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Thom Hartmann: Stop the Republican War on Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
11

Thom Hartmann is a remarkably well-informed journalist and blogger. In this article, he traces the history of the Republican war on one of our nation’s most important democratic institutions: its public schools.

He writes:

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places–and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public schools, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

There is no more powerful urge humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing: “[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republican Glen Youngkin successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory to the governor’s office in Virginia, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: a subset of Republican voters. 

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and churches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s schoolchildren.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (white) people.  

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal.

Republicans are generally convinced that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values. Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

As conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten writes:

“Red states are increasingly engaging in a broad push to purge public institutions of a Wokeness antithetical to the values and principles of their constituents…

“Yet at root, it is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture. …

“It is incumbent on lawmakers and their appointees to use every lever of power they can, within every educational institution under their purview, to combat the divisiveness and forcible conformity engendered by DEI, CRT, and the like and to replace it with a system rooted in the values and principles on which Western civilization is based.”

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well. David Pepper has a great post in his Pepperspectives Substack newsletter about how to spot the extremists and GOP shills at election time.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. 

Lobby your state legislators and either run for your local school board or support good people who are. 

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Vouchers

Pennsylvania: Rightwing School Board Candidates Lose in Critical Districts

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2023 //
10

Moms for Liberty faced big setbacks in school board races in Pennsylvania, reports Peter Greene in Forbes.

He writes:

When he talked to the Moms for Liberty convention back in July, Jordan Adams explained how new conservative board members could use their first 100 days to hit hard, flooding the zone with a kind of shock and awe. The conservatives of Pennridge School District board, Adams’ single client for his fledgling consulting business, may be rethinking his advice this morning as they contemplate their defeat in Tuesday’s elections.

Pennridge is in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, a county that has been ground zero for the Moms for Liberty style installation of far right policies in school boards. Since acquiring a majority, Pennridge has pursued a host of right wing policies. They had trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they removed DEI policies).

Pennridge’s conservative board also hired Adams, with close ties to conservative Christian Hillsdale College, to scour through their curriculum and remove all things woke. This was a new business model, a proof of concept for retooling a school’s curriculum along more conservative lines. He was, he told the Moms for Liberty crowd, the “fox in the henhouse.”

Now the henhouse is under new management. As of this morning, it appears that all five open seats on the board were won by candidates who ran on opposition to culture wars, secret agreements, poor policies, and the adoption of the curriculum recommended by Adams.

The backlash was also felt in Central Bucks district school board race.

Central Bucks has drawn national attention for implementing a wave of conservative policies. They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute (“Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.”) They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a “gender identification procedure”. No student name changes allowed without a note from home.

The conservative shift drew enough attention that Penncrest school board on the other side of the statetreated Central Bucks as a model.

The race drew spectacular amounts of money, particularly from Paul Martino, a venture capitalist who had put half a million in 2021 Pennsylvania board races. This year he chipped in $279,000 (out of a total $600,000 for bother sides) in support of his wife’s campaign for a board seat.

The campaign was brutal and, if one followed it on social media, mean. But the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this morning that the Democratic candidates swept the election, including the defeat of Martino’s wife and Dana Hunter, incumbent board president.

Open the link to finish the article.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Librarians, Libraries, Literature, Pennsylvania

Texas: The Rightwing Plot to Capture Local School Boards

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2023 //
15

Steven Monacelli wrote this article for The Texas Observer about the network of rightwing groups flooding local school board elections with big money. He also supplied the photographs.

As the article points out, about 75% of local school board candidates spend less than $1,000 to run for office. In districts targeted for takeover, such modest spending is no longer a path to success.

Monacelli writes:

Over the last three years, an interconnectednetwork of political action committees (PACs), largely funded by billionaires who support school privatization, has begun to transform the nature of local school board elections across Texas. They’ve done this with the help of consultants whose efforts have largely gone unnoticed.

On August 15, 2022, members of the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) board of trustees, all dressed in Southlake Dragons’ green, posed for a photo with representatives of Patriot Mobile, a Christian Nationalist phone company that spent big last spring to help secure the victories of three trustees. The occasion honored the company’s donation of posters that read “In God We Trust.”

The trustee’s acceptance of the red, white, and blue star-spangled posters immediately drew opposition from critics who see those words not just as a motto that appears on dollar bills, but also as a declaration of allegiance to conservative causes. One disapproving parent attempted to donate signs with the same words in Arabic and on a rainbow background but was rejected; the board president said they already had enough.

Other school districts got the posters around the same time. And not all parents who spoke out were critical.

Erik Leist, who resides in the neighboring Keller ISD area, spoke to multiple news outlets about the posters after they were donated. He approved of the state law passed in 2021 that requires schools to display donated signs bearing the national motto in a “conspicuous place.”

