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Michael Hiltzik: Of Course the GOP Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2023 //
53

During President Biden’s State of the Union address, he said that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, and the Republican side of the chamber erupted in jeers and shouts of “liar!” Two of those loudly jeering—Senators Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah—had explicitly made those proposals. Biden then masterfully got the Republican caucuses in both Houses to declare their support for both big entitlement programs.

Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the Los Angeles, sets the record straight about the Republican stance on Social Security.

From left, U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Mike Lee jeer.

From left, GOP Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah jeer during the State of the Union address when President Biden accused Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security. Both senators have proposed exactly that.

(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP/Getty Images)

Hiltzik writes:

President Biden has congressional Republicans all asquirm as he conducts a post-State of the Union speech national tour.

Why? Because Biden has doubled down — or as Fox News has it, “tripled down” — on his assertion during the speech that the GOP has been planning to cut Social Security.

Not so, they say. Never happened. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) were even caught on camera during the speech wearing “Who, me?” expressions of injured innocence.

It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots.

— Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), during his 2010 campaign for the Senate

Unfortunately for them, we have the evidence, as does Biden. Cutting Social Security along with Medicare has been part of the Republican platform for decades.

As I’ve reported before, they often hide their intentions behind a scrim of impenetrable jargon, plainly hoping that Americans won’t do the necessary math to penetrate their subterfuge.

Let’s take a jaunt through the GOP approach to Social Security and Medicare.

Start with their description of these programs as “entitlements,” which they’ve tried to turn into a dirty word. The truth is that they are entitlements, in the sense that most Americans have been paying into these programs for all their working lives, mostly through the payroll tax. So, yes, they’re “entitled” to receive benefits in return.

Republicans, including former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have consistently blamed the federal debt on “entitlements” — never mind that their 2017 tax cut for the wealthy has blown a multitrillion-dollar hole in the budget.

They know they’re on thin ice with the public when they talk about benefit cuts, which is why Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) once recommended discussing their ideas only “behind closed doors.”

Now we can turn to the specifics of Lee’s and Scott’s plans. In widely circulated videos from Lee’s first successful Senate campaign in 2010 he can be seen and heard stating as follows: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots.” He said that was why he was running for the Senate, and added, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

As for Scott, his 12-point “Rescue America” plan, issued last year, included a proposal to sunset all federal legislation after five years. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” The implications for Social Security and Medicare, which were created by federal legislation, were unmistakable — so much so that the proposal made Republican officeholders’ skin crawl.

Vice President Mike Pence speaks to reporters during a visit to the Manning Farms, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Waukee, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Column: Mike Pence, would-be president, has a plan to kill Social Security. It will cost you

McConnell disavowed the proposal on the spot and has continued to do so, telling a home-state radio host after the Biden speech that the sunset provision is “not a Republican plan.That was the Rick Scott plan.”

That said, it’s a priceless foil for Biden. When Republicans brayed during his speech that he was lying about it, he offered to make Scott’s manifesto available to anyone who called his office for it. At one of his subsequent appearances, a copy of Scott’s plan was placed on every seat.

The GOP can’t easily wriggle away from its intentions. Let’s examine the fiscal 2023 budget proposal issued by the Republican Study Committee, a key policy body, last June under the title “Blueprint to Save America.”

This plan would increase the Social Security full retirement age, which today is 66 or 67 (depending on one’s year of birth), to 70 by 2040. According to Kathleen Romig, the Social Security expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this would translate into a 20% cut in lifetime benefits compared with current law.

As I’ve reported before, raising the full retirement age is a Trojan horse that would affect all retirees across the board, but harm Black workers, lower-income workers and those in physically demanding jobs the most.

It would create particular hardships for those choosing to retire early and collect their benefits prior to their full retirement age.

Doing so exacts a lifetime reduction in monthly benefits, based on a formula aimed at equalizing the lifetime benefit among those who retire early, those who wait until their full retirement age, and those who defer collecting until that age (they receive a bump-up in benefits for every year they delay, topping out at age 70).

Raising the full retirement age to 70, Romig calculates, would mean that retirees who start collecting at the minimum age of 62 would receive only 57% of their full benefit….

The Republican Study Committee also would make it harder for disabled workers to qualify for benefits, and would lengthen the period before those who are disabled and younger than 65 qualify for Medicare to five years from two. This falls into the category of balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable members of society.


As for Medicare, the Republican Study Committee proposes raising the eligibility age, currently 65, so it matches the Social Security retirement age. It also would transfer many more Medicare accounts to private insurance. The committee claims this would save money.

The rest of his incisive analysis is behind a paywall, unfortunately. He demonstrates beyond doubt that Republicans have wanted for years to put these big programs on the chopping block, which are lifelines for senior citizens. They have no objections, however, to cutting the taxes of the wealthiest. That was Trump’s biggest accomplishment: tax cuts for those with the most.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Health, Lies

Jamelle Bouie: The Attacks on Transgender People Are Undemocratic

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2023 //
5

Jamelle Bouie is an opinion writer for the New York Times. He is brilliant. He writes essays about politics, philosophy, and culture. I subscribe to his opinion feed, where he writes about which books he is reading and what he’s cooking. I have never met him but I love him.

He published his thoughts about why transgender people deserve the same rights, respect, and dignity as others.

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.

In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.

In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.

Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.

He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”

There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.

This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.

Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.

Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.

I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many groups for dignity and respect in public life have been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.

Douglass observed “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”

Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.”Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”

Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters.Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”

David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.”Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

“My fellow pro-lifers and I will also need to make the case to expectant mothers, and fathers too, that their unborn children are, like the rest of us, dependent and needy persons.”

Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, in “What Makes a Fetus a Person?”Read the guest essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.”Read the guest essay.

Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny woman her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”

Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”

Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are meanstoward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”

The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Inequality, Injustice, Racism, Trump

Stephen Owens: The Public School Is the Best Choice for a Just Society

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2023 //
161

Stephen Owens is an evangelical Christian who has thought deeply about the importance of public schools in our society. He has a Ph.D. In education policy from the University of Georgia and is Director of Education at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. His blog is called “Common Grace, Common Schools.”

Let’s begin my argument for public schooling by making the familiar strange. There are aspects of public schooling that you do not see in any other facet of American life that need to be evaluated to better understand the institution’s value. Our familiarity with them takes away their novelty, but they are unique nonetheless. I think of us like a child who has Kelly Clarkson as an aunt. Just because she thinks of the singer as “Aunt Kelly” doesn’t mean we all have aunts who can sing like an angel.

Not only are parts of American public schooling unique, but reflect central tenets of the Christian faith. I want to explore three of them in the next few posts: inclusion, equity and accountability.

To put it concisely: I believe in the American cultural and political environment the public school is best situated to offer the highest quality service for all and, most specifically, the poor. I believe this is known, in my faith tradition, as common grace.

Now when I say the “poor” I’m not just talking about those who have more needs than resources, but a more generalized group of people that, for one reason or another, have structural obstacles to academic success. Students with disabilities and children who speak a language other than English at home are two perfect examples. Further, I don’t mean to imply that the state of a family’s bank account should be conflated with a child’s worth. Being “poor” in this sense cannot mean a person has less intrinsic value. The poor in this blog instead denotes a looser title for those children for which a neutral bystander might say, “good for them!” if the child were to perform a task common to the ruling class such as graduating from college.

I believe public schools are most valuable as a tool to lessen human suffering on the poor–one of the primary, and possibly only, ends of good governance—but that is not to say that its benefits end with this group. In fact, with few exceptions, I’m convinced that public schools are a service that have shown to support allpeople groups in our country. Foundational to this belief is the fact that public schools are required to provide services to every single child that arrives.

Inclusion. Public schools (in their current state) are for everyone. The road to the schools I attended in the 90s is paved with hard-fought legal protections for children that the majority culture would rather not teach. Throughout American history school leaders had to be forced to educate women, immigrants, Black people, students with disabilities and undocumented students via government compulsion. Each of these groups had to wait for laws to be changed to gain the advantages that white, rich, Protestant males shared since before our country was founded. This is not ancient history. My mom was a junior in high school when disabled kids got the right to a public education (1975). Undocumented children were guaranteed the same right two years before I was born (1982).

Inclusion, at least by this definition, has required blood, sweat and tears. It would be foolish to assume that inclusion is natural. In fact, inclusion is so unnatural to the way we consider schooling that its inverse remains a feature of excellence in the public mind. Consider elite schools’ relationship to exclusion: the ability to reject applicants based on test scores or income signals quality in a way that other schools could never replicate with performance alone. Post-secondary education is our best example here. Rejection rates for the Ivy Leagues not only “prove” their superiority but create it. For how could Harvard do poorly as a school if they’re allowed to choose to only educate the top seven percent of all those that apply?

It is only the common, or public, school which is left to teach all who enter her doors and, once inside, compelled to provide basic opportunities to each by threat of legal action. Inclusion, since it has been won, can be demanded.

Here I need to be explicit: inclusion is a good thing. Too often advocates for public schools treat inclusion as a burden to bear—“we can’t turn away students like private schools…”—instead of their greatest strength. Inclusion at some level acknowledges dignity in every person; Christians ought to be familiar with the concept via imago dei (the image of God). Early in Genesis the reader learns that God created humans in His image, bearing His likeness. Theologians have explained this concept differentiates humans from any other created thing by our spiritual/moral/missional similarity to the Creator. There is nothing that can remove this distinction, so every person you and I have ever met “looks” like God in some form. I’m convinced that this concept should be celebrated as the starting place for who is allowed where.

Now consider: where else is this the case? Think about your daily life, what physical spaces are compelled to not only accept everyone, but to give them foundational services? The other day a family came into a coffee shop where I was working and just sat. I will admit to being surprised. They didn’t buy anything, just sat on a couch near me while the kids looked at their iPads. I’m so used to private spaces that I did not think those people belonged until they bought something. This belief did not come out of thin air, many of the places that we imagine as public are only available if we have money, genius, status or some other item to trade. Outside of government programs (public parks, public transit, etc.) it’s hard to imagine a comparable institution to public schools besides hospitals. While I believe there are several similarities between schools and hospitals (nurses and teachers have long seen commonalities between how they are treated, for example), two major differences are apparent: 1) hospitals don’t exist in many rural communities and 2) no one has gone into debt because of the services provided by public schools.

I am, as I hope I’ve made clear up to this point, big on inclusion. But what are the public schools forced to include all children to? What occurs in the inner circle that has for generations been open only to the few? The generally-accepted answer to this question, and more broadly the question of “what is the purpose of education” usually falls into two categories–socialization and skill acquisition. When I describe the need for public schools to include all people it is with the latter purpose in mind. Poor children have been historically kept from learning the skills that are needed to earn living wages. A strong school system can help ensure higher wages, better health outcomes and decreased likelihood of entering the criminal justice system. On the path to living wages (and therefore less human suffering) there are few hurdles higher than failing to graduate high school and college.

The need for public education, and the majority-culture’s attempt to restrict it to the few, has a long history in our country. Tunis Campbell, the father of public education in Georgia, recognized a strong education as necessary to support formerly-enslaved people in post-Civil War Georgia. Without the ability to read, Campbell knew that freed men would continue to be subject to, among other racist practices, predatory labor contracts. Rev. Campbell spent the years following Sherman’s march setting up schools for freed people and is as responsible as any person for the state constitution’s inclusion of a right to public education for all children. He believed education sat alongside land ownership, a just court system and community service as necessary keys to a good life for Black Georgians.

