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Jess Piper: Why Uncontested Seats Are Undemocratic and Breed Extremism

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
14

Jess Piper is an educator, a blogger, and a farmer in rural Missouri. In this post, she describes an extremist in the state legislature who wants to defund public libraries, Planned Parenthood, and public schools.

Now Rep. Cody Smith, chair of the House Budget Committee, is running for State Treasurer, and no Democrat is running against him. He can flourish as an extremist because he is unopposed.

She writes:

Uncontested seats are undemocratic. This is the story of one of those seats:

Last year, Missouri Representative Cody Smith, the House Budget Committee Chairman, proposed a motion to defund public libraries in the state? Why? Because lawmakers were trying to pass a bill to ban “pornography” in libraries. The bill would actually limit classic books and literature that may be offensive to some, but is literature none the less. 

So, the ACLU, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association sued the state. In retaliation, Rep Smith moved to strip public libraries from the state budget. To defund public libraries. He failed…

Now he’s going after Planned Parenthood, which no longer provides abortion services, but does offer women’s health services, like screening for breast cancer.

He also is promoting a universal school voucher program that would subsidize every student currently enrolled in private and religious schools. The cost might be as much as $1 billion a year.

Here is the worst part, friends. He’s running for State Treasurer…against two other Republicans. Not one Democrat has filed to run as of today.

We. Can’t. Win. When. We. Don’t. Run.

Representative Smith also ran unopposed in 2022. He just walked right into the Capitol and wrote bills to defund public libraries, public schools, and Planned Parenthood. He has been made near-invincible by the power to not have to answer to constituents. If he has no fear of opposition, he can be as extreme as his donors would like. And, that seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

Last year, 40% of Missouri House seats went unopposed. We let 66 Reps win by default, and friends, this is undemocratic. Most of these seats are in rural parts of the state…Rep Cody Smith is from Carthage, population 15K. Cody faced no opposition, won without any contest, and then wrote bills that could harm millions of folks in our state.

I work with Blue Missouri for this reason—I believe in running everywhere. Even in rural races. Even in places we know won’t flip for a few cycles. Robert Hubbell wrote about our organization a few days ago after hearing about what we are doing in Missouri…here it is. 

Run Everywhere. Contest every damn seat.

So many statehouse races have gone uncontested and unsupported. Democrats in these districts, especially rural Dems like those in my community feel abandoned, ignored…forgotten. Meanwhile, GOP nominees get free passes to the Capitol to do the business of extremist donors.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

We can show up for Missouri’s Democrats, making sure no Democrat gets left behind. No Missouri voter is left without a choice. No Republican gets a free ride.

That’s the plan to deal with folks like Representative Smith. We take back our state seat by seat. We contest every single one of them on every ballot across the entire state.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Libraries, Missouri, Vouchers

Trump’s Debt to Putin

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
35

Our occasional commenter, who uses the sobriquet “Democracy” posted the following analysis of Putin’s involvement in the 2016 election. Russia and Wikileaks crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and at least eight Republican Senators knew it. They endorsed a report which reached that conclusion. Yet they continued to defend Trump.

Democracy posted:

Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigative report on the 2016 election:

“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Click to access report_volume5.pdf

And if you’ve not read it before, here’s Adam Silverman, a national security expert, on that investigative report:

The Real Takeaway From the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Bipartisan Report On Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference In the 2016 Election: They All Knew Before They Voted To Acquit!!!!!

It’s quite clear…Trump and Republicans (and the NRA) are enthralled by and beholden to Putin.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP is a Dying Party

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
43

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.

She writes:

Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.

Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power. 

The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan. 

The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.  

The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.

The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”

Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.

Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races. 

But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it. 

Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago. 

But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.

It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again. 

The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.

Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.

In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.   

Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.  

As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.

Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.” 

After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all. 

The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.” 

That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government. 

But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt. 

“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.” 

–- 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Should Anonymous Comments Be Permitted Online?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
44

Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade writes on the website Cafe Insider that social media should require commenters to use their real name. Anonymity enables trolls and invective.