“If it’s important to communities, the community will come behind it,” Leist said, according to accounts published in Fox News and the Texas Tribune that identified him only as the father of a kindergartener.

Leist, however, is much more than a concerned dad: He’s a conservative political consultant who at the time had already been paid tens of thousands of dollars by multiple PACs to support the campaigns of new ultraconservative school board members in Carroll and neighboring school districts, trustees who were eager to accept those posters and who later passed policies restricting students’ access to library books and rolling back accommodations for LGBTQ+ students.

Leist is just one well-connected node in a sprawling, hydra-like network of PACs and consulting firms that increasingly are targeting Texas school board races and politicizing those formerly low-budget, nonpartisan campaigns, an investigation by the Texas Observer reveals.

The Observer’s examination of campaign finance records shows that dozens of ultraconservative school board candidates around the state have been backed by PACs that collectively employ a handful of conservative political consulting firms.

Viewed together, the connections among these individuals and organizations reveal a network of major funders and political operatives focused on winning control of the state’s local school boards. The strategy this network employs has been trumpeted in the right-wing press as a blueprint for school board takeovers: Create a PAC, endorse candidates willing to run on politicized issues, hire a consulting firm with ties to the Republican Party, raise enough to outspend opponents, and if victory is secured, pass policies that align with statewide party priorities. The biggest known backers of this network are conservative billionaires who generally don’t live in the districts being targeted but all of whom support school privatization efforts.

The timing of the network’s activities corresponds to revived efforts by Governor Greg Abbott and Republican lawmakers to support vouchers for private schools in the 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions.

To understand how this network developed over time, it’s best to begin in CISD—a district located in Southlake, a wealthy suburb of Fort Worth that is over 70 percent white. It’s where Leist got his start as a school board campaign consultant, supporting an effort praised by the conservative press as a model for other school districts.

In August 2020, the seven-member CISD board held a hearing on something called a Cultural Competence Action Plan, a proposal created in response to a 2018 viral video of Carroll high school students shouting the N-word.

Less than two weeks later, Tim O’Hare, the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party and current Tarrant County judge, teamed up with Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist and the wife of a former Southlake mayor, to create Southlake Families PAC.

In November 2020, Southlake Families PAC—which describes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values”—paid a Keller-based marketing company called 221b Ingenuity, of which Leist was a managing partner, to help set up a website to promote two conservative CISD school board candidates. They ran in opposition to the Cultural Competence Action Plan in the spring 2021 race that featured PAC-funded mailers accusing opponents of pushing “radical socialism.” Both PAC-backed candidates won.

In June 2021, the right-leaning National Review lauded Southlake Families’ victory as a “model for conservative parents confronted by similar situations around the country.” When Southlake Families helped a third candidate win a special election for a vacant CISD seat that fall, the three joined with a fourth PAC-endorsed incumbent to form a conservative majority on the board.

Since then, seven federal civil rights investigations have been opened into allegations of discrimination against Carroll students based on race, disability, and gender or sexual harassment. The most recent began in January 2023, one month after the board removed references to religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity from the district’s nondiscrimination statement, stoking further controversy and making news.

What has drawn less press attention is that the situation in Carroll has inspired a network of copycat PACs supporting conservative candidates in other historically low-budget nonpartisan school board races across the state, in which PACs and the candidates they endorsed hired from the same handful of consulting firms to help with campaigns.

Tentacles of this big-spending network have already reached more than two dozen Texas school districts. The Observer has identified 20 PACs formed since late 2020 that, through early September, have collectively spent more than $1.5 million to support the campaigns of 105 conservative candidates in 35 districts.

Most of the time, that investment has paid off: 65 PAC-supported candidates—or 62 percent—won their elections from 2021 to 2023.

The majority of those PACs are focused on only one school district each. The ultraconservative committees have typically spent tens of thousands of dollars per election, with less than $100,000 in total expenses since they were formed. A handful of PACs have spent more than six figures in total, including Southlake Families, which has spent more than $239,000 since late 2020.

Campaign finance records show that these seemingly grassroots groups often use the same consulting firms like Leist’s Edgerton Strategies, which has worked on behalf of PACs and candidates in at least 14 school districts. Other consulting firms that have made over six figures working on school board campaigns include Axiom Strategies and CAZ Consulting—and both companies’ subsidiaries. They’re the same consultants used by big-spending conservative political PACs like Patriot Mobile Action and Texans for Educational Freedom, which have respectively spent more than $500,000 and $330,000 on school board races and together have endorsed 66 candidates across at least 23 districts.

At least one federal-level super PAC, the 1776 Project, has also invested in 28 school board candidates across eight Texas school districts that were also endorsed by either Patriot Mobile Action, Texans for Educational Freedom, or one of the Southlake Families-style PACs.

