Archives for category: Accountability

Another fine piece by Jan Resseger about the sorry state of politics in Ohio, where the Legislature ignores pressing problems, but passes bills for spite and political gain.

She begins:

In its legislative update last Friday, Honesty for Ohio Education reported: “It was an appalling and heartbreaking week in the Statehouse as Ohio legislators passed two bills to arm school personnel and ban transgender girls in female sports, and held hearings for bills censoring education about race, sexuality, and gender and banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors.”

The Plain Dealer’s Laura Hancock explains how, without a hearing, the House banned transgender girls from female sports when legislators added the amendment to another bill: “The Ohio House passed a bill shortly before midnight Wednesday, the first day of Pride Month, with an amendment to ban transgender girls and women from playing high school and college women’s sports… As originally introduced, HB 151 would change the Ohio Resident Educator Program, which assists new teachers with mentoring and professional development as they begin their careers… But on the Ohio House floor late Wednesday night, Rep. Jena Powell, a Darke County Republican, offered an amendment to the bill, which a majority of the house accepted…. House Bill 151 passed 56 to 28 with Democrats voting in opposition. It now heads to the Ohio Senate, which is in summer recess and won’t return until the fall.”

A big part of our problem in Ohio is a long run of gerrymandering—leaving both chambers of our state legislature with huge Republican supermajorities. A committee of legislators from House and Senate were charged to create fair and balanced legislative district maps. The Ohio Redistricting Commission spent the winter and spring redrawing the maps, which were rejected five times by the Ohio Supreme Courtbecause a Court majority found the new maps gerrymandered to favor the election of Republicans. At the end of May, however, a federal district court ruled that the state must end the battle over gerrymandering by using maps—for this year’s August primary and the November general election—which were rejected twice in the spring by the state’s supreme court because they favor Republican candidates.

Citizens in a democracy are not supposed to be utterly powerless, but that is how it feels right now in Ohio.

The legislature also passed bills to increase school privatization, despite the woeful performance of charter schools and vouchers. The 90% of students in public schools will suffer so that the failing charter schools and vouchers may thrive, at least financially.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a bully. He uses his power as Governor to force others to comply with his political ideology. Most recently, he forced the Special Olympics, which had chosen Florida for its competitions, to drop its vaccine requirement. This comes on the heels of an audit of Florida health data which found that the state had undercounted the numbers of COVID cases and deaths. Intentionally? DeSantis is probably the most likely Republican to run in 2024, if the aging Trump steps aside.

Rolling Stone and other publications reported the story:

Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and his administration have used their authority to essentially punish organizations he deems to be insufficiently conservative. One of their latest targets is the Special Olympics. Jay O’Brien of ABC News reported on Friday that the governor threatened to levy an eight-figure fine against the Special Olympics if it didn’t drop its Covid-19 vaccine requirement for its games in Orlando this weekend.

The Special Olympics backed off its vaccine requirement hours later, saying in a statement, “We don’t want to fight. We want to play.”

A letter from the Florida Department of Health dated June 2 threatened to assess the Special Olympics a $27.5 million fine due to “5,500 violations” of state law prohibiting business entities (including charitable organizations) from requiring individuals to show proof of vaccination. The applicable fine per person under this law is $5,000.

DeSantis is a dangerous ideologue who disregards science and the lives of his constituents.

The latest news from Florida is that there is an outbreak of a new strain of omicron COVID virus. Governor DeSantis doesn’t care if anyone is vaccinated. He believes that “public health” is a private, individual decision and that government should do nothing to protect the public.

Jill LePore is a professor of history at Harvard and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In this article, she analyzes the absurdity of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Alito was unable to find anything in the Constitution that supports a right to abortion, nor can he find support for a right to privacy. LePore points out that he won’t be able to find anything in that 4,000 word document written by 55 white men that mentions women at all. At the time the Constitution was written, women had no rights. Neither did fetuses. Nor did slaves.