Bringing it back to the present, I will put socialization to the side for now and will describe how the very nature of common schools supports poor families more than their richer neighbors. There are many facets of public schooling which we take for granted but that are frankly unbelievable. Every morning a transit system crawls cities, towns and rural counties to pick up any child that arrives to the stop on time and take them to their school. This service is provided at no additional cost to the child’s family whether they live one mile from the building or 30. In a country that tends to require the ownership and maintenance of a personal-transport vessel as the price for admission to society, the school bus itself is a marvel. It’s far from the only one. Health care, multiple meals and career guidance are all things that richer families can pay for but are often out of reach for the poor. In the public school each (via school health clinics, free food and school counseling) are provided part and parcel to poor public school children. If any one of these services were not already a part of schooling in America, it is impossible to imagine them being created and, more importantly, paid for with public funds. It is services like these that do not neatly fit into a definition of schooling but have become a pivotal safety net for struggling families in our nation. To ignore the role of public schools as welfare is convenient but unhelpful.

To ignore the role of public schools as welfare is convenient but unhelpful.

I’d go as far as to say that the true measure of a school is their support for the poor. The brutal truth of schooling in the U.S. is that parental income is strongly predictive of educational outcomes. While we like to imagine a true meritocracy, the real difference is whether your parents have enough money to provide 1) security (food and housing), 2) accountability, 3) targeted support and 4) social capital. So, any time I come across the “conventional wisdom” of the superiority of private schools it sounds like someone bragging that Georgia beat Vanderbilt in football. Duh: Kirby and…whomever is coaching Vandy… are dealing with two qualitatively different pools of players. If we’re really going to provide the measure of a school, look to the services provided to those that the Bible refers to as “the least of these.”

When you compare the test performance of wealthy Americans to other nations it’s clear we are on par with, or outperforming, every other country in the world. What makes our system “mediocre” is our treatment of poor children. Generations of white supremacist policies have ensured that wealth is concentrated in white families. So, the limitations of our public school system cannot be separated from our nation’s original sin. The good news is that income does not have to equal destiny. Research has shown that investment in public schools can and does level the playing field, but the investments have to go to the schools and/or children that need them the most. Another word for this is equity. I will write about equity in the next post.

–Stephen

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Ethics, Goodness, Supporting public schools

Michael Podhorzer: The Supreme Court Wants to Roll Back the Past Century

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2023 //
76

Michael Podhorzer is a keen political analyst who the assistant to the president for strategic research for the AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 labor unions representing 12.5 million members. His observations in this post are well worth reading.

His insightful article begins:

When, in the Dobbs decision, Samuel Alito declared that Roe v. Wade had been “wrongly decided,” he succinctly stated the credo of a resurgent revanchist coalition that believes the Twentieth Century was wrongly decided. Over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has been instrumental in advancing this coalition’s agenda, which is to dismantle the New Deal order and reverse the civil and social rights gains made since the postwar period.

The execution of this agenda has been nothing short of a slow-motion coup against our freedoms. The Supreme Court has not only transformed itself into a democratically unaccountable lawmaking body; it has used this illegitimate power to create a one-way ratchet that makes the rest of our system less democratically accountable. Yet no matter how many times the Court tightens this ratchet, our political and opinion leaders keep asking whether the Court risks losing its legitimacy if it keeps this up – not what we should do now that legitimacy is a distant memory at best.

We hear of “conservative” judges, yet not one of the six Republican-appointed justices demonstrate fealty to any consistent set of principles beyond giving more power to the gatekeepers who put them on the Court. Instead, we must call them the Federalist Society justices. All six are current or former members of the Federalist Society, an enterprise sponsored by right wing billionaires and corporations whose intention was capture of the legal system – and capture it they did. They knew this capture would be necessary in order to implement their agenda, since they couldn’t count on the majority of Americans to vote against their own rights and freedoms.

The campaign to repeal and replace the 20th century is an extremely well-funded enterprise, organized by people who have never made any secret of their plans. None of this is happening by accident.

Yet for the most part, media coverage of SCOTUS continues to focus on the details of the individual cases on the docket: the arguments each side is putting forth, the likelihood that certain justices will find those arguments persuasive, and what a “win” for either side could look like. In the context of our current crisis, however, doing this is like narrating each segment of a bullet’s trajectory without naming the assassin or his target.

In this post, we’ll take a few steps back from that “what did the bullet do today” perspective.

  1. The Coalition Against the Twentieth Century – This section identifies the antagonists, outlines how they came together through the Southern Strategy, and shows how two historical accidents – the 2000 presidential elections and the 2010 midterms – enabled the massive power grabs that have brought us to our current crisis.
  2. The Originalist Con – This section reveals just how blatant and unprincipled the Federalist Society Majority has been in its execution of the coalition’s agenda.
  3. The Federalist Society Majority Juggernaut – This section lays out the enormous progress the Federalist Society Majority has already made to overturn the “wrongly decided” 20th century. This has included giving MAGA state legislatures new license to curtail voting rights and gerrymander themselves impregnable majorities that closely resemble the region’s one-party authoritarian rule during the Jim Crow era.
  4. No Longer Legitimate? We conclude with a look at how the Court’s “crisis of legitimacy” is actually a crisis for American democracy as a whole.

The Coalition Against the Twentieth Century

This revanchist coalition has two factions, which have come together through the Federalist Society to capture the nation’s legal system. One faction, which I call the MAGA industrial complex, is a symbiotic combination of white grievance media (e.g. Fox, Breitbart), white Evangelical churches and their political expressions dedicated to white Christian nationalism, as well as supremacist militias and the NRA.

