Arizona has a Democratic Governor, Katie Hobbs, who beat election denier Kari Lake, by a small margin. Each house of the legislature has a small Republican majority, by one vote only. Yet the Republicans have decided to copy the zany extremist initiatives of Ron DeSantis of Florida. Some Republicans think it’s a risky bet.
From criminalizing drag shows to legalizing guns on college campuses, Republican lawmakers at the Arizona Capitol are proceeding like it’s a normal year for them, pushing forward with proposals that appeal to the furthest-right voters in the state.
They’re advancing election bills based on conspiracy theories and pushing back at critics, even silencing speakers for using the phrase “conspiracy theory.” Some proposed laws that were rejected in past years due to Republican opposition have made it further this year, even as they have less chance of becoming law.
Republicans expect Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to veto what they believe are good bills, hoping their commitment to far-right conservative values will help them in next year’s election.
It’s a risky strategy if they want to avoid seeing the Legislature flip to Democrats next year, according to some observers on both sides of the aisle.
“The party right now is tone-deaf,” said former Sen. Paul Boyer, a Republican from Glendale who served in the Legislature for five terms but didn’t run for reelection last year after some constituents and GOP peers pilloried him for failing to embrace election denialism. “They haven’t figured out that if they keep this up, we’re going to get massacred.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have been pushing voucher legislation hard this year. Texas is one of the few red states that has not adopted voucher legislation for religious and private school tuition. The big stumbling block in the past has been a sturdy coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans.
Keith Bryant, Superintendent of Schools in Lubbock-Cooper ISD, illustrates the effect of a voucher program in rural public schools best:
“They are unifiers, gathering places, and information providers. Many times they are the largest employers in their communities, and, often, school events are the largest draw of visitors to their towns. Disruptions to funding for rural schools are disruptions to the fabric of life in rural communities.”
In a state where the money follows the child, students dropping out of public schools would inevitably affect – an already scarce – budget. Those who oppose a “school choice” program argue that the Legislature should focus on increasing public school education funding, instead of diverting those dollars into a system that holds no accountability.
School funding isn’t that complex, Bryant told RA News, who explains school funding as a pie that everyone in public schools in Texas is sharing.
“Every public school in Texas is sharing this pie. If someone takes a slice out of the pie to fund vouchers for private schools or homeschooling, there is less pie remaining for Texas public schools.”
Open up the link at the Network for Public Education blog, where you will see the article as well as a link to the original.
Consider subscribing to the Network for Public Education blog, which is able to cover many more stories about education across the nation than I do. The blog is curated by the wonderful Peter Greene, who has an eye for great stories.
The first charter school opened in 1991. Since then, charters have expanded exponentially. There are now more than 7,000 of them. Originally, charters had bipartisan support.
Bill Clinton loved the charter idea and created the federal Charter Schools Program to fund new charter schools, a modest expenditure of $6 million a year (that has since ballooned into $440 million a year, most of which has gone to grow big, wealthy charter chains).
President Barack Obama also loved charter schools , as did his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. When Congress pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy to stave off an economic collapse in 2009, it allocated $100 for schools. $95 billion went to public schools. $5 billion was set aside for the U.S. Department of Education to use as it wished for “education reform.”
Secretary Duncan, aided by helpers from the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, launched a competition among the states to win a share of $4.35 billion. But the states’ eligibility to participate in Race to the Top depended on their complying with certain demands: the states had to agree to open more charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students, to restructure or close schools with low test scores, to adopt national standards (I.e., the Common Core, not yet finished, never tested).
Race to the Top gave a huge boost to charter schools.
But reality intruded. Large numbers of new charters opened. Large numbers of charters closed, replaced soon by others. Charter scandals proliferated. Get-rich-quick entrepreneurs opened charter schools; grifters opened charter schools. Some charter leaders paid themselves more than big-city superintendents. Highly successful (I.e. high test scores) charters carefully curated their students, rejecting or removing those who had low scores, excluding students with disabilities.
The charter sector began to act like an industry, with its own lobbyists in D.C. and in state capitols. Sometimes the charter lobbyists wrote state legislation to assure that there was little or no accountability or oversight or transparency Fort the public funds they received.