She writes:

Within a matter of months, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” There were no women among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were no women among the hundreds of people who participated in ratifying conventions in the states. There were no women judges. There were no women legislators. At the time, women could neither hold office nor run for office, and, except in New Jersey, and then only fleetingly, women could not vote. Legally, most women did not exist as persons.

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About as wholly speculative as the question of who leaked this decision is the history offered to support it. Alito’s opinion rests almost exclusively on a bizarre and impoverished historical analysis. “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text,” he argues, making this observation repeatedly. Roe, he writes, was “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text” and suffers from one error above all: “it held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned…”

Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor…

If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” As I have argued, the history test disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then…

Stephen Dyer, former legislator, writes that two of every three voucher students in Ohio’s Edchiice program this year never attended public schools.

Yet legislators want to expand it.

No more nonsense about “saving poor kids from failing public schools.” The voucher program is simply a transfer of public funds to parents who never sent their children to public schools. It’s a giveaway of public dollars to parents whose children are in private schools.

And public schools are better than the private religious schools that get public money. The public schools have certified teachers, more advanced classes, a broader curriculum, and extracurricular activities that religious schools do not offer.

Dyer writes:

Ok. My jaw literally dropped when I read this bill analysis of House Bill 583 — a bill originally intended to help alleviate the substitute teacher shortage, but thanks to Ohio Senate Education Chairman Andrew Brenner, is now a giveaway to school privatizers.

Tucked away on page 7 of this analysis, I read this:

… (R)oughly 33% of the new FY 2022 income-based scholarship recipients entering grades 1-12 were students who attended a public school the previous year.

That’s right.

2 of every 3 EdChoice Expansion recipients this year never attended a public school before they received their taxpayer-funded private school tuition subsidy…

And remember that families up to 400% of poverty qualify. How much is that? For a family of 4, $111,000 qualifies as 400% of poverty That would qualify about 85% of Ohio households for this taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy.

Oh yeah, the bill also eliminates the prorated voucher for EdChoice Expansion. What’s that mean? Well, until this bill, families between 250% and 400% of poverty would qualify for a subsidy, but at a reduced rate from the $5,500 K-8 voucher or the $7,500 high school voucher.

Not anymore. Under HB 583, those prorations go away. What else goes away? The recipient’s loss of a voucher if their income grows beyond 400%.

That’s right.

Someone could make $100,000 one year, qualify their kids for a full, $5,500 Grade 1 private school tuition subsidy, change jobs, make $200,000 a year or more for the next 11 years and keep the full voucher as long as their kid was in school.

Look, I don’t need to keep repeating this, but I will: In nearly 9 of 10 cases, kids taking a voucher perform worse on state testing than kids in the public schools they leave behind. Not to mention the racial segregation the program exacerbates.

Yet here Ohio lawmakers go and dump another $13 million or more of public money into a program that will undoubtedly subsidize the private school tuitions of wealthy, disproportionately white families whose kids never attended public schools.

Who loses? The 90% of kids who don’t take a voucher because the money comes out of their schools’ budget.

Dana Milbank tells the sad story of Elise Stefanik, a promising moderate who was elected to Congress from Upstate New York. But when power beckoned, she threw aside character, ethics, and principle to join the Trump brigade. For this once-moderate member of Congress, there are no bounds to her willingness to go full MAGA. She echoes the Great Donald, walking in lockstep with him and his Big Lie, even endorsing the “great replacement theory” that terrifies MAGA-Carlson voters but inspired a massacre of ten innocent Black people in Buffalo. A week after the massacre of children and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, Stefanik said she opposes gun control, but favors more funding for mental health. Anything for the base. Anything for power. Sad.

When John Bridgeland left a senior position in George W. Bush’s White House and joined Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the fall of 2004, an eager undergraduate got assigned to him as a student fellow and facilitator of his seminar.

“She was so excited because I was one of the few Republicans” then at the school’s Institute of Politics (IOP), Bridgeland told me this week. He remembered her as “extremely bright” and “through-and-through public-service-oriented.” She was so impressive in the seminar that he chose her to do a project with him selling Harvard students on the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and other service opportunities. “I thought the world of her,” Bridgeland said.