When most of us hear “Make America Great Again,” we think of voters in their MAGA caps being stoked on by white grievance entrepreneurs like Trump and Tucker Carlson. We should instead be thinking of the elites and institutions that helped make MAGA one of America’s most successful political movementsto date. We know, for instance, that the white Christian nationalist movement was built not around a moral concern for fetal life, but around panic over the court-ordered revocation of tax-exempt status for religious schools—particularly Bob Jones University, as well as the private religious “segregation academies” that were founded in response to Brown v. Board of Education.¹

The other faction in the coalition against the 20th century consists of the plutocrats and rapacious capitalists whose efforts long predate Trump and MAGA. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful until the 1960’s. Until then, the Republican Party, which was the party of business, nonetheless acquiesced to the New Deal order. This sentiment was famously expressed by President Eisenhower:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

The Southern Strategy

And then … in 1964 that “splinter” of “Texas oil millionaires” and “conservative” activists wrested the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was trounced by 23 points. But rather than dispatching the Goldwater forces to the dustbin of history, this defeat simply convinced many that they would have to give ground on their ambition of electing anyone as “pure” as Goldwater. They were ready when, in 1968, Nixon reversed his position on civil rights, becoming the candidate that fused segregationists’ racist agenda with the traditional Republican business agenda. Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 was deceptive. George Wallace siphoned off 14 percent of the most extremist voters, and combining Wallace’s and Nixon’s vote share reveals that there was a substantial majority consisting of Democrats (the backlash to the Civil and Voting Rights Acts) and traditional Republican voters. Kevin Phillips best laid out this blueprint in his book The Emerging Republican Majority.

We generally think of the success of the Southern Strategy depending on the direct appeals of national Republicans to southern segregationist Democrats, with those voters changing their party affiliation without changing any of their values. The following map makes vivid something that has gone remarkably unnoticed. As Robert Jones and others have documented, from even before the Civil War, Christian churches played a critical role providing the “moral” basis for white supremacy. In this period, southern Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches continued to provide essential organizational scaffolding for preserving those attitudes and the salience of “social” issues in the region.

Map of U.S. showing regions shaded by religious denomination

Source: American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips

The Tea Party & the Takeover of the Republican Party

Until the election of Barack Obama, Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders placated the reactionary, nativist, white Christian faction of the party by nominating right-wing judges and embracing the dog whistles and symbolism of white Christian identity, while making little or no progress reversing the civil rights gains of the 1960’s. Indeed, as late as 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized with nearly unanimous congressional support, with Bush claiming credit. This White House press releaseannouncing Bush’s signing would be unimaginable coming from any MAGA Republican now.

We very much remember the 2000 election for its razor thin margin and the Supreme Court brazenly intervening to stop the count and select Bush. But we have all but forgotten that the reason the race was as close as it was can be attributed to Bush’s consolidation of the white Evangelical establishment, and with it, Bible Belt voters that made the race that close in the first place.² While Clinton won the Bible Belt by a hair in 1996, Gore lost it by 12 points – and more consequentially, he lost the electoral votes in 7 Bible Belt states Clinton had won.³ And Kerry would lose the region by an even larger margin, 16 points. Bush stressed his own born again experience and did much for the white Christian establishment, including his “faith based” initiatives.

In response to Obama’s victory – and McCain and the Republican establishment’s immediate acceptance of his legitimacy – the nativist faction formed the Tea Party and focused on developing a political strategy to purge the Republican Party of “RINOs.” The last straw for this faction was Romney’s nomination and defeat. They revolted against the business wing’s “Autopsy” report, which in 2013 urged the GOP to moderate on immigration policies and dampen its racial rhetoric to stay competitive in an increasingly diverse electorate. Trump rushed into that political vacuum, smearing Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers. Crucially, unlike Goldwater, who faced a uniformly hostile and demeaning national media, Trump now had the advantage of the extensive right-wing media system that had since been established, which proved essential to his nomination and victory.

Please continue reading this deeply informed post about the underlying trends that have shaped the present moment in American politics.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Politics

Carol Burris on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Horrible Education Plan

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
26

Carol Burris is the executive director for of the Network for Public Education. in this post, which she wrote exclusively for the blog, she reveals the details of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to defund and destroy the public schools in her state.

Burris writes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of Baptist minister and former Governor Mike Huckabee, missed learning the 9th commandment that prohibits telling a lie. As press secretary to Donald Trump, her distortions of the truth resulted in the editor of Forbes warning corporations against hiring Sanders and other Trump “propagandists,” writing, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

 

Now she is the Governor of Arkansas. On her first day in office and in her response to Biden’s State of the Union, she parroted the old “education is the civil rights issue of our time” line that has been used to justify horrible policies from school closures to charter schools and vouchers. However, the disconnect between what she says and what she does quickly became apparent. On her first day in office, she issued an executive order prohibiting “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools” and another banning the term “Latinx” from being used in state documents. State authorities are investigating AP African American Studies at Little Rock Central High School, where the majority of students are Black.

If we need further proof that this self-proclaimed champion of Civil Rights is more aptly described as a champion of Civil Wrongs, look at her recently leaked ed reform plan.

Here are its features:

 

The Privatization of Public Education:

· Her voucher plan is a universal ESA—the plan now favored by the far-right. These plans have few rules and no family eligibility requirements. They have become Entitlement Spending Accounts–cash going into the pockets of private school families regardless of income. The leaked plan does not say how taxpayers will pay for it. But everyone will be eligible by 2025. It includes Voucher funding for homeschools. The only restrictions will apply to vendors, so those who enroll their children in those recently uncovered Neo-Nazi homeschools can find ways to cash in.

· Increased tax credits for contributions to an existing voucher program.

· Local School Boards can contract with an open-enrollment charter school or private company to run a school campus at risk of state takeover due to low performance—and if they do, they get a financial incentive.

· Establishment of a charter-school construction fund for new charters and expansion.