We have seen what happens on this blog. Anonymous posters attack others, make wild accusations, and vent their inner demons. I take down as many of these comments as I can, but I’m not online 24/7. One Trump troll repeatedly changes his IP address to evade being blocked.

There are a number of rules in this blog. First, I don’t allow comments that insult me; the blog is my online living room and I eject offensive visitors. Second, I don’t tolerate conspiracy theories: Sandy Hook happened, 9/11 was not “an inside job,” Trump lost the 2020 election. I also will not post racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, or homophobic comments.

The reason I allow anonymous comments is because many educators are afraid to speak their mind about what they know. They fear retribution from their superior.

What do you think?

McQuade writes:

Dear Reader,

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts two dogs sitting at a computer with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” 

This image came to mind recently when one of my hometown newspapers, The Detroit Free Press, announced it would no longer post reader comments on its website. In a letter to readers, Editor Nicole Avery Nichols explained the decision was necessary “due to the time investment needed to produce a safe and constructive dialogue.” The real culprit, I believe, is anonymity. 

Reader comments became commonplace when news outlets went online in the 1990s. The idea for such comments is laudable. Members of the community may engage with writers, editors, and each other to discuss a matter in the news, adding to the discussion the perspectives of other voices and experiences. 

Yet, the Free Press has decided to eliminate reader comments, following the lead of other media outlets such as NPR, CNN and the Washington Post. The Free Press now invites readers to comment on social media, where it has no duty to moderate the conversation, or through letters to the editor, which are screened before publication. Letters to the editor of the Free Press also require one important component that online comments do not – the identity of the author. To have a letter considered for publication, writers must include their “full name, full home address and day and evening telephone numbers.” The Free Press may be onto something. 

In researching my forthcoming book on disinformation, Attack From Within, one of the things I learned was the danger of anonymity online. When people can hide behind a false name, they have license to say all manner of inappropriate things. As Free Press columnist Mitch Albom wrote regarding the new policy, a typical commenter can use a pseudonym like SEXYDUDE313 and say all manner of despicable things with no accountability. And so, instead of a thoughtful discussion exchanging diverse viewpoints, the conversation quickly devolves into a barrage of insults aimed at not only the reporter, but also other readers posting comments. Commenters typically attack one another with slurs based on their presumed political affiliation, their level of education, or even their race. Comments have become a sort of online heckling, but in real life, even hecklers can be thrown out of the nightclub. 

The danger of anonymity online was a key finding of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller’s report noted that members of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization alleged to have engaged in a disinformation campaign, used false names, such as “Blacktivist,” “United Muslims of America,” and “Heart of Texas,” to pose as members of various groups and sow discord in American society. Operatives, posing as members of certain racial or ethnic groups, would post inflammatory content to provoke outrage. Some posts were designed to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and some discouraged minority voters from casting a ballot at all. While we will never know the full extent to which Russia’s influence campaign affected the outcome of that election, this kind of foreign interference in political discourse is a danger to our democracy. 

To combat disinformation on social media, one easy step could be to eliminate anonymous users. The Free Press’s example demonstrates that anonymity enables behavior that is rude, harassing, and deceptive. Congress could mandate that social media platforms require users to verify their identities. At one time, before Twitter became X, a user could become verified by providing identifying information to the platform. A blue check signaled that the person was who they said they were. Mandatory verification could help reduce threats, trolling, and the spread of disinformation. Although it would be resource-intensive, to be sure, it should be part of the cost of doing business for social media platforms. 

Such a policy could face First Amendment challenges. As a general matter, the First Amendment protects anonymous speech because it permits people to engage in political speech even when it’s unpopular, and to criticize powerful people without fear of retribution. But, like all rights, the right to free speech is not absolute. The Supreme Court has routinely held that fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech, may be limited when the government has a compelling interest in the restriction and the measure is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Here, Congress could investigate whether eliminating anonymity online effectively reduces threats, harassment, and disinformation, serving a compelling government interest. By limiting the restriction to social media, and not all speech, the law could be sufficiently narrow. 