This level of outside spending is highly unusual in school board races. The results of a 2018 survey conducted by the National School Board Association showed that 75 percent of all candidates reported spending less than $1,000 per race, with only 9 percent spending more than $5,000.

Analysis of campaign expenses by the nonprofit OpenSecrets shows that spending more money doesn’t always ensure victory—but often does. Given the relatively low cost of school board races, the influx of even a few thousand dollars of outside funding can transform the nature of such elections at a time of high turnover: According to a 2022 survey from School Board Partners, a national organization focused on recruiting and training anti-racist school board members, nearly two-thirds of school board members nationwide said they planned not to seek reelection…


In the southeast Texas city of Humble, another 2021 school board race became a quieter testing ground for a new conservative PAC. Unlike in Carroll ISD, there was no dramatic national coverage or clash over diversity and inclusion. The district, in one of Houston’s sprawling and forested northern suburbs, was the first foray into school board races for Texans for Educational Freedom, a PAC with a mission of “fighting against Critical Race Theory and other anti-American agendas and curriculums.”

Funded primarily by a coterie of conservative billionaires, Texans for Educational Freedom—originally known as the Freedom Foundation of Texas—was founded in early 2021 by Christopher Zook Jr., a former field director for the Harris County Republican Party and senior fellow at Texans For Lawsuit Reform.

In the May 2021 election, the PAC spent more than $10,000 to help three candidates—a significant investment from one source, given that Humble school board candidates tended to spend only about $3,300 from all contributors in contested races. The PAC money was spent on a national political consulting firm called Axiom Strategies. All three of the PAC’s candidates won.

Unlike in majority-white Southlake, the school board election in Humble—where white students are a minority—didn’t feature inflammatory, politicized rhetoric. That helped Texans for Educational Freedom keep a low profile.

“I wasn’t aware there was outside PAC spending,” said Brian Baker, a father of two students in Humble ISD. “I had been paying attention to stories in other parts of the state and I was looking out for candidates and mailers using certain buzzwords like ‘woke,’ but I didn’t really notice any.”

After the initial victory in Humble, Texans for Educational Freedom targeted two more districts near Houston, Cypress-Fairbanks and Klein, in 2021. This time, messaging around critical race theory came to the fore. All three PAC-backed candidates in Cypress-Fairbanks ran against the ostensible inclusion of critical race theory in school curriculum and teacher training, as did one PAC-backed candidate in Klein. Six of the seven candidates won.

By the end of 2021, candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom had established near or outright majorities in all three districts—and all three would later rank on a list of book-banning districts put together by PEN America, a nonprofit organization focused on the protection of free expression.

Texans for Educational Freedom has intervened in races across the greater Houston area, including Houston, Conroe, Katy, and Spring Branch. The PAC has also backed candidates in the wooded Austin suburb of Leander, in the oil-rich flats of Midland, in several suburbs of Fort Worth, and in the Panhandle’s Canyon ISD. The PAC backed 12 candidates in 2021, 10 in 2022, and 20 in 2023, covering a total of 17 school districts. Out of all those candidates, 76 percent won their elections.

“Things like this have happened before but not in such a coordinated way,” said Ruth Kravetz, a retired public school administrator and teacher who co-founded Community Voices for Public Education, an advocacy group that seeks to strengthen Houston’s public school system. “In the past it was to promote charter expansion. And now it seems like it’s about promoting the destruction of public education.”

Candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom have regularly run on hot-button issues that tie in with state-level Republican policy and rhetoric, such as notions that children are being “indoctrinated” into radical ideologies or “sexually alternative lifestyles.”

In Conroe ISD, three candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom ran as the “Mama Bear” slate and won their November 2022 elections after being involved in a push by a group known as Mama Bears Rising to restrict student access to certain books.

“The PACs were able to support a massive printing of voter guides and distribution of mailers,” said Evan Berlin, a resident who lost to one of the Mama Bears. Berlin, a first-time school board candidate who has a conservative voting record, told the Observer he wanted to run on providing education in a non-politicized manner. “I think with PAC money coming from out-of-district donors, just by nature of that we could assume that it’s part of a larger, more strategic effort,” he said.

Last year, while Texans for Educational Freedom was concentrating on Houston area races, Patriot Mobile Action and another 17 PACs were backing candidates in 22 districts across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Those candidates largely ran on issues that have become a common refrain: allegations of ideological indoctrination, critical race theory, pornography in schools, and the sexualization of children.

Fifteen of the 18 PACs targeting North Texas school districts tapped either Axiom Strategies, Edgerton Strategies, or CAZ Consulting for campaign consulting—as did many school board candidates in the area. The outliers were: McKinney First PAC, which endorsed candidates that worked with those consulting firms; Metroplex Citizens for a Better Tomorrow and Decatur ISD Parents Unite, two groups primarily funded by a Republican mega donor who has contributed to Texans for Educational Freedom; and Collin Conservatives United, a self-described PAC that does not appear in the state PAC registry, whose endorsed candidates received donations from the same megadonor.