· Elimination of the cap on charters.

· Charter school applications no longer need to be reviewed and approved by the local school district board of directors.

· All students attending a public school can take courses and earn credit for classes not offered in their school. By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, students attending a public school that receives a letter grade of “C”, “D”, or “P” from the Arkansas School and District Accountability System may take their required courses (i.e. math, English, etc.) through the course choice program. Bet your bottom dollar that these courses will be online, with vendors like Stride K12 making a fortune.

Censoring and Controlling Curriculum

· K-3 literacy evaluation will be aligned with the “science of reading.”

· Before grade 5, teachers cannot provide classroom instruction on the following topics: sexually explicit materials, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

· School districts must implement an age-appropriate child sexual prevention program for grades K-12, allowing parents to preview materials and exempt their children from instruction. (I have no idea what a child sexual prevention program even is.)

· The Secretary of Education will review the Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

· No school employee or student must attend training on prohibited indoctrination or Critical Race Theory.

 

Harmful Policies for Students

· 3rd-grade retention based on deficits in reading proficiency.

· An accountability system for pre-school education that includes student data.

· Literacy testing three times a year for all students in K-3.

· Curriculum tracking in Grade 8.

· Community service requirements, which may, for some students, be challenging to meet.

· Mandated cops on campus.

· Career-ready pathways in partnership with local business and industry leaders” translate workforce training programs to track students into low-paying and middle-wage jobs.

Punitive Policies for Teachers

 

· Elimination of due process in dismissals.

· Base salaries will no longer increase by years of experience or for Master’s degrees.

· Bonuses based on VAM.

There are a few likable initiatives in her plan, such as paid maternity leave for teachers, but if she makes districts fund them even as she drains their funding with charter schools and voucher expansion, a good initiative will be one more financial pressure on already underfunded schools.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education plan is a hodgepodge of all the awful and ineffective ideas proposed since No Child Left Behind. The fingerprints of JEB! and the Walton family are over the leaked legislation.

Despite its hodgepodge nature, one thing is clear—its ultimate intent is to destroy public education in the state by slamming a fist down on students, public schools, and their teachers while propping up a wild and largely unaccountable privatized system.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Florida: The Hostile Takeover of New College by Rightwing Zealots Threatens Academic Freedom Everywhere

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
11

Ron DeSantis is a dangerous ideologue and a wannabe Mussolini. He speaks of freedom but practices coercion and cancel culture. In Florida, you are free to echo his beliefs but not to disagree. He is a bully.

This frightening story by Kathryn Joyce in Vanity Fair is a MUST-READ. DeSantis engineered the right-wing takeover of New College, a small, progressive college by installing new board members and ousting the President of New College. The extremists are portraying their swift decapitation of a left wing college as a model for other red states. Their plan is to turn New College into its ideological opposite, the “Hillsdale of the South.” Public colleges and universities in other red states should be on high alert. Vanity Fair (to which I subscribe) is usually behind a paywall, but this article is a one-time freebie.

The article begins:

It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she couldn’t represent the mandate New College was being given through this “hostile takeover.” And she refused to support the claims of right-wing critics that the school had been indoctrinating its students.

In the audience, supporters hugged one another and students left in tears. The trustees moved on, voting to replace Okker with interim president Richard Corcoran, Florida’s recently departed education commissioner who, in a 2021 speech at Michigan’s right-wing Hillsdale College, came close to calling for the collapse of the public school system through student attrition and said the political war “will be won in education.” The trustees replaced the board chair too, made plans to replace the general counsel, and instructed administrators to start preparing to dismantle the college’s diversity offices. null

It was hard to imagine a starker change in leadership for New College, the small, nontraditional honors college of the Florida public university system, known for its lack of grades, individualized majors, and leftist student body, but which has also been eyed skeptically for years by Florida’s conservative-dominated legislature for its low enrollment and graduation rates. But that was exactly the transformation intended when Governor Ron DeSantis last month appointed six new trustees to the school’s 13-member board, in hopes they would remake New College into a right-leaning “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” as his education commissioner Manny Diaz put it.

After the Republican-controlled Board of Governors appointed a seventh trustee, the new majority represented a team uniquely qualified to carry out DeSantis’s scorched-earth, right-wing education wars. There was Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-critical race theory hype man Christopher Rufo, who has most recently turned his efforts to laying “siege” to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; one of Hillsdale’s graduate school deans, Matthew Spalding, who also helped lead Donald Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission; Charles Kesler of the right-wing Claremont Institute, which spent the Trump years retconning an intellectual platform for the MAGA movement; a senior editor at a religious right magazine; the Catholic author of a book accused of “fram[ing] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness”; and a private Christian school cofounder with a penchant for Covid disinformation.

Following his appointment, Rufo immediately began speaking in martial terms: that conservatives were “recapturing higher education,” mounting a “landing team” to survey the school as well as a “hostage rescue operation” to “liberate” it from “cultural hostage takers.” Another new trustee, the private Christian academy cofounder Jason “Eddie” Speir, started a Substack to chronicle the transformation, sparking further panic in late January with a post proposingthe board declare a financial emergency, firing the entire staff and rehiring only those professors aligned with the school’s new business model. (Speir also used his newsletter to propose banning USA Today affiliates from covering campus events over a reader comment suggesting people throw dog poop on the new trustees; to request the entire board be given his essay, “‘Florida, Where Woke Goes to Die’ What Does It Mean?” as “supporting material”; and to ask if any readers had a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order he could borrow.)

Students, faculty, and alumni from New College and far beyond decried the takeover as an attack on academic freedom with national implications. Multiple scholarly organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, denounced it as “an orchestrated attack on academic integrity.” The University of Florida graduate assistants’ union tweeted a message of “Solidarity with New College students, faculty, and staff as DeSantis appoints a card-carrying fascist to the presidency.” At a campus rally preceding last Tuesday’s meeting, former Democratic state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith warned, “New College is their first test, their first trial run.” Repeating a Twitter hashtag protesting students had used, Smith added, “your campus is next.”

