Peter Greene provides an overview of the three states that will be voting on vouchers on November 5. Vouchers have been on state ballots nearly two dozen times. They have never won. They are usually defeated overwhelmingly. Voucher advocates know this, and they usually try to kill state referenda because they know they will lose.

Of the three states that will conduct voucher referenda, Colorado has the trickiest ballot. It currently has charter schools but voucher advocates want the state constitution to go further. They are using bland, deceptive language to make vouchers legal, without actually using the word “vouchers.”

In a few weeks, Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska are giving voters a chance to vote on taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Colorado

Colorado voters will have the chance to amend the state constitution to enshrine school choice. The proposed amendment is short and sweet, asserting that “parents have the right to direct the education of the children” and “each K-12 child has the right to school choice.”

Colorado is no stranger to school choice. Students can travel across district boundaries to other school districts, and in 1993, Colorado became the third state to pass a charter school law.

Advance Colorado, a conservative anti-tax group, pushed the amendment. Supporters insist that the intention is simply to preserve the thirty-year-old charter program. But the wide-open language of the proposal, which specifies that ”school choice includes neighborhood, charter, private, and home schools, open enrollment options, and future innovations in education,” clearly covers more than just the charter school program.

In fact, in addition to opening the door to school vouchers, the proposal seems to open up some other possibilities. If a student is denied admission to a private school for any reason, can the student’s family demand their constitutional right to school choice? If a parent disagrees with any element of a school’s curriculum, can the parent demand their constitutional right to “direct the education” of their child? Kevin Welner of the Colorado-based National Education Policy Center calls the proposal “a ‘full employment for lawyers'” act.

Kentucky

In 2022, Kentucky voucher supporters suffered a major setback when the state supreme court ruled the voucher funding mechanism violated the state constitution. Supporters had set up a tax credit scholarship program in which folks could donate to a voucher scholarship program and get a dollar for dollar tax credit.

Proponents argue (as Betsy DeVos did when she proposed a federal version of this system) that this does not constitute spending taxpayer funds on private or religious schools because the money is never actually in the government’s hands, despite the fact that the government will then face a revenue shortfall.

Section 184 of the Kentucky constitution has some straightforward language about funding education, including:

No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation.

Kentucky’s Attorney General, arguing for the voucher plan, tried to assert a reading of the law that allowed for tax credit scholarships. The court replied, “We respectfully decline to construe the Constitution in a way that would avoid its plain meaning.”

Then in 2023, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled against the law set up to fund charter schools in the state.

So in January of this year, HB 2 was proposed, a constitutional amendment that would expand all that restrictive public school language and free lawmakers to fund charter schools and vouchers. With one sentence, vouchers would become constitutional in Kentucky:

The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools.

Nebraska

In May of 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools, called “Opportunity Scholarships.”. Opponents circulated a petition to challenge the law by putting it on the ballot. They needed 60,000 signatures to force the issue onto the ballot. At the end of August, 2023, they had 117,000, and the measure was headed for the November 2024 ballot.

In April of 2024, voucher supporters tried an end run around the petition. LB 1402 repealed the Opportunity Scholarship Act and launched a new school voucher program. The new bill came from Senator Lou Ann Linehan, who also authored the Opportunity Scholarships Act. Governor Jim Pillen approved the bill on April 25.

Arguing that the repeal of Opportunity Scholarships rendered the November vote on the program pointless, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evman pulled the ballot issue. Voters can’t repeal a law that has already been repealed.

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. A lawsuit and a threat by Evman to pull the measure from the ballot were struck down by the Nebraska Supreme Court in a 7-0 decision. Nebraskans will vote on vouchers for their state.

These are three different approaches to the question of taxpayer-funded school vouchers, but they share the unusual feature of putting voucher programs to a public vote. All school voucher programs in the U. S. were passed into law by legislatures, sometimes over strong objections of the taxpayers. No taxpayer-funded school voucher program has ever survived a public vote.

Mercedes Schneider writes in her blog that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is in hot water because of a CNN exposé of his lewd and unhinged posts on porn sites. CNN admitted that some of his posts were so XXXX-rated that it would neither post them nor even link to them.

Mercedes, no less fastidious than CNN, decided that the public should know why this man is morally and ethically unfit to be the Governor of North Carolina.

She posted the links to posts by Robinson that demonstrate his lack of character, decency, and morality.

A reader of the blog, who shall remain nameless, sends comments repeatedly to justify or minimize the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists. Her comments are so offensive to me that they are in moderation, meaning I read them before approving or deleting them.

The reader believes that the terrorists intended to attack only military targets and kill only soldiers. She suggests that Israel overstated the number of civilian deaths to win sympathy. She argues that only “one baby” was killed. She also has claimed that most civilian deaths were caused by Israeli fire. She has also written, in comments I did not publish, that women were not raped by the terrorists: anyone who says so is lying. Even the hundreds of young people gunned down at the Rave, the all-night dance party, were killed by IDF helicopter fire, not Hamas.