Of course, the charter lobby maintained a strong public relations presence, booking appearances for their paid spokespeople on national TV and in the press. When state legislatures met to vote in the budget, the charters hired buses to bring thousands of students and parents to demand more money and more charters. They were coached to use the right words about the success of charters.
Since charters have been around for more than 30 years, the research on them is consistent. Their test scores, on average, are about the same as regular schools, even though they have much more flexibility. Some get high scores (typically the ones with high attrition rates who got rid of the students they didn’t want), some got very low scores. Most were in the middle. The Cybercharters were the worst by every measure: low graduation rates, poor academics, high teacher turnover, expensive for the low quality but very profitable.
Were they innovative? No. Those considered “successful” operated with 19th century modes of strict discipline. Some substituted computers for teachers.
Charters fell under a cloud when Donald Trump became President and sooointed choice zealot Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. She plugged vouchers and charters and choice. Most Democrats in Congress began to open their eyes and understand that charters were a prelude to vouchers. DeVos’s strident advocacy for charters made most Democrats remember their party’s historic legacy as a champion of public schools, real public schools , not privately managed schools that were Public in Name Only.
So, where stands the charter idea now? Charters are admired and thriving (at least financially, if not academically) in red states. Most Democrats understand that the preservation and improvement of public schools is central to the party’s identity.
A reader of the blog came up with a sensible redefinition of the mission of charter schools. Since they have the freedom to try out new ideas, they should serve the neediest children. They should do whatever it takes—not to raise their test scores—but to educate the children who have struggled in regular schools. Let the charters innovate—their original mission—free of the burden of being labeled “failing” or “low performing.” Let them work their magic for the children who need it most, not for the high achievers who would succeed in any school.
Greg R. Flick, a reader of the blog and himself a blogger (“What’s Gneiss for Education”)) sent this perceptive comment about what charters should do to be truly useful to American education and to provide an exemplary service:
It seems that if we believe the narrative the charters push, we should flip the system on its ear. Let the charters be the default schools for the kids who can’t function in the public schools. Let’s have the public schools be able to cream their student populations, select only the students they want to have…the “easier” students, and have the charters be required to take those kids kicked out of the public schools.
Charters with their smaller classes and “freedom” to innovate will finally be able to help those kinds of kids. And since they are public schools (as they keep on telling us repeatedly) they can’t gripe about taking in the hard nuts, the Special ed kids, the ones with behavioral issues, etc.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson describes the sharp contrast between the two parties: the Democrats are looking to the future, building platforms for innovation, new industries, and economic growth, while the Republicans are mired in stale culture war issues—campaigning for more restrictions on abortion, despite public opinion, and relitigating the 2020 election.
She writes:
At Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service today, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke on “The CHIPS Act and a Long-term Vision for America’s Technological Leadership.” She outlined what she sees as a historic opportunity to solidify the nation’s global leadership in technology and innovation and at the same time rebuild the country’s manufacturing sector and protect national security.
Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022 by a bipartisan vote, directing more than $52 billion into research and manufacturing of semiconductor chips as well as additional scientific research. Scientists in the U.S. developed chips, and they are now in cars, appliances, and so on. But they are now manufactured primarily in East Asia. The U.S. produces only about 10% of the world’s supply and makes none of the most advanced chips.
That dependence on overseas production hit supply chains hard during the pandemic while also weakening our national security. The hope behind the CHIPS and Science Act was that a significant government investment in the industry would jump-start private investment in bringing chip manufacturing back to the U.S., enabling the U.S. to compete more effectively with China. In the short term, at least, the plan has worked: by the end of 2022, private investors had pledged at least $200 billion to build U.S. chip manufacturing facilities.
Today, Raimondo framed the CHIPS and Science Act as an “incredible opportunity” to enable the U.S. to lead the world in technology, “securing our economic and national security future for the coming decades.” In the modern technological world, “it’s the countries who invest in research, innovation, and their workforces that will lead in the 21st century,” she said.