The young woman’s name was Elise Stefanik.

Bridgeland secured her a job in the White House when she graduated in 2006, personally appealing to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and other former colleagues to hire her. Bridgeland later encouraged her to run for Congress, which she did, successfully, in 2014 — and the New York Republican quickly established herself as a leading moderate. “I was so incredibly happy and proud,” Bridgeland said. “I viewed her as the bright light of her generation of leaders. She was crossing the aisle. She was focused on problem-solving. She had the highest character.”


And then, he said, “this switch went off.”
Today, the world sees a much different Stefanik. This past week, after the racist massacre in Buffalo, attention turned to her articulation of “great replacement” theory, the white-supremacist conspiracy beliefs said to have propelled the alleged killer. Before that, she had been a prominent election denier, voting to overturn the 2020 results after the Jan. 6 insurrection, and then using the issue to oust and replace House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) because she refused to embrace President Donald Trump’s election lies.

Now, Stefanik has thrown her support, as the No. 3 House GOP leader, behind a proposal to “expunge” Trump’s impeachment for his role in the insurrection. She has joined a small group of extreme backbenchers as co-sponsors of the resolution, which casts doubt again on Joe Biden’s “seeming” win, citing “voting anomalies.” The resolution has no purpose (there’s no constitutional way to expunge impeachment) other than to sow further distrust of democracy.


It’s a story told a thousand times: Ambitious Republican official abandons principle to advance in Trump’s GOP. But perhaps nobody’s fall from promise, and integrity, has been as spectacular as the 37-year-old Stefanik’s. “I was just so shocked she would go down such a dark path,” said her former champion, Bridgeland. “No power, no position is worth the complete loss of your integrity. It was just completely alarming to me to watch this transformation. I got a lot of notes saying, ‘What happened to her?’ ”
The answer is simple: “Quest for power,” Bridgeland said. “But power without principle is a pretty dark place to go. She wanted to climb the Republican ranks and she has, but … she’s climbed the ladder on the back of lies about the election that are undermining trust in elections, putting people’s lives at risk.”


As a candidate in 2014, Stefanik refused to sign Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, a Republican purity test. Then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she became a co-chair of the Tuesday Group of Republican moderates. She boasted about being among the most bipartisan lawmakers. She criticized Trump’s “insulting” treatment of women, his “untruthful statements,” and his proposed Muslim ban and border wall.


But Trump’s huge popularity in her upstate New York district changed all that. She became one of Trump’s most caustic defenders during his first impeachment. After Trump’s 2020 loss, she embraced the “big lie,” making a stream of false claims about voter fraud, court actions and voting machines, and urging the Supreme Court to reject the results.

When Bridgeland saw his former protegee’s lies about the election, “I was shattered. I was really heartbroken,” he told me. Alumni of Harvard’s IOP petitioned to remove Stefanik from its advisory committee, and Bridgeland signed it. “I had to,” he said, “because Constitution first.” Stefanik called her removal a “badge of honor” and a decision on the school’s part “to cower and cave to the woke left.”


Bridgeland, a career-long policy innovator who still considers himself a Republican, retains a flicker of hope that his former student might return to her early promise, recant the lies, and prove true Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that if a “single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”


“People become totally ruined by their failure to stand up for the good and the true, but I do think she has the spark still and could awaken to it,” Bridgeland said. “It’s not too late.”

For our country’s sake, I wish I could believe that.

Colbert I. King, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote recently about the acknowledgement by various institutions about their role in perpetuating slavery. Harvard University was the most recent example. King says that not enough attention has been paid to the sexual exploitation of slave women. As we reflect on the current Republican obsession with banning teaching about racism and accusing teachers of pedophilia, think of the following story. Who were the most dangerous pedophiles in American history?

King writes:

This soul-searching may well help the nation come to terms with its past. But an examination of racist cruelty in 18th and 19th-century America cannot stop with the failings of public and private institutions.