As though to prove them right, on February 1, Florida Republican state representative Spencer Roach—who cosponsored a recent Florida law mandating ideological surveys of public university campuses to “stem the tide of Marxist indoctrination”—tweeted that Okker’s termination should be replicated “at every university of the state.” In a January essay published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo touted the opportunities for emulation as well, writing that “If we are successful” in carrying out the mission of “institutional recapture,” what happens at New College “can serve as a model for other states.”

One horrified alum, Cayenne Linke, who attended New College in the 1990s, compared the takeover to a violent assault. “I feel like I’m standing at the precipice of the Fourth Reich, and I’m mostly powerless to fight back,” Linke said. “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid and inevitably installs Rufo as education secretary.”

Please open the link and read the article in its entirety.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Funding, Higher Education, Lies, Religion, Republicans

Michael Podhorzer: The Supreme Court Wants to Roll Back the Past Century

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
5

Michael Podhorzer is a keen political analyst who works as political director of the AFL-CIO. His observations in this post are well worth reading.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Politics

Jeff Bryant: The Harrowing Story of a Family That Used Vouchers and Abandoned Their Rights

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
14

Jeff Bryant is a professional journalist who has written extensively about the failures of corporate-style school reform. This story recounts the experience of a family that accepted vouchers in Maine and learned that school choice meant that students abandon their civil rights protections when they enroll in a private school. Please open the link and read the complete article.

The harrowing story of a Maine family shows the potential perils families face when they transfer to privately run schools that are less subject to government oversight.

By Jeff Bryant

“I am the type of parent who always made sure my kids had the good teachers and always took the right classes,” said Esther Kempthorne in an interview with Our Schools. So, in 2014, when she moved with her husband and two daughters to their new home in Washington County, Maine, in a bucolic corner of the state, near the Canadian border, she made it a top priority to find a school that would be the right educational fit for their children.

“We settled in Washington County hoping to give our children the experience of attending one high school, making lasting friendships, and finally putting down some roots,” said Esther’s husband, Nathan, whose career in the military had sent the Kempthorne family traveling the world, changing schools more than 20 times in 17 years. “Both of our children were born on military bases while I was on active duty with the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force,” said Nathan, whose role in military intelligence often meant that he was deployed to high-risk assignments in war zones.

“We said that when we got to Maine, we weren’t going to keep bouncing from school to school,” said Esther.

But after some firsthand experience with the education programs provided by the local public schools, the Kempthornes decided to investigate other options the state offers. One of those options was the state’s provision that allows parents who live in a district that doesn’t have a school matching their child’s grade level the choice to leave the public system and transfer their children to private schools, with the “home” public school district picking up the cost of tuition and transportation, subject to state allowance.

Because the rural district the Kempthornes lived in did not have a high school, they took advantage of that option to enroll their daughters—at taxpayer expense—in Washington Academy, an elite private school founded in 1792 that offersa college track curriculum and access to classes taught by faculty members from a nearby university.

Their decision to leave the public school system for Washington Academy seemed all the better when Esther, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, got a full-time job teaching Spanish at the school.

Thinking back on how the Kempthorne family negotiated the school choice landscape in Maine, Nathan recalled, “I thought we were finally going to be okay.”

But the Kempthornes weren’t okay. Far from it, in 2021, the Kempthornes found themselves in the front seat of their car while they were traveling in another state, using Nathan’s iPhone to call in via Zoom and provide testimony to a Maine legislative committee on why Washington Academy, and other schools like it, pose significant threats to families like theirs and how the state needs to more heavily regulate privately operated schools that get taxpayer funding.

Fighting through tears, they spoke of “racism” and “bullying” at Washington Academy and the school administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge and address the school’s culture.

In his written testimony, Nathan wrote of “a disturbing pattern of systemic racism and institutionalized oppression, harassment, and bullying behavior based on race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation that has occurred for years at [Washington Academy].”

In her letter of resignation from the school, presented to the committee, Esther wrote of a school environment where she and her daughters, who identify as Hispanic, experienced “racist, anti-immigrant sentiments.” She wrote, “As the racist anti-immigrant rhetoric became more mainstream, we had to teach our daughters how to defend themselves without our intervention, and they did. However, such self-defense has been exhausting and stressful for my children, and it should not be their responsibility to constantly deflect harassment; rather they should be guaranteed a safe educational environment by school leaders.”

Although their daughters eventually graduated from Washington Academy and went on to college, the family became totally uprooted because of their experience at the school. Nine years after building their dream home in rural Maine, they now find themselves living in an apartment in New York City, embroiled in a years-long battle with Washington Academy and Maine officials, which has absorbed countless hours of their time and thousands of dollars of their life savings.

Esther has been unable to reenter the classroom as a full-time teacher due to the lingering effects of the traumatic experiences she had from teaching at Washington Academy, and both parents and daughters speak of long-term adverse mental health effects stemming from the years they spent at the school.

“We sold everything,” Nathan said in his spoken testimony to the committee. “We lost everything in your state and we left for our safety. Our children are completely traumatized. They lost all their friends.”

The Kempthornes’ story about the consequences of leaving the public education system for a private school is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a system designed to provide parents with taxpayer-supported private school options fails to consider the potential risks when students and parents transfer to these schools that are less subject to government oversight.

Their story is even more significant given the current trend across the country where states have increasingly been adopting charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts, “backpack funding,” and other so-called school choice options that use taxpayer money to fund alternatives to the public system.

These options are favored by politicians on the right and left, and, at least one state, Arizona, has a voucher program called the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, which every student in the state is eligible to tap.