Raimondo described the major investment in semiconductor technology and its manufacture as a public investment in the economy that rivals some of the great investments in our history. She talked of Abraham Lincoln’s investment in agriculture in the 1860s to cement the position of the U.S. as a leader in world grain production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman’s investment in scientific innovation to develop nuclear technology, and John F. Kennedy’s investment in putting a man on the moon.
Each of those massive investments sparked scientific innovation and economic growth. Raimondo suggested that “the CHIPS and Science Act presents us with an opportunity to make investments that are similarly consequential for our nation’s future.”
The vision Raimondo advanced was not one of top-down creativity. Instead, she described the extraordinary innovation of the silicon industry in the 1960s as a product of collaboration between university scientists, government purchasing power, and manufacturing. Rather than dismissing manufacturing as a repetitive mechanical task, she put it at the heart of innovation as the rapid production of millions and millions of chips prompted engineers to tweak manufacturing processes a little at a time, constantly making improvements.
“This relentless pace of lab-to-fab[rication] and fab-to-lab innovation became synonymous with America’s tech leadership,” she said, “doubling our computing capacity every two years.” As the U.S. shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, it lost this creative system. At the same time, inability to get chips during the pandemic hamstrung the U.S. economy and left our national security dependent for chips on other countries, especially China.
Reestablishing manufacturing in the U.S. will spark innovation and protect national security. It will also create new well-paying jobs for people without a college degree both in construction and in the operations of the new factories. With labor scarce, Raimondo called for hiring and training a million women in construction over the next decade, as well as bringing people from underserved communities into the skilled workforce to create “the most diverse, productive, and talented workers in the world.”
Raimondo warned that the vision she laid out would be hard to accomplish, but “if we—as a nation—unite behind a shared objective…and think boldly,” we can create a new generation of innovators and engineers, develop the manufacturing sector and the jobs that go with it, rebuild our economy, and protect our national security.
Just “think about what’s possible 10 years from now if we are bold,” she said.
Later, Raimondo told David Ignatius of the Washington Post: “This is more than just an investment to subsidize a few new chip factories…. We need to unite America around a common goal of enhancing America’s global competitiveness and leading in this incredibly crucial technology.… Money isn’t enough. We all need to get in the same boat as a nation.”
Part of the impetus for the bipartisan drive to jump-start the semiconductor industry is lawmakers’ determination to counter the rise of China, which has invested heavily in its own economy. As the U.S. seeks to swing the Indo-Pacific away from its orientation toward China, Raimondo will travel to India next month to talk about closer economic ties between the U.S. and India, including collaboration in chip manufacturing as India, Japan, and Australia are launching their own joint semiconductor initiative.
For the Biden administration, the investment in chips and all the growth and innovation it promises to spark, especially among those without college degrees, is also an attempt to unite the nation to move forward. Theirs is a heady vision of a nation that works together in a shared task, as Lincoln’s United States did, or FDR’s, or JFK’s.
Their orientation toward the future, growth, and prosperity is a striking contrast to the vision of today’s Republicans, who look backward resolutely and angrily to an imagined past. In the short term, many of them continue to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, long after the Big Lie that Trump won has been debunked and the rest of the country has moved on.
In the New York Times yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Swan reported that one of the reasons House speaker Kevin McCarthy handed access to more than 40,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol from January 6, 2021, to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson was that McCarthy had promised the far right that he would revisit that event but did not want to have the Republican Congress tied to the effort. His political advisors say swing voters want to move forward.
In the longer term, today’s Republicans are out of step with the majority of Americans on issues like LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun safety, and abortion. Although Republicans are pushing draconian laws to end all abortion access, today Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, released a report showing that 64% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 25% say it should be illegal in most cases and only 9% say it should be illegal in all cases. Less than half the residents in every state and in Washington, D.C., supported overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as the Supreme Court did with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of last June.
In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) echoed Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address with his description of today’s America as one full of misery and hopelessness. Florida governor Ron DeSantis traveled this week to New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago to insist those Democratic-led cities were crime-ridden, although as human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid pointed out, Florida has a 19% higher rape rate, 66% higher murder rate, and 280% higher burglary rate than New York.