Requiring people to use their real names when posting comments online could make digital spaces safer. It would also allow readers to assess the credibility of those posting comments, making it much more difficult to be fooled by manipulative political operatives and hostile foreign actors. 

And perhaps even by dogs.

Stay Informed, 

Barb

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake

Did Ukraine Miss a Chance to Make a Deal with Russia?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
37

One of the oft-told tales is about Ukraine’s failure to make a deal with Russia at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022. But, writes Yaridlov Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, there was a catch to the deal: Russia wanted Ukraine to capitulate, not to negotiate.

He writes:

The lead Ukrainian negotiator, David Arakhamia, pointed to a bottle of sanitizing gel on the table, covered by a crisp white cloth, as Russian and Ukrainian peace delegations gathered in Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace.

“That’s an antiseptic,” Arakhamia told his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin’s adviser Vladimir Medinsky.

 “Ah, I thought it’s vodka,” Medinsky joked.

There was plenty of tension behind the jovial appearances during that pivotal meeting on March 29, 2022. Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, had just publicly advised Ukrainian negotiators not to accept any beverages from the Russians and not to touch any surfaces, lest they be poisoned. After all, Russian forces were still at the gates of Kyiv, trying to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government.

What actually happened on that momentous Tuesday and in the immediate aftermath has since turned into a matter of fundamental disagreement among Ukraine, Western nations and Russia. The Istanbul meeting has also emerged as a key point of discord in America’s own debate about the war, as indispensable U.S. aid to Ukraine remains stalled in Congress because of Republican opposition. Some argue that Ukraine blew a chance at the time to end the war. The real story paints a different, and far more complicated, picture. 

The first meeting between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators happened on Feb. 28, 2022, in the Belarusian city of Gomel, four days after Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. At that encounter, Medinsky recited a long list of the Kremlin’s demands. It included the replacement of Zelensky’s administration with a puppet regime, Ukrainian troops handing over all their tanks and artillery, the arrest and trial of “Nazis”—a Russian euphemism for any Ukrainian opposed to Moscow’s rule—and the restoration of Russian as Ukraine’s official language. Medinsky even demanded that city streets named after Ukrainian national heroes be returned to their old Soviet names.

“We listened to them, and we realized that these are not people sent for talks but for our capitulation,” recalled one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak. Yet to gain time the Ukrainians agreed to keep talking.     

The story continues. The point remains the same. Putin had nothing to offer. He had demands.

Categories Accountability, International

Texas: Vote for These Brave Legislators Who Stood Up for Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2024 //
2

I am a native Texan. I was born and raised in Houston. I attended Houston public schools from kindergarten until my high school graduation. The public schools of Texas gave me a strong foundation, and I will always be grateful to my teachers and my schools.

The public schools in Texas will be harmed by vouchers. Yet Governor Greg Abbott is demanding that the Legislature endorse vouchers, so that the public will subsidize every student who goes to private and religious schools. No wonder he campaigned for vouchers by visiting private and religious schools.

Some Republican legislators know that vouchers will hurt their public schools.

Governor Abbott has spent millions of dollars to defeat those brave Republican legislators who oppose vouchers.

The primary is March 5.

Funded by oil and gas billionaires and by Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, Abbott has tried and repeatedly failed to pass a voucher bill. He failed because these Republican legislators stood up for their communities and their public schools.

These legislators know their local teachers. They are friends and neighbors. The legislators know they are hard-working dedicated teachers. They teach the children; they don’t “indoctrinate” them, as Governor Abbott falsely claims. Many have taught in the same schools for decades, raising up the children in the way they should go.

The teachers are underpaid, and the school buildings need upgrades. But the Governor won’t put another penny into paying teachers and funding public schools unless he gets his vouchers.

In every state that has vouchers, most of them are used by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are nothing more than a public subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools.

Voucher schools are free to discriminate and are excused from all accountability.