As this larger cluster of PACs and consulting firms has grown, its strategy has proved potent. Fourteen of its 17 candidates won in 2021. Another 42 candidates ran in 2022 and 27 won. And so far in 2023, 48 more candidates ran and 26 won.

Open the link to finish the article. I hope it’s not behind a paywall.

If you open the link, you can then see the diagram that displays the intricate interconnections among the rightwing groups and their funders.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Texas, Vouchers

Politico: House Republicans Want Deep Cuts to Food Stamp Program

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2023 //
11

Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reports that House Republicans are itching to cut the food stamp program, but running into opposition from Democrats and farm-state Republicans.

Mike Johnson‘s new role as House speaker heightens the chances of a major political clash next year over one of the nation’s largest welfare programs and the government’s preeminent aid package for farmers and rural America.

The fallout is likely to reverberate in countless congressional races, not to mention President Joe Biden’s attempts to win back rural votersin the 2024 presidential race.

Johnson, more so than previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is a proponent of more hardline GOP efforts to overhaul the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s largest anti-hunger program that serves 41 million low-income Americans. As a senior member of the conservative-leaning Republican Study Committee, Johnson backed proposals to roll back food aid expansions under Biden and block states from exempting some work requirements for SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. In 2018, Johnson referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.”

Now, the RSC, Freedom Caucus hardliners and other Republicans are pressing to include similar measures in the next farm bill. Such a move would upend the fragile bipartisan coalition needed to pass the legislation — a blow to House Republicans who represent the majority of rural and farm districts, including Johnson, as well as more centrist GOP members who will be fighting for their political lives in 2024.

Open the link to read more.

Didn’t Jesus say something about feeding the hungry and clothing the needy? Why do these people rattle on about Christianity but ignore the words of its leader?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Health, Republicans

Thom Hartmann: How the “Citizens United” Decision Corrupted Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2023 //
49

Thom Hartmann writes here about the most consequential Supreme Court decision of our time: Citizens United. That decision unleashed the power of big money to control our politics. It’s consequences have diminished our ability as a nation to take action on pressing issues. It has allowed the Uber-rich to buy politicians. That always existed to some extent. Citizens United established the practice as business as usual.

Hartmann writes:

According to Talkers Magazine, the “Bible of the Talk Radio Industry,” I talk with around 6 million people every week on my nationally syndicated call-in radio/TV show. What I’m hearing, increasingly (I’ve been doing this program for 20 years now), is frustration bordering on despair about the inability of America to get basic, necessary things done.

Why is it, people ask, that we can’t do anything about guns amidst all these mass shootings? Or homelessness? Or affordable healthcare and education? Why are we moving so slowly on climate change? How did social media get excused from responsibility for its own content and then become overrun by Putin bots and Nazis?

And why do we let the billionaires who own social media (along with all the other billionaires) get away with only paying an average 3.2% income tax when the rest of us are making up for it by paying through the nose? Why can’t Congress pass a simple budget or raise taxes enough to stop running deficits?

What happened, people ask, that caused America’s politicians — in the years after JFK — to stop listening to the people who elect them? Why is it that (other than tax cuts), when Republicans have power or the ability to block Democrats efforts, nothing gets done?

The simple and tragic answer to all these questions comes back to a single root cause: money in politics. Or, to be more specific, Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized political bribery (and, thus, functional ownership) of judges and legislators, both federal and state.

In 1976, in response to an appeal by uber-rich New York Republican Senator James Buckley, the Court ruled that wealthy people in politics couldn’t be restrained from using their own money to overwhelm their political opponents. They then went a step farther and struck down other limitations on billionaires using their own money to “independently” promote the campaigns of politicians they like.

Their rationale was that restrictions on rich people buying political office “necessarily reduce the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of the exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.”

In other words, for morbidly rich people to have “free speech,” they must be able to spend as much money on politicking as they want. If you don’t have millions or billions, your free speech is pretty much limited to how loud you can yell: this was a decision almost entirely of, by, and for the morbidly rich.

Two years later, in 1978, four Republicans on the Court went along with a decision written by Republican Lewis Powell himself in declaring that corporations are “persons” entitled to human rights under the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution), including the First Amendment right of free speech.

And free speech, as they’d established two years earlier, meant the ability to shovel money into political campaigns. Effective in April of 1978, elections could go to whoever spent the most money.

Democrats largely ignored the rulings (until 1992). They hadn’t been the party of the rich since the 1920s, and, with a third of American workers in a union, those unions provided plenty of money for political campaigns.