Another study released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, which specializes in civil rights law, noted that domestic extremist mass killings have increased “greatly” in the past 12 years. But while murders by Islamic extremists, for example, have been falling, all the extremist killings in 2022 were committed by right-wing adherents, with 21 of 25 murders linked to white supremacists.
President Biden’s poll numbers are up to 46% in general and 49% with registered voters. Perhaps more to the point is that in Tuesday’s four special elections, Democrats outperformed expectations by significant margins.
There are many reasons for these Democratic gains—abortion rights key among them—but it is possible that voters like the Democrats’ vision of a hopeful future and a realistic means to get there rather than Republicans’ condemnation of the present and vow to claw back a mythological past.
Governor Ron DeSantis is doing his best to crush academic freedom and the expression of views that differ from his own. He won a sweeping re-election victory in 2022, and his party has a super-majority in both houses of the legislature. Whatever DeSantis wants, the legislature will give him.
But that’s not enough. The Democratic Party is powerless and supine, but they have the nerve to speak out against the Governor’s authoritarian policies. He can’t tolerate any nay-sayers.
Now, I can truly affirm that I have seen it all in Gov. DeSantis’ Florida.
The state’s Republican Party is no longer a fan of multiparty American democracy — and they feel no shame in saying so in public. Nor in proposing legislation to dismantle it.
When the Florida GOP’s tweet appeared on my Twitter news feed, I thought it was a joke or a parody. But what Republicans are up to this legislative season is no laughing matter.
After easily winning the gubernatorial election and obtaining a Republican super-majority in the Legislature that allows the party to act unimpeded, GOP chairman Chris M. Ziegler says he’ll take nothing less than eradicating the Democratic Party. His threat to give Democrats no seat at all at the table is very real.
Republicans are acting like the hemisphere’s evil regimes. They know it, but don’t care.
On February 25, 2023, at 11:30 a.m., the chairman of the Florida GOP, Chris Ziegler, posted a tweet @FloridaGOP in which he wrote:
from Chairman @ChrisMZiegler: “Until we get every Democrat out of office and no Democrat considers running for office, we’re going to continue to step on the gas and move forward in Florida.”
Chris Ziegler’s wife Bridget is the founder of the extremist group Moms for Liberty, which is deeply involved in protests against masks, in book banning, in fighting “critical race theory,” and in attacking gays and the teaching of Black history.
Santiago continues:
The U.S. Constitution and the system of checks and balances be damned. There was immediate pushback on Twitter.
A person identifying as @k_kojei answered Ziegler: “I disagree. We need dissenting voices. That’s what a democracy is about. The problem is not helped by a one-sided view of things. Polarization is just that, no matter who does it! There has to be dialog and balance or we remain only half represented!”
Ziegler doubled down.
“We are doing just fine not giving Democrats a seat at the table in Florida,” he said, mimicking what the planet’s dictators, who think countries are their personal fiefdoms, say about the opposition.
“I recommend other states to do the same!”
More people enter the conversation, at first, remarkably civil in tone, given the sewer speech Twitter attracts.
Some of the horrified were Republican.
“That is extreme and Totalitarian by definition. Not a good look!” tweeted a man who describes himself as a “patriot” with “a recently restored account after two years. Starting from scratch. Unapologetically Conservative American!! #MAGA”
“No, it’s DEMOCRACY!” retorts Ziegler, the kind of Florida man who lives in an alternate universe, and so dumb — or sure of his party’s power — that he accuses the Republicans who disagree with him of being “leftist.”
Finally, a ‘fighting for our republic” Floridian from the Treasure Coast brings a fitting hashtag to the conversation — #FloridaWhereFreedomDies. She posts a checklist of tactics Nazis used in their rise to power.
It’s eerily familiar, but nothing new to those of us who have visited museums in Israel and Germany. It all begins with religious, ethnic and lifestyle persecution, silencing the media and obliterating political opposition.
The Florida GOP and DeSantis’ ballyhooed platform is ticking off a whole lot of unimaginably undemocratic boxes.
TAMARA LUSH • AP
Pictured in this April 14, 2017 photo, Christian Ziegler, 33, a marketing professional from Sarasota, has become the Florida GOP chairman going into the 2024 presidential race. He made the constitutionally questionable vow to eradicate Florida’s Democratic Party and defended a one-party state. (AP Photo/Tamara Lush)
As if the new GOP chairman acting like a two-bit Third World dictator-wannabe wasn’t egregious enough, his words were quickly followed by legislative action.