These heroic and principled legislators deserve your thanks and your vote on March 5:

  • Steve Allison, District 121, San Antonio
  • Ernest Bailes, District 18, Shepherd
  • Keith Bell, District 4, Forney;
  • DeWayne Burns, District 58, Cleburne;
  • Travis Clardy, District 11, Nacogdoches
  • Drew Darby, District 72, San Angelo
  • Jay Dean, District 7, Longview
  • Charlie Geren, District 99, Fort Worth
  • Justin Holland, District 33, Rockwall
  • Ken King, District 88, Canadian
  • John Kuempel, District 44, Seguin
  • Stan Lambert, District 71, Abilene
  • Glenn Rogers, District 60, Mineral Wells
  • Hugh Shine, District 55, Temple
  • Reggie Smith, District 62, Sherman
  • Gary VanDeaver, District 1, New Boston

For their courage in defending their community schools, their teachers, their parents, and their students, I place them on the blog’s Honor Roll.

Now get out there and vote for them!

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Honor Roll, Privatization, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Texas, Vouchers

Anand Giridharadas: The Supreme Court’s Attempted Suicide

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
155

Anand is a brilliant writer and thinker who blogs at The Ink. Consider subscribing.

Here is his take on the Supreme Court’s decision to delay judgment on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for criminal actions while he was president.

Yesterday the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court decided to step in and rescue Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations, agreeing to hear his claim of broad immunity and to delay his federal trial on charges of election interference stemming from his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. But it’s much worse than that. We agree with Timothy Snyder that this is no simple stalling tactic. By taking up the question of whether a single American citizen is above the law — simply by entertaining a question that shouldn’t be — the right-wing justices are undermining the legitimacy of the Court itself, and the very notion of a nation of laws.

The Supreme Court is attempting to end its own life as an institution above politics. If it has been doing moving in this direction for some time, this week it came to a head.

This can only be read as a blow to democracy itself. With this stay now in place, it’s unlikely that any trial could be concluded by (and even more likely that it will be delayed entirely until after) Election Day. Of course, at that point, should Trump win re-election, the case would not move forward at all: the Justice Department would be unlikely to pursue a case against a newly elected president, and of course in his second term Trump could stop the proceedings entirely. Which, of course, is the plan.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Ohio: $1 Billion Per Year for Unaccountable Private Schools

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
17

The leadership of the Ohio legislature decided, without consulting the voters, to shift significant funding from public schools, which the overwhelming majority of students attend, to private schools, which are wholly unaccountable to the state.

It is an enduring puzzle as to why Republican-led legislatures in states like Ohio, Arizona, and Ohio demand strict accountability from public schools but no accountability from private schools that receive public money.

William Phillis, formerly a Deputy Commissioner of the Ohio Department of Education, puts a price tag on state subsidy of private schools: $1 billion.

One billion tax dollars per year will be going to private schools with no public audit.

In addition to non-public administrative cost reimbursement, auxiliary services, and student transportation services, the state will be providing a billion dollars per year for private school vouchers. There is no provision in Ohio law to audit private schools. Is this the way state government should treat taxpayers? Voucher expenditures will escalate year after year and the state is giving private schools an open checkbook without any financial accountability.

It gets worse. Some state officials are planning to authorize the use of tax funds for private school facilities with no public oversight. What are state officials thinking?

Ohio taxpayers need to wake up to chicanery concocted by state officials in Ohio.

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OhioEandA

vouchershurtohio.com

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

A Right-Wing Think Tank and Its Plan to Destroy “the Administrative State”

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
21

We first heard the term “destroy the administrative state” when Steve Bannon used it in 2015 and 2016. Bannon, a close advisor to Trump, viewed the federal government as a danger to life and liberty. Now, Trump supporters echo that language, and it still sounds bizarre. They may be relying on Social Security and Medicare, they may be drinking clean water and breathing fresh air thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they may enjoy daily safety and security thanks to federal regulations, but they are prepared to toss all of it overboard.

They want to get the administrative state out of our lives, except that they don’t. They want the state to control women’s bodies, to limit parental rights to seek medical care for their children, and to control what we can read and what entertainment we can see. They want frozen embryos and fetuses in utero to be declared children, with all the rights of personhood. They want women and girls to be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancy was caused by rape or uncest, even if it endangers the woman’s life, even if the fetus has fatal deficiencies.

