Bill 8 calling for a universal voucher. The final straw was when the committee failed to garner the votes to pass out SB 8. The plan died in committee.

That’s when the Senate, in a last-ditch effort, attached a comprehensive voucher program to HB 100 which would have provided much-needed funds for local public schools and well-deserved teacher pay increases.

Rep. King did not mince words: “Teacher pay raises held hostage to support an ESA plan. Teachers are punished over a political fight.”

This session’s rejection of vouchers is particularly powerful because Gov. Greg Abbott made the passage of a voucher policy an “emergency item” this legislative session, conducted a statewide campaign in anti-voucher House districts, and personally lobbied House members on the chamber floor to pass it.

“Vouchers are fundamentally unjust and inequitable,” said the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Founder and Executive Director of Pastors for Texans Children. “It is wrong for public tax dollars to be diverted to subsidize the private education of affluent children. To pay for religious education is an especially egregious violation of both the public trust and of God’s moral law of religious freedom.”

“Gov. Abbott has tied up the entire legislature this session, at the cost of millions of tax dollars, for his own petty personal political agenda. Sadly, his stated intention is to continue calling special legislative sessions until he bullies the House into submission.”

“There is only one way to deal with a bully: a firm, patient, courageous confrontation. Precisely what our morally oak-strong caucus of pro-public education rural Republican and urban Democratic House members can provide.”

The Texas State Constitution, in Article 7, Section 1, calls for the suitable provision for “public free schools.” There is no constitutional provision for public funding diverted to private schools.

Pastors for Texas Children is grateful that the Texas House of Representatives once again stood firm, as they have throughout the 30 year voucher debate in Texas, for the true conservative value of universal education for all Texas schoolchildren, provided and protected by the public.

 

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Pastors for Texas Children mobilizes the faith community for public education ministry and advocacy. http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com

PO Box 471155 – Fort Worth, Texas 76147

http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Rural Schools, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: The Debt Ceiling Deal: GOP Protects the Rich, Punishes the Poor

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
3

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times explains how Republicans agreed to the increase in the debt ceiling: by cutting aid to the neediest. He wrote: The cruelty is the point.

No one should be surprised that the resolution of our most moronic fiscal policy, the federal debt ceiling, involved our stupidest social policy, work requirements for assistance programs.

But that appears to be the case. In negotiations between the Biden White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republican caucus, one of the last sticking points was whether, and by how much, to tighten work requirements for food stamps and welfare.

In coming days, as Congress moves toward votes on the deal, political commentators will thoroughly masticate the question of whether Biden or McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) prevailed in this dealmaking and which of them will be hurt or harmed politically by the outcome.

Democrats right now are willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work.

— Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) tells a giant lie about the debt ceiling negotiations

That’s not a very interesting parlor game. (Personally, I’d go with the judgment of Timothy Noah of the New Republic, who thinks Biden emerges as the political victor and McCarthy’s days as speaker are numbered, thanks to the choler of his far right wing.)

More important is what the deal says about the principles of both camps. The granular details of the agreement were still murky Sunday, and it could still collapse because of objections from congressional Republicans or Democrats.

The deal, as reported, freezes discretionary federal spending — that is, most of the programs for which Americans depend on the federal government — at current levels for the next two years, with increases lower than inflation. That means an effective budget cut, relative to inflation. In return, the debt ceiling is suspended for two years.

But Biden managed to preserve the accomplishments of his presidency thus far from the GOP’s knives. He fended off their efforts to torpedo the support for renewable energy in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, their harshest proposed budget cuts, the rollback of student debt relief, and repeal of his budget increase for the Internal Revenue Service.

(Reports say that $10 billion will be shaved off the $80-billion 10-year IRS budget increase, but the money can be redirected to other programs.)

Biden rejected Republican demands to impose work requirements on Medicaid, but allowed some tightening of the rules for food stamps — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, which is what’s left of traditional welfare.

Make no mistake: No rich American will be harmed even a bit by this deal. Some may even be advantaged, if the carve-out from the IRS budget comes from the agency’s enforcement efforts; that would help the rich, who are the nation’s worst tax cheats.

The most vulnerable Americans, however, will bear the brunt of the deal points. Let’s take a look.

Start with work requirements. As I’ve reported ad infinitum over the years, work requirements on safety net programs accomplish nothing in terms of pushing their beneficiaries into the job market.

They are, however, very effective at throwing people off those programs; that’s what happened in Arkansas , where 17,000 people lost Medicaid benefits in 2019 after only six months of a limited rollout of work rules. A federal judge then blocked the changes.

The debt ceiling deal will tighten work requirements for SNAP by requiring able-bodied, childless low-income adults younger than 55 to work 20 hours a week or be engaged in job training or job searches. If they don’t meet that standard, their SNAP benefits end after three months. Current law applies to those adults only up to the age of 49. The change will expire in 2030.

This rule will do virtually nothing to reduce federal spending, which Republicans say has been the whole point of holding the debt ceiling hostage. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the change would reduce federal spending by $11 billion over 10 years, or $1.1 billion a year.

By my calculation, that comes to 17 thousandths of a percent of the federal budget, which this year is $6.4 trillion.

If it’s scarcely a rounding error in federal accounts, however, it’s critically important to the recipients of food aid. The CBO estimated that about 275,000 people would lose benefits each month because they failed to meet the requirement.

Biden’s negotiators did get the Republicans to waive SNAP rules for veterans and the homeless, which will probably lower that figure and limit the reduction of federal spending.

Work requirements for safety net programs have been a Republican hobby horse for decades. It’s based on the Republican image of low-income Americans as layabouts and grifters — the “undeserving poor.”