But Republicans — specifically, the 1980 Reagan campaign — jumped forward with both hands out for all the cash they could grab. The gift they offered wealthy people who supported them? Tax cuts, even if they drove the deficit sky high.

There were still quite a few campaign restrictions in place in 2010, when five Republicans on the Supreme Court did it again, striking down literally hundreds of state and federal laws and regulations by doubling-down on their assertion that “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons with human rights.”

Thus, we can track many of the worst aspects of America’s political dysfunction to these three corrupt Supreme Court decisions, as I detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Prior to the Court’s Citizens United decision, for example, there was a bipartisan consensus in Congress that climate change was caused by burning fossil fuels and that we should do something about it, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse so eloquently documents.

John McCain campaigned for president on a platform of doing something about climate change: he was the lead cosponsor of the Climate Stewardship Act, which had multiple other Republican cosponsors. At the time, he said:

“While we cannot say with 100 percent confidence what will happen in the future, we do know the emission of greenhouse gases is not healthy for the environment. As many of the top scientists through the world have stated, the sooner we start to reduce these emissions, the better off we will be in the future.”

The Clean Air Planning Act was supported by Republican Senators Lamar Alexander, Lindsay Graham, and Susan Collins. Republican Senator Olympia Snow was the lead cosponsor of the Global Warming Reduction Act of 2007. Multiple Republicans supported the Low Carbon Economy Act and the Clean Air/Climate Change Act.

In 2009, Republicans supported the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act and the Waxman-Markey carbon cap-and-trade proposal. Maine Republican Susan Collins was the lead cosponsor of the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal Act, a bill that would have imposed a fee on burning fossil fuels. At the time, she said:

“In the United States alone, emissions of the primary greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have risen more than 20 percent since 1990. Clearly climate change is a daunting environmental challenge…”

And then, in 2010, everything changed.

Clarence Thomas, actively groomed for decades by fossil fuel and other billionaires, became the deciding vote in Citizens United, legalizing not only his own corruption but that of every Republican in Congress.

Once the fossil fuel industry could pour unlimited money into either supporting — or, perhaps more importantly, destroying — the candidacy of any Republican politician, every Republican in the House and Senate began to say, “What climate change?”

As Senator Whitehouse said on the floor of the Senate:

“I believe we lost the ability to address climate change in a bipartisan way because of the evils of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Our present failure to address climate change is a symptom of things gone awry in our democracy due to Citizens United. That decision did not enhance speech in our democracy; it has allowed bullying, wealthy special interests to suppress real debate.”

When Poppy Bush was president, the world confronted a crisis with acid rain destroying monuments and buildings; Democrats and Republicans came together and put into law a sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade “free market solution” that largely solved the problem.

Why can’t we do the same with a cap-and-trade system for carbon pollution from fossil fuels like the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea have already done? Citizens United.

Similarly, why can’t America get our gun crisis under control? We’re the only country in the world where schoolchildren are subjected to the monthly terror of active shooter drills.

Bullets are the leading cause of death among our nation’s children. But no Republican will take on the issue because they know the firearms industry and its front groups will destroy them with a waterfall of money for their inevitable opponent in the next election. Citizens United.

Our public schools are crumbling as the charter and private school industries pour millions into politicians’ coffers. Instead of fixing our schools and raising our educational standards, the private school industry has gotten Republican governors in several states to offer vouchers to every student in the state.

It’s busting the budgets of states (once the public schools are dead, they’ll cut back on the generosity of the vouchers), but making literally billions in profits for the private school industry — money that’s then, in part, recycled back to the politicians promoting their interests. Citizens United.

Please, please, please open the link and read the rest of this brilliant article.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Politics

Mercedes Schneider Asks Moms4Liberty If They Will Ban the Bible for Its Sexual Content

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2023 //
30

Mercedes Schneider wonders when or if the so-called “Moms for Liberty” will get involved in banning the Bible from America’s classrooms and libraries. Should young children be exposed to racy sexual content?

She writes:

Moms for Liberty– a misnomer for Far-right Moms (and Others) for Censorship of What We Disapprove– is into banning books that is loves to tag as “pornography.” The group originally started in Florida in 2021 and having some pretty tight Republican connections(see here also); the October 13, 2023, Salon notes that Moms for Liberty (M4L) is “a GOP darling” pushing a far-right GOP agenda:

A GOP darling, its agenda includes filling school boards with conservatives, a boilerplate Republican strategy for winning wider elections. Under its “parents’ rights” banner, Moms for Liberty pushes core conservative policies: bans on public school education about sex, diversity, LGBTQ issues and the role of race and racism in society.

An April 2023 NewsNation article states that M4L doesn’t want to ban books; it just wants to “prohibit ‘pornographic materials’ from school libraries.”

That got me to wondering whether M4L has ever come on strong against the bible.

I’m guessing not since, well, far-right folks might just implode at the thought.