Former GOP chairman, Blaise Ingoglia, 2015-2019, threw the law behind Ziegler’s words.
Now Ingoglia, a 52-year-old Spring Hills home builder — named one of Tampa Bay’s most influential politicians — filed Tuesday “The Ultimate Cancel Act,” SB 1248, creating the conditions to force the Division of Elections to declare the Democratic Party illegal in Florida.
Reading the dangerous gobbledygook contained in Ingoglia’s bill is an exercise similar to interpreting Cuba’s repressive laws, where the bureaucratic entwining of edicts achieves the goal of making the repression look reasonable to the outside world.
Ingoglia has concocted a ruse: Rule the Democratic Party racist, claiming it’s because Southern Democrats supported slavery in the 1800s, and order it dismantled the way Confederate monuments are forced to come down.
His legal maneuvering is purely a power trip. Sad to say, but it’s unnecessary. The inept Florida Democrats, the 2020 midterms showed, aren’t a serious political threat.
The GOP, however, should scare every Floridian — and, given DeSantis’ 2024 ambitions, every American. We’re just a stepping stone.
The Florida GOP is DeSantis’ party. Nothing happens behind his back. This hardened, fascist Florida is a carefully planned, if sometimes stupidly executed, plot to destroy the United States as we know it.
This isn’t unlike the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, only the men leading the charge are in suits instead of camouflage.
What institution will defend Floridians from tyranny when the GOP has so cleverly staged a takeover of every sector in the state?
Emboldened Florida Republicans aren’t happy with simply winning by big margins.
They want what every dictator has: total domination over what people think, whom they love, what they read. Total political control over law and policy without organized opposition to offer an alternative.
Floridians must wake up. It’s imperative.
The author Fabiola Santiago
None of this is happening without DeSantis’s knowledge and support. It sounds insane and fascist, but it is real. Ron DeSantis shows his true colors.
The 74 Million—a news site funded by charter supporters and billionaires—reports that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will downplay his support for charter schools now that he is Minority Leader of House Democrats. Charters have lost ground among Democrats, and Jeffries wants to unite the party. Importantly, he doesn’t want to alienate the teachers’ unions, which are an important part of the Democratic Party’s base.
Most Democratic members of Congress realized that charters were a step towards vouchers, and that both were deeply embedded in the Trump MAGA agenda.
For a time, during the Obama years, Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sold charters as a “progressive” idea that would nurture innovation. After thirty years, the charter claims dimmed. Too many scandals, too little innovation. Too many charter chains making profits or paying outlandish salaries. Too many charters that opened and closed within three years. Too many charters that believed harsh discipline was “innovative.”
The charter lobby considered Hakeem Jeffries one of its best friends, but that was before Trump chose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. She was an outspoken friend of School choice, including charter schools. In recent years, red states have embraced charters and vouchers in their frenzy to privatize public schools and transfer public funding to private organizations.
Now, it’s clear to most Democrats that Republicans own the issue of charters and vouchers, not Democrats.
When Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona proposed modest rules to clean up the federal Charter Schools Program, which hands out $440 million a year to start new charter schools, the charter lobby made wild claims about how any accountability would irreparably harm new charters, but Democrats didn’t go along. The usual charter supporters in the Senate—Booker, Bennett, and Feinstein—complained about the new rules, but when the Senate voted on a motion to overturn them, not a single Democrat voted for the motion.
Today, the strongest allies of charter schools in Congress are conservative Republicans, like Virginia Foxx (NC), chair of the House Education Committee.
Here is the most important election of 2023: Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election is April 4, 2023.
The current Court is 4-3, with a Republican majority. A win by Democrats will reverse the balance and be crucial on issues of abortion, gerrymandering, and schools. It is also a chance to reverse the damage done by Republican Scott Walker.
Voting is under way in an under-the-radar race that could wind up being the most important election in America this year.