No probe into the corrosive effects of racial bondage can be complete without coming to grips with, besides slavery itself, the single most heinous crime against humanity committed in the annals of U.S. history: the centuries-long sexual exploitation and subjugation of Black women and girls….

How many black women and girls were sexually exploited?

The 1860 federal census provides a clue. In Southern or slaveholding states, and in Northern states respectively, 518,360 and 69,885 people were classified as “mulattoes.”

Then King refers to a relationship that was revealed almost a decade ago. I did not read about it then.

A 22-year-old White South Carolinian who impregnated a 16-year-old Black maid in his father’s house also comes to mind. He, Strom Thurmond, avowed segregationist, Dixiecrat presidential candidate and staunch opponent of civil rights legislation, went to his grave without saying a word about what he did to that teenager. As did hundreds if not thousands of White men before him.

King links to an article that tells the story of Thurmond’s never-acknowledged black daughter. It was written by journalist Mary C. Curtis and published in the Washington Post in 2013.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams lived for 87 years. But, in her own words, she was never “completely free” until she could stand before the world and say out loud that Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist South Carolina senator, was her father. That was in 2003, after she had spent more than 70 years being denied what we all deserve – her true name and birthright. “In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was,” Washington-Williams wrote in her life story. She has died.

Thurmond’s oldest child — born when he was a 22-year-old man and her mother, Carrie Butler, a 16-year-old black maid in his father’s house – had kept the senator’s secret, an open one rumored about but never revealed when he was alive because, she had said, “He trusted me, and I respected him.” As in the case of Thomas Jefferson, another successful southern politician who was father to black children, stories shared among African Americans were long disbelieved until they turned out to be true….

She remained silent even as he did his best to block civil rights legislation and uphold white supremacy. She and her mother occasionally visited Thurmond’s law office. He sometimes gave her money. But he never gave her his name.

In 2003, she could finally stop holding her breath and tell her truth. The Thurmond family didn’t dispute her, and her name was added to the list of children on a monument for the senator on the grounds of the South Carolina state house, joining the Confederate flag, a monument to the contributions of African Americans and statues honoring segregationists who did their worst but could not stop Washington-Williams from achieving.

Wanda Bailey, Washington-Williams’ daughter, said in The State newspaper that her mother was an inspiration. “She was there for us,” Bailey said. “She was a very giving person. She did everything she could not only for her children, but her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

In that, she proved a better person than the man who spent his own life denying her. I wonder if she was smiling a few years ago when she said she would become a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy through Thurmond’s ancestral lines.

Facing internal conflicts most could only imagine, she became a mother, wife, teacher, and a daughter that Strom Thurmond or any father could be proud of.

South Carolina journalist Marilyn Thompson was credited with breaking the story of Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter.

As more details emerge, the disaster at Uvalde grows ever more horrifying. The New York Times reported that more than 140 officers of the law converged on Robb Elementary School. They began to arrive only minutes after the killer started shooting children and teachers. Two officers tried to enter the classroom but were struck by gunfire. The school district’s chief of police—who commanded a force of six—decided not to storm the classroom, although the first rule in an active shooter situation is to confront the shooter immediately and disable him. Since Columbine, police training for school shootings emphasizes the importance of rushing the killer and stopping the shooting.

The chief decided that the shooter was barricaded in the classroom and that no one was in danger. He did not have a police radio. He called on a cell phone to ask for reinforcements. Children in the classroom with the killer repeatedly called 911 to plead for help. The police waited outside the door for more than an hour. When a tactical force from the Border Patrol stormed the classroom, the officer in charge told them to stay out. They disobeyed orders and killed the shooter.

The story begins:

UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.

The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.

But there were problems from the start.

Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.

Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a message that set the stage for what would prove to be a disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.

Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more than an hour….

A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a 10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of medical attention.

The story is horrifying. It is a story of missed opportunities, unnecessary deaths, fear, miscommunication, ignorance, and perhaps cowardice. The children risked their lives to call 911. Their messages were not relayed to the officer in charge at the scene. 140 police officers on hand, waiting for orders. No orders came other than to evacuate the children who were not in the classroom with the killer. The children in the classroom with the killer were on their own for over an hour while armed police waited for a key and an order.