And yet, those of us who have read the entire bible know that there are some pretty racy situations therein, especially in the Old Testament.

For example, there’s this situation with Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:30 – 38, NIV):

Open the link to read about another Bible story that will shock you. Worried about sexually explicit materials? Read the Bible!

Categories Censorship, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Ravitch, Diane

Paul Krugman: There Are No GOP Moderates in the House of Representatives

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2023 //
14

Maybe House Republicans got tired of not finding a new Speaker. Maybe they felt humiliated by their inability to agree on a leader. Every one of them finally agreed to endorse one of the most radical extremists in the House as their party’s leader. You know already that Mike Johnson is hostile to abortion and to gay rights. You know that he was a prominent leader in the effort to overturn Trump’s loss in 2020.

What you probably do not know is that Johnson is an extremist on economic issues as well. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economics columnist for the New York Times, wants you to know that his views on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are also radical.

He writes:

There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.

In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.

Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.

There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.

But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.

Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.

For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.

Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.

On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.

Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.

Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.

The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.

Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.

So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.

I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?

Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.

But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Republicans

Thom Hartmann: The Real Mike Johnson Is a Dangerous Rightwing Zealot

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
21

Thom Hartmann has checked out the record and public statements of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He is even more of an extremist than his idol Donald Trump.

Hartmann writes:

The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate.

As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday:

“Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.”

Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

Their lawsuit had no merit and no facts — everybody, including the Republicans involved, knew that Biden had won fair-and-square — but Republican hate of Democrats is now so deep that the idea of Democrats legitimately governing after winning an election is repugnant to them. No matter how big the Democrats’ victory (7 million votes in this case) may be.

Johnson went public with his support of Trump’s hateful, poisonous Big Lie just a week after the 2020 election, saying:

 “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that…They know that in Georgia it really was rigged.”

As The Washington Post noted at the time:

“Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, spearheaded the effort to round up support on Capitol Hill. Johnson emailed all House Republicans on Wednesday to solicit signatures for the long-shot Texas case after Trump called. The congressman told his colleagues that the president ‘will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.’”

Johnson got 106 of the 196 Republicans then in the House to sign on to the effort to force four swing states to throw out Democratic votes and declare Trump emperor for life: he was the legal architect of the argument. It doesn’t get more hateful against our republican form of government than that effort to destroy confidence in the vote at the cornerstone of our democracy.

Johnson’s hate of women having agency over their own bodies and lives is so intense that he has repeatedly championed a nationwide ban on abortion. 

His wife Kelly, a “licensed pastoral counselor” with whom he’s in a “covenant marriage,” makes money from Louisiana Right To Life, and before being elected to the House in 2016 he was an attorney for the far-right-billionaire-supported Alliance Defending Freedom that pushed the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court.

While there, he helped sue New York and New Jersey to force them to allow official state license plates that displayed an anti-woman, anti-abortion message; sued New Orleans to try to block benefits for the partners of queer city employees; and promoted a “National Day of Truth” to encourage homophobic students to hate on their LGBTQ+ peers.

Johnson and the GOP explicitly hate queer people and their allies.

“Radical homosexual advocacy groups” are promoting “the culture’s assault on traditional values,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed for a Louisiana newspaper. That “assault,” of course, was gay marriage, something that horrifies Johnson and his wife. 

He wrote:

“Same-sex ‘marriage’ selfishly and deliberately deprives children of either a mother or a father. Children need both. Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.

“Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”

Johnson also supports a federal version of DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law that would outlaw any discussion of queer people in any public school classroom in America. In another anti-gay newspaper screed, Johnson wrote:

“Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices. Where would it end? This is one Pandora’s box we shouldn’t open.”

While Johnson hates queer people, he apparently loves Vladimir Putin, an affection that has earned him the loyalty and help of Donald Trump.

Last month he joined Matt Gaetz and 93 other Republicans in voting to cut off all US military aid to assist Ukraine’s survival in the face of Russia’s ongoing terror campaign.

He’s also a friend to mass shooters and the psychopaths at the NRA. 

Johnson repeatedly voted against gun safety and gun control legislation, and voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Hating on Medicare and Social Security is another specialty of Johnson and the GOP. As Social Security Works Executive Director Alex Lawson noted yesterday:

“Rep. Mike Johnson has a long history of hostility towards Social Security and Medicare. As Chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019-2021, Johnson released budgets that included $2 trillion in cuts to Medicare and $750 billion in cuts to Social Security, including:
— Raising the retirement age
— Decimating middle class benefits
— Making annual cost-of-living increases smaller
— Moving towards privatization of Social Security and Medicare.”

Johnson also pushed for $3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), saying slashing the entitlement programs should be Congress’ “top priority.” Johnson is also a huge advocate for a Catfood Commission to figure out ways to slash Social Security benefits to seniors (thus forcing them to eat catfood: the White House refers to it as a “death panel for Social Security”).