The NYT headlined: “2023’s Biggest, Most Unusual Race Centers on Abortion and Democracy.” Within weeks, the Times reported, “Wisconsin will hold an election that carries bigger policy stakes than any other contest in America in 2023.”
The state’s high court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but one of the conservative members is retiring, which has created an opening for progressives to flip the high court for the first time in decades.
And everything is on the line: from Act 10, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights, to gerrymandering, abortion, and the way presidential elections are decided.
“If you change control of the Supreme Court from relatively conservative to fairly liberal, that will be a big, big change and that would last for quite a while,” said David T. Prosser Jr., a conservative former justice who retired from the court in 2016.
The contest will almost certainly shatter spending records for a judicial election in any state, and could even double the current most expensive race. Wisconsinites are set to be inundated by a barrage of advertising, turning a typically sleepy spring election into the latest marker in the state’s nonstop political season.
The Wapo reports that the election “will have sweeping consequences, as the court in the coming years is likely to decide whether to uphold the state’s near-total ban on abortion. It also could wade into disputes over gerrymandering and the outcome of the next presidential election.”
On paper, the contest is non-partisan, but nobody even bothers to pretend anymore. Next Tuesday’s free-for-all primary includes four candidates: two progressives: Janet Protasiewicz and Everett Mitchell; and two conservatives: Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow.
The conventional wisdom (which is likely correct) is that the primary will set up a contest between left and right. The same conventional wisdom (on both sides of aisle) thinks that Protasiewicz is the strongest progressive candidate, while Dorow — who achieved a sort of media stardom for presiding over a high-profile criminal case — is the most electable conservative. Kelly, who was named to the Court by former Governor Scott Walker at the urging of the Federalist Society, has already lost a statewide election — a rare defeat for an incumbent justice.
**
But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.
While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court…
All four bills put forward by Republicans this year to let parents use state education funding to cover the costs of educational opportunities outside the public school system failed to make it through this year’s General Assembly.
One bill carried by Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, died in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Two others carried by Dels. Phillip Scott, R-Spotsylvania, and Marie March, R-Floyd, failed in Republican-controlled House Education subcommittees
The most promising, House Bill 1508 from Del. Glenn Davis, R-Virginia Beach, initially cleared the House Education Committee, which Davis chairs, but ran into trouble later in the legislative process.
That bill, which gained the support of numerous Republicans including Lt.-Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, would have created the Virginia Education Success Account Program, a proposal that would allow parents to set up a savings account funded with state dollars that could be used to cover educational expenses outside public schools in Virginia. Funds could be used for costs like tuition, deposits, fees and textbooks at a private elementary or secondary school in Virginia.
Last month, Davis estimated that an average of $6,303.25 could have been available per student. The program would only have applied to students previously enrolled in public school or who were starting kindergarten or attending first grade for the first time….
Davis said when the bill reached the House Appropriations Committee Friday, he was one vote short of what he needed to pass the legislation and agreed to send it back to the Education Committee in hopes of fast-tracking it through the approvals it still needed. He told the Mercury he considered adding a delayed enactment clause to the proposal to skirt concerns about the current budget cycle but said the committee was “one day short” of exercising that option.
But that bill died in committee.
Democrats opposed all of these measures, because they would take funding away from public schools.
Thom Hartmann looks back to the Ronald Reagan presidency to explain how Republicans seized the strategy of tax cuts and spending to counter the Democrats’ winning formula of social welfare spending. Now Republicans are threatening to force the federal government to default on the national debt, which would plunge the global economy into chaos, unless Democrats make deep cuts in social programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Hartmann writes:
The media refers to it as a debate around the debt ceiling, but it’s actually far simpler than that. And entirely political.
Back in November, a few weeks after House Republicans won the election and seized control of that body, I wrote to you warning that the House Republicans would try the same scam that Ronald Reagan first rolled out in the 1980s. I wrapped the article up with the “hope that Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam.”
So far, no soap. I haven’t heard a single mention of Two Santas in the mainstream media, and I’ll bet you haven’t, either. That’s the bad news.
The good news — perhaps — is that the scam has lost its sting after working so well for them for 42 years. President Biden and House Democrats are standing firm, saying they have no intention of negotiating around the debt ceiling with terrorists threatening to destroy our economy.