After years of rallying, protesting, and demanding class size reductions, the parents and teachers of New York won! The legislature passed a bill mandating a reduction in class sizes.

This is the single most powerful reform that will help students, especially the neediest students, who will benefit from smaller classes and more teacher attention.

Class size reduction matters more than school choice or teacher evaluation or other expensive but ineffective fads.

A special shout out to Leonie Haimson, the unpaid executive director of Class Size matters, who has fought this battle with all her time and energy for years.

I’m proud to say that I am a board member of Class Size Matters and Leonie is a board member of the Network for Public Education.

There have been more than 200 mass murders in the United States since the beginning of the year, and we have not yet reached the halfway mark. For mass killings, the sociopath’s gun of choice is the AR-15. It’s a guaranteed killing machine, used most recently in Buffalo to murder 10 innocent people who were grocery shopping. It will kill many more people this year. You are not safe anywhere after you leave your home. Not safe in a school, a grocery store, a place of worship, a nail salon, a music festival.

As states enact laws permitting concealed carry and open carry of guns, try not to get involved in a road rage incident. The other person might shoot you dead. Avoid all disputes. Put your hands up in the air and walk away quickly.

Life in America in these times will begin to resemble the Shootout at the OK Corral. Tourists beware. Parents, grandparents, and children, beware. Death could come anywhere, at any time.

A writer called Democracy points out that there are still some limits on guns, even though AR-15s seem to be easy to buy. In New York, a teenager who had recently had a mental evaluation (and was quickly cleared) after threatening murder and suicide. He said he was joking but he wasn’t. After killing 10 people, he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. Since he’s likely to go to jail for the rest of his life, he can count on his fellow prisoners to give him the Justice he deserves.

Democracy writes:

It’s important to note here what Antonin Scalia said in his Heller decision, the one in which he essentially REWROTE the Second Amendment to his liking. Even in Heller, Scalia made it a point to say this:

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

Scalia went on to say this: “that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”

Assault-style rifles like the AR-15 are, in fact, very “dangerous,’ military-grade weapons.

PBS described what the AR-15 is:

“the AR-15 is America’s rifle because it’s what America’s military carries…even those who don’t serve feel that they’re part of that effort when they carry the AR-15… It’s a military rifle. It’s designed to deliver masses of bullets to a very specific target…This is a weapon designed to kill…It’s a military weapon…What’s different on the civilian versions is, it only allows semiautomatic fire…It’s very easy to reload. It’s very easy to get more ammunition in there and continue to shoot at your target…The ammunition for the M-16 or the AR-15 is a 5.56-millimeter bullet. It’s a very small and very fast bullet that does a lot of tissue damage… because it’s so small and moves so fast, it tends to tumble…when it hits a person, and so it tends to create a very large wound and very difficult-to-treat wounds. Again, it’s a military weapon. It’s not designed for hunting…It’s designed to wound or kill soldiers in combat…”

The Trump judges erred, badly, and likely, on purpose.

This is truly a noble gesture by an independent Russian journalist whose publication was closed by V. Putin. He says the Nobel Prize should have gone to Alexei Navalny, the bold leader of the opposition to Putin, who was imprisoned for nine years for opposing Putin; Navalny was warned a few days ago that another 15 years may be added to his prison sentence, just because…

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last October, the Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov said he thought the honor should have gone to a different Russian: the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.

Mr. Muratov, the editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (who shared the prize with the journalist Maria Ressa of Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines), later announced that he would donate his roughly $500,000 in prize money to support various charitable causes.

And now, Mr. Muratov — whose paper suspended publication in late March, saying Russia’s increasingly draconian press laws made it impossible to truthfully cover the war in Ukraine — is giving away the 23-karat gold Nobel medal itself.

On June 20, the medal will be sold in New York by Heritage Auctions. All proceeds will go to UNICEF.