Like Red state Republican politicians beholden to the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries, Johnson also hates marijuana. He’s repeatedly argued and voted against legalization, as well as helping shoot down a bill that would let legal pot dispensaries use banks to conduct their business.  

Hating on science and our children’s future is a feature, not a bug, of Republican politics, and Mike Johnson fits right in. The largest single group of donors to his political career have been the oil and gas industries, and he happily takes their money and spreads their lies. For example, he argued:

“The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

The League of Conservation Voters gave his environmental record a 0 percent (yes, zero) score for 2022: this guy has burrowed so deeply in Big Oil’s pocket that he’s like a blood-filled tick on a shaggy dog. He’ll never let go.

On voting rights, Johnson hates voters in Blue cities in Red states as much as their own Republican legislatures do. A big fan of voter suppression laws, he argued that making it harder to vote and purging people from voter rolls would help the GOP in the 2022 election:

“They’re making sure that the election results can be counted upon, and that’s a critical thing for us to do.”

That was followed by his voting against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act, both of which would have guaranteed Americans’ right to vote regardless of race, religion, or geography. On the other hand, he voted for a Republican bill that would have enshrined GOP voter suppression efforts nationwide. 

Like Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville, Johnson apparently also hates our men and women serving in the armed forces.

He voted against the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Actthat President Biden was cheerleading because it would aid service members like Biden’s son Beau who became deathly sick because of exposure to open-air burn pits and other toxins.

He also voted against a year-end package of bills to aid service members, including requiring states to honor the professional licenses of military spouses who find themselves stationed in states other than where they were originally certified. And he joined Tuberville in his opposition to the Pentagon paying to fly raped servicewomen stationed in countries or states where abortion is illegal to places where it is available.

Johnson has supported a few Republican military spending bills, but only, as military.comnoted, when they are “packed with GOP policy riders such as provisions to bar abortion services, transgender health care, and LGBTQ+ Pride flags at the VA.”

Johnson, like most Republicans who hate the idea of Brown people entering our country legally, is also a “border hawk,” having visited our southern border with Donald Trump and introduced two pieces of legislation that would restrict immigration and refugee status. Speaking of his desire to “build a wall” and keep would-be refugees out of the US, he said:

“Now, I have no illusions about this. I’m sure that President Biden will veto anything we send him, but it will send a very strong message. If we can’t override a veto, we’ll be ready to run when the next Republican president is elected two years later.”

Republicans like Johnson love to plaster the word “freedom” all over everything they do. But they’re just fine with a for-profit prison industry lobbying for harsher sentences, and to keeping draconian drug laws in place.

When Republicans say “freedom,” it’s a safe bet they mean they want the freedom to hate on minorities, the freedom of rich people and giant corporations to screw average working people, and the freedom of billionaires to continue paying only around 3 percent of their income in income taxes.

In MAGA Mike Johnson (what Trump calls him), Republicans have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds. At this point, the only “loves” they have are rightwing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, Trump’s good buddy and fossil fuel oligarch Vladimir Putin.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Politics, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: House GOP Remains Loyal to the Big Lie

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
28

How to explain the radicalization of the Republican Party? It just chose a defender of the Big Lie as Speaker of the House. Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner explain:

The drama around a speakerless House of Representatives has come to an end, at least for the moment. It has been a sad spectacle, to be sure, but the means by which it was resolved, and what it augurs for the future, offer no reason to celebrate.

Quite the contrary.

If the elevation of Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson to the speaker’s gavel with unanimous Republican support counts as compromise within the party’s caucus, it reinforces what we already knew — this nation faces grave threats to its constitutional order, because one of our two major political parties has embraced autocratic extremism.

This is not hyperbole. The person who rallied his party to make him second in line to the presidency was a cheerleader for the end of American democracy. There should be no normalization of this fact.

In the wake of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, the vast majority of the Republican Party fell in line behind Donald Trump’s attempts to destroy one of the most sacrosanct features of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. We all know what came next, including a violent attempted coup that swarmed the Capitol on January 6. On that day, 139 Republican members of the House of Representatives (including Johnson) voted not to certify the election. It marked arguably the greatest threat to the continuation of the republic since the Civil War.

The new speaker of the House might not be well known by the American public. But he was an influential leader of the movement to deny the will of the people and their selection of president. In late 2020, Johnson pushed House members to sign on to a lawsuit, filed by Texas, that would have thrown out the votes in key battleground states — in essence disenfranchising millions of Americans. To call this ridiculous legal maneuver “fringe” is insufficient. This wasn’t just “out there.” This was the legal equivalent of orbiting Pluto. Even the reactionary right-wing Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

But the purpose of the lawsuit wasn’t just to deny Biden the presidency. It was to delegitimize a legitimate election. And all you have to do to understand how successful this movement has been is to see Mike Johnson now sitting in the speaker’s chair.