No organization has been more influential than the Heritage Foundation in stoking hostility to the Federal government. This venerable D.C. think tank is now planning the second Trump administration.

Over the past year, Heritage gathered rightwing ideologues to draft a document called Project 2025. It is a plan for the next Trump administration.

Here is another link. The section on the federal role in education starts on page 351.

Trump’s allies believe that his ambitious goals in his first term were stymied by career bureaucrats. So they recommend that his first act must be to reorganize the civil service, removing job protections from civil servants, enabling Trump to replace civil servants with Trump loyalists. It’s worth remembering that the civil service was created to eliminate the “spoils system,” the routine practice of filling government jobs with political cronies. Every president currently has thousands of political jobs to fill, but the core functions of government are staffed by experienced civil servants who serve regardless of the party in power.

The Heritage plan would enhance the powers of the President. Every government agency would be staffed by his loyalists. The Justice Department would no longer enjoy a measure of independence; instead it would serve the President. If he wanted to use it to persecute his political enemies, he could. He could carry out his pledges to jail Hillary Clinton and the Biden family. His Justice Department, led by a Trump attorney (Jeff Clark? Robert Hur? Alina Habba?) would follow proper procedures, arrest Trump’s enemies, and charge them with something or other.

PBS described Project 2025:

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking….

The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.

There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

As Politico described it, the Project 2025 plan is the product of numerous rightwing groups that are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Texas Monthly: The Billionaire Bully Who Wants Texas to be a Theocracy

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2024 //
26

Texas has several billionaire bullies who want the state to keep their taxes low, cut benefits to needy people, and enact vouchers so that more students can attend religious schools on the public’s dime.

Russell Gold writes in the Texas Monthly about Tim Dunn, a billionaire who has used his money to purge the Republican Party of moderates. In addition to being an oilman, Tim Dunn is a pastor and a devout Christian nationalist. He has funded numerous organizations that act as pass-throughs for his political contributions, such as Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the First Liberty Institute, Empower Texans, Texas Scorecard, Ballotpedia, Stand for Freedom PAC,

Gold writes:

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him. But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

For two decades he has been quietly, methodically, and patiently building a political machine that has pushed Texas forcefully to the right, sending more and more members of the centrist wing of the Republican Party into exile. A 68-year-old oil billionaire, Dunn seeks to transform Texas into something resembling a theocracy. If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook. If you question why Texas’s elected officials no longer represent the majority of Texans’ views, the reason can be traced to the tactics employed by Dunn and the many organizations and politicians he funds and influences. He has built his own caucus within the Legislature that is financially beholden to him. And despite his Sunday school pleas for comity, Dunn has deepened Texas’s political divisions: there are the Democrats and what remains of the mainstream conservative Republican Party. And then there are Dunn and his allies….

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of 2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative, whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control politicians. 

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate independently? Their fate is easy to predict. 

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the combative and divisive chair of the state GOP…

Dunn’s influence goes well beyond campaigns and politics. His résumé is lengthy. He is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank located a couple of blocks south of the Capitol. TPPF generates policy proposals—from severe property tax cuts to bills that impede the growth of renewable energy—that are often taken up by the Texas Legislature and emulated in other red states. He has served for years on the board of the First Liberty Institute, a legal powerhouse that has won Supreme Court cases to advance Christianity’s role in public life. ..

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn that then became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes.

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network has attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts. Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute, publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an “ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a quarter billion page views in 2022…

Dunn has a few key powerful officials in his pocket, including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (a job considered more powerful than the governor) and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who escaped an effort to impeach him thanks to Dunn’s largesse.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans. 

Back in 2010, Dunn met with Joe Strauss, the Republican Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Strauss represented San Antonio. He is Jewish. Dunn told Strauss that only Christians should be in leadership roles.

Considering that Jesus was Jewish, that’s not a very Christ-like sentiment. Unless you are a Christian nationalist.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Religion, Texas, Vouchers
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