Sure enough, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), one of McCarthy’s debt-ceiling negotiators, couldn’t resist slandering this vulnerable population during the talks. “Democrats right now are willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work,” he said during a break.

Of course, it was Republicans who showed willingness to default on the federal debt. Nor is there a smidgen of evidence that any sizable percentage of this target population is “refusing to work.”

The vast majority of SNAP recipients already work, but they’re in low-paying jobs that are so unstable that they often drift in and out of employment. According to the Census Bureau, 79% of all SNAP families include at least one worker, as do nearly 84% of married couples on SNAP.

In other words, the GOP insistence on work requirements is nothing but the party’s typical performative malevolence toward the poor. If they really cared about getting SNAP recipients into the job market, they’d fund job training programs and infrastructure projects. They never do.

In any case, the only cohort of beneficiaries that tends to move into the job market at all are younger recipients — not those in their 50s. All that work requirements accomplish is to erect bureaucratic barriers to enrollment in the safety net. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The work rules for TANF are managed somewhat differently — they’re directed at the states administering the program, which have been required to ensure that a certain percentage of beneficiaries are working or looking for work. How the debt ceiling deal applies to that program is unclear.

In the next week or so, before June 5 — the putative date at which the Treasury Department says the government runs out of money to pay its bills without a debt ceiling increase and thus flirts with an unprecedented default — Biden and McCarthy will hit the hustings to claim victory.

But there’s really only one way to think about the exercise we’ve just gone through. It was a supreme waste of time.

Republicans showed they were willing to crash the U.S. economy to make some bog-standard complaints about the federal deficit, most of which they created themselves through the 2017 tax cuts they enacted for the wealthy. Their initial negotiating stance was so extreme that they must have known it could never gain Democratic votes in the House or pass the Democratic Senate.

The Democrats held reasonably firm. They agreed to some modest budget constraints for two years, moved the next debt ceiling cabaret off to beyond the next election, and saved millions of Americans from serious economic pain.

As I’ve written before, if Republicans were really serious about restraining federal spending, they wouldn’t have voted for the tax cuts and budget increases that that contribute to the deficit.

Instead, they said the only way to control spending is to refuse to pay the bills they ran up, by refusing to increase the debt ceiling. They lied, and every thinking American knows they lied. So tell me, why did we go through this again?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Lies, Poverty, Republicans

Jim Hightower: Why Texas GOP Loves the Bible

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
24

Jim Hightower is a gadfly who keeps stinging the Texas GOP in the backside. He was elected State Agriculture Commissioner from 1983-1991. I recently subscribed to his blog to get a deeper insight into the clowns who now control my native state. You might consider doing the same.

He writes here about the latest embarrassment to the state by its leading yahoos.

Cartoon via FFRF.org

Once again, the Texas Legislature leads by example! Erroneous and wrongheaded example, but, Bless Their Little Hearts, they’re just not real good at thinking complicated things through.

The present lawmaking adventure of the GOP-controlled Lege is an attempt to impose a militant brand of Christian Nationalism as the official public religion of Texas. Throughout history, such right-wing attempts to subvert a pluralistic society’s sense of the Common Good with the narrowest mindset of one particular pietistic group has led to both great harm and unintended hilarity. Indeed, the Lone Star State has a long and daffy history of getting the Bible jumbled up in public policy. In the 1920s, for example, Governor Miriam A “Ma” Ferguson rejected a proposal for bilingual education in our schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,” she explained, “it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”

Likewise, today’s trio of Republican numbskulls running our state government – the governor, lt. guv, and attorney general – are acting as Bible-thumping Pentecostals. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick recently rose up on his hind legs to proclaim that ours is “a Christian nation,” that “there is no separation of church and state,” and that God Almighty himself “wrote the Constitution.” To enshrine this religious absolutism into law, these sanctimonious Texas politicos are now enacting a dictate that all public schools must conspicuously display The Ten Commandments “in every classroom,” and the nitpicking autocrats even specify that the displays “must be at least 16-by-20 inches.” It’s rule by rulers.

TIDBIT: The sanctity of the Ten Commandments derives from its devotees contention that the instructions were literally handed down by God. So, every word is sacrosanct. Except “ass.” The 10thCommandment directs: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house… wife… manservant… maidservant… ox… ass….” But the sponsor of the Texas bill, a self-righteous pissant of a senator named Phil King, took the ungodly liberty of removing ass from the holy version of the Lord’s Word. Thus, the children will be instructed by law to obey a religious code co-authored by Yahweh and Phil King. And, thanks to Phil’s red-ink editing pen, they will be morally free to covet their neighbor’s ass.

As proof that these Christian edicts are the holy foundation of US law, pushers of the public indoctrination of children point out that a frieze along the east Wall of the US Supreme Court is emblazoned with the numbers I through X. This shows, they assert, that our nation’s laws are derived from the higher authority of Christian commandments.

But – Holy Ma Ferguson! – they’re flaunting their ignorance. Those numbers refer not to the Bible, but to the Constitution, specifically the 10 Amendments that itemized our people’s original Bill of Rights. And remember that the very first one of those secular amendments prohibits government from enacting any law for the “establishment of religion.”

Note, too, that none of America’s founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers) even mentions the Christian commandments. Finally, the various writers of the Bible itself don’t agree on the proper wording of the so-called commandments, how many there are, and what they mean.

DO SOMETHING!

To get the lowdown on the Ten Commandments (or is it 13? Or more?) The Freedom From Religion Foundation providesfactual insights and historical context for each one. FFRF is the leading source for tracking theocratic assaults on religious freedom and for providing how-to action items for battling right-wing efforts to turn our local, state, and national government into autocratic theocracies. Connect at ffrf.org.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Humor, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Religion, Separation of church and state, Stupid, Texas
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