This rapid expansion of school choice options is taking place even though there is ample anecdotal evidence and a growing body of research showing that parents in a school choice marketplace often make questionable choices they sometimes come to regret.

As the Kempthornes came to learn, private education providers that are not governed within the public domain pose legal problems that parents often either don’t know about or don’t understand, and local and state government officials often either have no authority to intercede on parents’ behalf or are reluctant to assert what little authority they do have.

The Kempthorne family’s saga, which is still enduring, is a sharp counterpoint to advocates who promote school choice as a simplistic solution for families without acknowledging that transferring taxpayer-funded education services from the public to the private realm will actually complicate parents’ and students’ lives.

Bryant goes in to describe a school culture that was implicitly racist and unwilling to act in complaints of racism.

Washington Academy is one of several Maine “town academies” that benefit from what’s known as “town tuitioning,” in which private schools receive public funding from districts that “tuition out” students to the schools rather than paying to educate them in their “home” district. These Maine academies had from 80.4 to 99.3 percent of their student enrollments funded with public dollars in the fiscal year 2020-2021. Most of them also obtain additional income by operating expensive residential programs that enroll students, often from countries outside the U.S.

The practice of using town tuitioning programs as alternatives to providing public schools started in Vermont, according to Education Week, but has since spread to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as well as Maine.

Supporters of these programs call them a “model of educational choice,” according to Education Week, and although supporters of vouchers haven’t always held up town academies as their ideal, they’ve more recently been describing them as the “oldest school choice program in the nation” and calling for expanding them so that all students are eligible to attend the town academies.

But the rationale for having town academies and funding them with public money seems to no longer hold, if it ever did.

‘A Common Myth’

“A common myth is that town academies in New England exist in rural areas which have a scarcity of public schools due to the relatively low population density of families with school-aged children and a lack of funding to support district schools,” according to Bruce Baker, an education professor at the University of Miami in Florida. “But that’s not the reality.”

According to Baker, many of these schools started in the early 1800s, or earlier, as private secondary schools for their communities prior to the existence of public high schools “and in many cases,” prior to the creation of the nation’s system of public common schools. “Some, like Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vermont, were originally funded by local businessmen,” he noted.

Given that origin, town academies that are in operation today are “holdovers,” according to Baker, “of what were once proxy public schools that never converted to district public schools,” although a few have, such as Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans, Vermont, which converted from private to public in 2008.

Contrary to the town academy narrative, some of the schools are in communities that have sufficient populations to educate school-aged children. For instance, New Bedford Academy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is located in a city with a population exceeding 100,000, according to the 2021 U.S. census. Norwich Free Academy is located in Norwich, Connecticut, a community with a population of more than 40,000.

Also, the notion that town academies are needed in Maine because public schools are few and far between seems hardly the case. “The distances between publicly funded town academies and competing public high schools in Maine is often negligible,” Nathan Kempthorne wrote in an email, pointing out that the distance between Washington Academy and Machias Memorial High School in Machias is only 4.2 miles, and John Bapst Memorial High School, a town academy in Bangor, is only 2.5 miles from Bangor High School and 2.1 miles from Brewer High School.

Public schools in rural communities are quite commonplace. “More than 9.3 million—or nearly one in five students in the U.S.—attend a rural school,” according to a 2019 reportby the Rural School and Community Trust. “This means that more students in the U.S. attend rural schools than in the nation’s 85 largest school districts combined.”

Whereas rural public schools are subject to the same government oversight that all public schools are subject to, that oversight does not extend to private schools, even when they get a substantial portion of their funding from the public.

“In private schools, students end up losing basic constitutional rights and essentially don’t have due process rights,” Todd DeMitchell told Our Schools. DeMitchell is a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester who studies laws governing school policies and the impact of court cases on these policies.

According to him, if the Kempthornes had their children enrolled in public schools they would have had access to certain rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, including Title 6, which addresses race, and Title 9, which addresses discrimination on the basis of sex. Washington Academy, being a private school, is exempt from these protections.

DeMitchell pointed to a 1987 decision by a federal courtthat ruled a private academy in New Hampshire had the right to fire a teacher who, contrary to school policy, grew a beard, because the school argued successfully that it was “not a state actor,” according to DeMitchell. That ruling’s logic has been extended to a potential 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a North Carolina charter school is arguing that it has the right to require girl students to wear skirts at school because it also is not a state actor. (Charter schools are also privately operated schools that are funded almost exclusively with public money.)

Along with their problematic funding rationale, town academies also have issues with being truly diverse and inclusive schools. For instance, they’ve “long struggled” to serve students with disabilities, according to Baker. And the student populations of these town academies tend to be more white and affluent than their surrounding communities, with any purported claims of student diversity being largely due to their enrollments of international students in residential programs.

Please open the link to read this important article.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Failure, Maine, Racism, Safety, School Choice, Vouchers

Miami Herald: Legislature Holds Special Session to Clean Up After DeSantis Blunders

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
7

Time and again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has exceeded his authority by one-man stunts, created to win national publicity and demonstrate that he’s more fascist than Trump.

Now, his puppet legislature is meeting in special session to clean up the mess DeSantis left behind.

The Miami Herald editorial board excoriates his authoritarian control of weak-kneed legislators.

With Gov. DeSantis’ iron-fisted control of the legislative process in Florida, it’s not elected officials who must conform to the limits of the law; it’s the law that gets modified according to the whims of elected officials.

If you pass a half-baked bill in vengeful haste, someone will clean up your mess. When you get sued for allegedly violating your own migrant-relocation program, no worries, your friends in the Legislature will expand that program and give you ample power — and cash — to make it “right.” When you tout illegal voting arrests of people who the state allowed to vote, and it turns out you might have chosen the wrong prosecutors to bring those charges, you simply change the law.