It should be noted that Johnson holds the speakership despite espousing extremely radical views on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. He also seems to be following Trump’s lead in wanting to stymie U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. That these views were not disqualifying for a single Republican member — including those purported “moderates” who come from districts Biden won — shows how the party marches in lockstep with radicalism and in the opposite direction of where a majority of Americans want the nation to go.

In the days before Republican elected officials crowned an architect of authoritarianism to lead the House, several of the Trump lawyers who helped orchestrate the specious legal rationale for the coup were busy pleading guilty in the conspiracy case of election interference in Georgia. Georgia, it turns out, was one of the states where Speaker Johnson wanted votes to be thrown out.

In their plea deals, the Trump lawyers had to admit what was obvious from the beginning: All the attempts to steal the election were built on lies. The rule of law seems to be closing in on Trump. And it is being fueled by the truth.

Yet the Big Lie continues to fuel Republicans outside of the courtroom, and especially in the halls of Congress. This puts our nation in peril. We are at a point where the very thing that should most disqualify someone from political leadership in America — the desire to destroy our democracy — has become the litmus test for the speaker of the House.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Politico: The New Speaker of the House is Deeply Conservative

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
15

The Republicans in the House of Representatives finally united to elect Rep. Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House. Johnson was elected to Congress in 2016. He was a leading figure in the effort to overturn the election in 2020. He gathered signatures among his colleagues to support an appeal by the Texas Attorney General to the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify the votes cast in contested states. The Court didn’t hear the case, ruling that Texas did not have standing to reverse the results in other states.

So, yes, Johnson is an election denier. Less well known are his deeply conservative views on social issues. He opposes abortion and gay marriage. As a representative of oil country, he dismisses claims that fossil fuels contribute to climate change.

Politico wrote about Johnson:

BROADCAST NEWS — It’s finally over. After more than three weeks without a leader, House Republicans came together to unanimously select Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives. Johnson served as a consensus pick among the numerous factions, appeasing both the right flank of the party that tossed out former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and moderates. While he’s served as vice chair of the Republican Conference, he has served just four terms in Congress and remains little-known within Washington.

What’s clear, however, is that Johnson is a social conservative’s social conservative — the most culturally conservative lawmaker to ascend to the speakership in decades, if not longer.

He has longstanding ties to the evangelical activist group Family Research Council — which could one day prove discomfiting to members from swing districts or of a more secular orientation.

His first brush with national prominence came in April 2015, when Johnson, then a Louisiana state legislator, proposed a bill called the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act that would have prevented “adverse treatment by the State of any person or entity on the basis of the views they may hold with regard to marriage.” Critics called it legalized discrimination against married gay couples, and the bill failed, but the media attention got him on the radar of the influential FRC and its president, fellow Louisiana native Tony Perkins.

Perkins, who hosts a national radio show called Washington Watch, began tapping Johnson to guest host. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, appeared to be a natural — by December 2015, local Shreveport, La. ABC affiliate KTBS said he “may have a budding second career on the airwaves.”

The FRC and Perkins are political lightning rods among non-evangelicals — some of Perkins’ stances, like his argument that natural disasters are divine punishments for homosexuality, don’t sit well with broad swaths of the electorate. But Johnson’s political and religious beliefs dovetail with Perkins’ views. In a 2004 op-ed, Johnson argued that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural… society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle.”

When he ran for Congress in 2016, Johnson placed his faith at the center of his campaign, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message, “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”

His connection with Perkins — and his interest in evangelical radio as a political tool — continued after he was elected to the House in 2016. As a freshman lawmaker, Johnson announced his bid to lead the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that currently counts 156, on Washington Watch with Perkins. He won the election.

Johnson used the skills he sharpened on talk radio and in televised FRC interviews to start a weekly podcast in 2022 with his wife, called “Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.”

During the first episode in March 2022, entitled “Can America be Saved?” Johnson says that “we’ll review current events through the lens of eternal truth,” and noted that in each podcast they intended to incorporate a themed scripture because “the word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth.” Guests have included Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson.

On occasion, Kelly Johnson will tee up her husband for an answer. “Why are we the freest, most powerful, most successful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world, and why does every other nation on the planet look to us for leadership and even expect it of us?” she asks in one episode. Her husband responds explaining that America is the only country in the world founded upon a creed, or a “religious statement of faith.”

As a matter of fact, Kelly Johnson is wrong. The Constitution of the United States does not include a creed or a “religious statement of faith.” It specifically mandates freedom of religion and prohibits the establishment of any religion. It also bars any religious test for officeholders.

Mike Johnson is an evangelical Christian whose strong personal views are bound to affect his political views and actions.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Religion, Republicans, Trump
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