But even if it’s the last gasp of this scam, it appears House Republicans plan to go out with a bang. So let’s quickly review how Two Santas works.
Back in 1976 the Republican Party was a smoking ruin. Nixon had resigned after being busted for lying about his “secret plan to end the Vietnam War,” his involvement in the Watergate burglary, and his taking bribes from Jimmy Hoffa and the Milk Lobby. He only avoided prosecution because Gerald Ford pardoned him.
His first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had also resigned to avoid prosecution for taking bribes.
Newspaper and television editorialists were openly speculating the GOP might implode. The Party hadn’t held the House of Representatives for more than two consecutive years since 1930(and wouldn’t until 1994), Jerry Ford had ended the War the year before in a national humiliation, the unemployment rate was over 7 percent, as was inflation after hovering around 11 percent the year before.
The Republican Party had little to offer the American people beyond anti-communism, their mainstay since the 1950s.
Americans knew it was Democrats who’d brought them Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, subsidized college, the right to unionize, antipoverty programs, and sent men to the moon. And they knew Republicans had opposed the “big government spending” associated with every single one of them.
But one man — a Republican strategist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal named Jude Wanniski — thought he saw a way out. It was, he argued, a strategy that could eventually bring about a permanent Republican governing majority.
In a WSJ op-ed that year, Wanniski pointed outthat Americans thought of Democrats as the “Party of Santa” and Republicans as, essentially, Scrooge. Republicans, he noted, hadn’t even proposed a tax cut in 22 years!
The solution, Wanniski proposed, was for Republicans to start pushing tax cuts whenever the GOP held the White House. This would establish their Santa bona fides, particularly if Democrats objected. It would flip the script so Democrats would fill the role of Scrooge.
To make it even easier for Republicans to cut taxes, Wanniski invented and publicized a new economic theory called Supply-Side Economics. When taxes went down, he said, government revenue would magically go up!
Four years later, when Reagan came into the White House with the election of 1980, he picked up Wanniski’s strategy and doubled down on it. (In the primary of 1980, he’d even run on it: his primary opponent, George Herbert Walker Bush, derided it as “Voodoo Economics.”)
Reagan not only cut taxes on the rich: he also radically increased government spending, goosing the economy into a sugar high while throwing the nation deeply into debt.
Citing Supply-Side Economics, in eight short years Reagan ran up greater deficits than every president from George Washington to Jerry Ford combined, taking our national debt from around $800 billion all the way up to around $2.6 trillion when he left office.
By 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, Reagan and Bush’s debt had climbed to over $4.2 trillion, giving Republicans a chance to double down on Two Santas. Bill Clinton would be their test case.
House Republicans loudly demanded that Clinton “do something!” about the national debt, waving the debt ceiling like a cudgel. Over the next eight years they repeatedly wielded the debt ceiling, shutting down the government twice. The battles lifted Newt Gingrich to the speakership.
Clinton caved, making massive cuts to the social safety net to get a balanced budget, a gut-shot to the Democratic Santa programs.
By the end of the Clinton presidency the formula was set. When Republicans held the White House, they’d spend like drunken Santas and cut taxes to the bone to drive up the national debt.
When Democrats come into the presidency, Republicans would use the debt ceiling to force them to cut their own social programs and shoot the Democratic Santa.
As I noted last November, when Clinton shot Santa Claus the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.
Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Claus strategy, they used the debt ceiling as a weapon.
State after state turned red and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government from the Supreme Court to the White House.
Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:
“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve… But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts…”
“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. … That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”
Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream.
Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when they were in office, and they knew well how to scream hysterically about it and hook in the economically naïve media as soon as Democrats again took power….
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Jess Piper lives in rural Missouri. She and her husband are farmers with five children. She taught American literature in the local public school. She describes herself as a “woke” progressive. When she added the history of slavery and African American literature to her classes, she said, none of her students (all white) felt embarrassed or uncomfortable. They identified with the abolitionists, not the slaveholders.
She ran for office when she realized that there were no Democrats, and she lost. But she wasn’t discouraged.
Diane Ravitch's blog 