That’s the story of the special legislative session that began this week in the Florida Capitol. The urgent matter the Republican-controlled Legislature must address is cleaning up the governor’s most controversial policies. Lawmakers couldn’t even wait another month until their regular two-month session that starts in March.

To be fair, there are other valid issues being discussed: providing relief for Hurricane Ian victims and expanding a law that allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals. But this is no ordinary special session. The bulk of it is about giving DeSantis more — and unchecked — power.

Take the law that tried to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida last year. Created in the 1960s, the special taxing district is controlled by Disney and serves as the governing body for the Walt Disney World Resort. Was it time to revisit this unusual arrangement that ceded so much power to a private company (the district can even build its own nuclear power plant)? Maybe, but good governance wasn’t really top of mind. The Legislature, egged on by DeSantis, was retaliating against Disney for opposing the parental-rights law critics nicknamed “Don’t say gay.”

When lawmakers passed a bill to dissolve Reedy Creek last year, they didn’t hash out what to do with Disney’s $1 billion debt that, without the company’s ability to tax itself, would fall on the residents of Orange and Osceola counties.

There’s no mea culpa on the part of Republicans, though they did give themselves until June 1 to make changes to the law. They now want to maintain the district under a different name, take away Disney’s power to control it and give it to our almighty governor, who would nominate the five people who make up the district’s board. We suppose there’s one silver lining: The board would lose the authority to build a nuclear plant.

House Bill 5B and Senate Bill 6B are another gift to the governor from lawmakers. The state is defending a lawsuit filed by a Democratic state senator challenging the taxpayer-funded flights of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Those migrants were duped into believing they would find jobs and resources on the island.

The lawsuit centers on a key component of the relocation program lawmakers funded last year at DeSantis’ urging: that it relocate migrants from Florida, not other states.

Republicans want to get rid of that fine print and give DeSantis the unchecked authority to relocate migrants from anywhere in the country as long as they have been released by the federal government pending the resolution of their case. He also would get $10 million and the possibility to access $500 million in emergency funds because he signed an executive order declaring an immigration emergency in January, the Herald reported.

This gives DeSantis the ability to tap into millions of dollars to target any voter-rich Republican primary state in his expected presidential run, courtesy of taxpayers. The premise of the program is that the border crisis presents a threat to Floridians, but whether or not those migrants would ever make it to the Sunshine State is inconsequential at this point.

The other legislative clean-up relates to the state’s new election-crimes office, created by the Legislature after Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election became a major plank in the Republican Party platform. Last year, DeSantis proudly boasted the office had arrested 20 felons who voted illegally.

Those voters told the Herald and other news outlets they were given voter registration cards by their local election offices. DeSantis’ own administration didn’t flag them as ineligible. Some cases were dismissed by judges who found that the statewide prosecutors who filed the charges didn’t have the jurisdiction to do so.

The Legislature’s first order should be to prevent more ineligible voters from slipping through the cracks. Instead, its solution is to make it easier to prosecute them after they have already cast ballots. Legislation would clarify that the Office of Statewide Prosecution can investigate voting-related crimes. The office reports to a Republican, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and is a safer way for DeSantis to score wins than going through Florida’s 20 states attorney, prosecutors who are elected locally.

One-party control of Florida’s government is nothing new. What’s new is that the Legislature has become just another arm of the governor’s office. Its role isn’t to serve as a check on the executive power anymore, but to rubber stamp and inflate the man whose ambition and thirst for the spotlight have turned governing into a power-grabbing spectacle.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Vouchers

David Dayen: Biden Delivers on Program to Limit CorporatePower

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
11

David Dayen writes in The American Prospect about President Biden’s efforts to limit corporate power and spur competition.

Dayen begins:

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.

Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”null

The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.

It’s been a year and a half since Biden signed the executive order; its architect, Tim Wu, has since rotated out of government. Not all of the 72 actions have been completed, though many have. Some were instituted rapidly; others have been agonizing. Some agencies have taken the president’s urging to heart; others haven’t. But the new mindset is apparent.

Seventeen federal agencies are named specifically, tasked with writing rules, tightening guidelines, and ramping up enforcement. I wrote to each agency, asking how they have complied with the order; all of them answered but one (the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, whose role is admittedly tangential). Even Cabinet departments that weren’t mentioned wrote in to explain their approach to competition. Clearly, agencies are aware of the emphasis being put on reorienting their mission.

Bringing change to large bureaucracies is often likened to turning around a battleship. One way to get things moving is to have the captain inform every crew member of the intention to turn the battleship around, counseling them to take every action from now on with that battleship-turning goal in mind. The small team that envisioned and executed the competition order put the weight of the presidency behind it, delivering a loud message to return to the fight against concentrations of power. It’s alarming and maybe a little disconcerting that you have to use a high-level form of peer pressure to flip the ship of state. But that battleship is starting to change course.

TIM WU WAS THE FIRST OF THE TRIUMVIRATE of Wu, Khan, and Kanter (a motto emblazoned on mugs by advocates) to actually get appointed in the Biden administration, joining the National Economic Council (NEC) to work on competition policy in early March 2021. Hiring the author of The Curse of Bigness signaled the administration’s strong anti-monopoly thrust. Khan (Lina, chair of the Federal Trade Commission) and Kanter (Jonathan, heading the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division) would arrive later.

The competition order was released four months after Wu’s appointment, but in reality, it was laid out over the previous five years. In that time, a collection of policymakers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and experts, sometimes known as the New Brandeis movement, warned of the dangers of economic concentration. Wu, Khan, and Kanter were part of this crusade, and prior to the 2020 election, they and others strategized about how to reinvigorate competition policy if Democrats took the presidency.

This is an unusual story about an accomplishment or series of accomplishments that have gone unnoticed. Read on to the end.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economics, Economy
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