Her “evidence” is found in an article that makes most of these assertions. Her reading seems to be confined to sources that hate Israel’s very existence and look forward to it being eliminated or dissolved, as Israelis “go back where they came from.” How will that work for the millions who were born in Israel or were expelled by Arab nations?

The article was written by a British journalist, Robert Inlakesh, who loathes Israel. He has written many anti-Israel articles. Here is a quote from one of them:

Whether we look at the Israeli political elite, military, police, intelligence, society or media, we see genocidal mania. This is because their narcissistic supremacist ideology is collapsing before their very eyes, they are beginning to realize that maintaining apartheid is no longer viable.

The opportunity for the Israelis to implement the only solution that would have enabled them to continue their existence has passed. If the Zionist regime was actually serious about the Oslo Accords and simply accepted international law as the consensus for a so-called two-state solution, they could have perhaps proceeded and actually maintained their regime. However, allowing the Palestinian people to gain access to basic human rights in only 22% of historic Palestine was not possible for them under their racist expansionist ideology.

We are now reaching the final phase of this settler colonial project and the Israelis have come to the realization that maintaining their ethno-supremacist regime of absolute privilege will mean exterminating and ethnically cleansing everyone in their way. They are so immersed in their own collective form of narcissism, in which they view themselves as both the victim and hero of the story, that stopping now is impossible. This is also why Israeli society is split down the middle on the question of what kind of ethno-supremacist regime they seek: whether that will be a secular or religious regime going forward.

Therefore, with full US backing they are slowly committing national suicide. This may be a process that is somewhat delayed if a ceasefire is reached in Gaza that prevents the immediate end of the regime by military means, but the war will continue in other ways. The West Bank will likely end up becoming their punching bag until they can again escalate elsewhere and the only promise that can be made to their own people is a future of perpetual war.

In reading his articles, I can’t find anywhere that he calls Arab nations “ethnostates,” although by his definition they are.

I have been clear on this blog about my desire for a ceasefire, for peace, and for a two-state solution. I have strongly condemned Benjamin Netanyahu for his unwillingness to seeek peace. But I have also condemned Hamas, not only for the October 7 attack, but for their unwillingness to seek peace and for hiding their quarters under the cover of schools, hospitals, and other civilian facilities. It’s not as if my opinion matters to world leaders. It doesn’t.

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, in full knowledge that their attack would trigger an overwhelming Israeli military response. They were willing to sacrifice Gazan civilians because Hamas had secure underground hiding places for themselves

How do I know about the brutality of Hamas on October 7? I watched the videotapes made by the terrorists. I watched them murder people in their homes, their cars, their gardens, their bomb shelters. How do I know women were raped? Not only eyewitness testimony, but an indelible memory of a young Israeli woman lying in the back of a pickup truck, the bottom of her pants stained with blood, as terrorists sat around her, smiling broadly.

One house, to my knowledge, was hit by fire from an Israeli tank, and 13-14 Israelis who were sheltering there died.

Most of the carnage happened before the IDF arrived. The attack began about 6:30 am, and the Israeli forces did not get there until 3-4 pm. Why the long delay? An official inquiry will one day explain but Netanyahu won’t allow the inquiry until the fighting is over. Another despicable, self-serving action on his part. An impartial inquiry will surely fault him for failing to protect the peaceable kibbutzim that bordered Gaza, as well as the inexplicably slow response by the IDF to stop the attack.

As far as the number of children killed, UN sources say it was 29, not 1. At least 3,000 children in Gaza have died, but the number has doubtless multiplied since the story was written last November.

A site called Factcheck.org reported:

At least 29 children were killed when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In addition, about 30 children were taken hostage by Hamas, the Associated Press reported…

There has been extensive news coverage of the Oct. 7 attack and the war, including stories on video footage from that day showing “Hamas gunmen cheering with apparent joy as they shot civilians on the road, and later stalking the pathways of kibbutzim and killing parents and children in their homes,” as BBC reported. 

As we have written, Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine has been working to identify the remains of those killed on Oct. 7. Forensic pathologist Chen Kugel, the head of the center, said the ages of those killed ranged from 3 months to 80 or 90 years, according to The Media Line, an American news outlet that covers the Middle East.

Kugel also told the Los Angeles Times that initially most of the bodies could be identified through DNA. Now, the staff’s work involves “reassembling and reconnecting pieces” of remains found in the landscapes where the killings occurred.

For example, what initially appeared to be a piece of charcoal was examined through a CT scan, Kugel said. The scan revealed, “These were people who were hugging one another and burned while they were tied together. It might be a parent and a child.”

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