Laurence H. Tribe, the eminent professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School (Democrat), and Judge Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge (Republican), co-authored a lengthy article in The Atlantic, condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Colorado Supreme Court, which removed Trump from the 2024 ballot.
It seemed, after the Court’s decision, that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendnent had been excised from the Constitution. But just yesterday the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a New Mexico man who was convicted for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.
Couy Griffin was convicted for his role as a member of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Because he previously served as a member of the Otero County board of commissioners, the courts in New Mexico said he was ineligible to hold office ever again. Griffin was a founder of Cowboys for Trump and an outspoken purveyor of lies about election fraud.
The Supreme Court concluded that states could disqualify persons from attempting to hold state offices, but Congress had to enact legislation to implement the disqualification of federal officials.
Since Congress is unlikely to muster a majority of both Houses—or 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster—oath-breaking insurrectionists will not be barred from seeking or holding federal offices.
One good thing: the Griffin decision implicitly agreed that the mob action of January 6 was an insurrection.
The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.
In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Court was disappointingly unanimous in permitting oath-breaking insurrectionists, including former President Donald Trump, to return to power. In doing so, all nine justices denied “We the People” the very power that those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment presciently secured to us to save the republic from future insurrectionists—reflecting a lesson hard-learned from the devastation wrought by the Civil War.
For a century and a half before the Court’s decision, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy, promising to automatically disqualify from public office all oath-breaking insurrectionists against the Constitution, deeming them too dangerous to entrust with power unless supermajorities of both houses of Congress formally remove their disability. This provision has been mistakenly described by some as “undemocratic” because it limits who may be elected to particular positions of power. But disqualification is not what is antidemocratic; rather, it is the insurrection that is antidemocratic, as the Constitution emphatically tells us.
In any event, all qualifications for office set by the Constitution limit who may be elected to particular positions of power. And no other of these disqualifications requires congressional legislation to become operative, as the Court now insists this one does. To be sure, the other qualifications—age, residence, natural-born citizenship—appear outside the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fifth section specifically makes congressional action to enforce its provisions available. But no such action is needed to enforce the rights secured to individuals by Section 1 of the same amendment, so deeming congressional action necessary to enforce Section 3 creates a constitutional anomaly in this case that the majority could not and did not explain. For that matter, no other provision of the other two Reconstruction amendments requires congressional enforcement either. As the concurring justices explained, the majority “simply [created] a special rule for the insurrection disability in Section 3.”
To read the rest of this brilliant article, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic.
Michael Tomasky writes for The New Republic. He understands that when Trump goes off-script, as he often does, he becomes incoherent. But whenever he can’t read the teleprompter, he goes to stream-of-consciousness and whatever he says is difficult to decipher. That’s because he tends not to speak in complete sentences and forgets what he was talking about. Trump is obsessed with doom and gloom. If he’s elected, America will be great again, but if he is not elected, the country will continue to be a “third-world country,” a cesspool of despair, a failed state. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, spoke of America as “a city on a hill,” “morning in America,” not a country trapped in “carnage.” Reagan tried to lift spirits. Trump aims to encourage desperation and fear. Trump’s dystopian perspective is always there. He can’t hide it.
Saturday afternoon, at yet another poorly attended rally in Ohio, Donald Trump spoke these shocking words: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country, that will be the least of it.”
As is always the case with a man who only finishes about every seventh sentence that he embarks upon, it’s hard on one level to make sense of what he said. In this short clip, you can see that he’s holding forth on the subject of cars and automobile factories. On Sunday, many outlets reported the “bloodbath” line without much in the way of context, which had MAGA world howling on X (f.k.a. Twitter).
CNN’s reporting added more context. Here’s the fuller quote from the CNN story: “We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”
It does seem that, in that half-finished sentence, he was briefly heading in the direction of saying, “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole auto industry.” If he’d said that and stopped there, I’d agree that his words were being taken badly out of context.
Notably, he didn’t stop there. What made him say “that’s gonna be the least of it”? Where was he going, in that mildewed brain of his? He stopped himself mid-sentence. Why? Based on what he went on to say, it’s a reasonable guess that he stopped himself because the words that were about to come out of his mouth, “auto industry,” just weren’t big enough—weren’t aggressive enough. So he had to amplify it and make it more threatening. The auto-industry bloodbath, he said twice, will be the least of it. It will be a bloodbath “for the country.”
Still, maybe he only meant an economic bloodbath. In fact, that’s just typical Trump bluster—built as usual on lies. The Biden economy as we all know reeled from inflation in 2022 and 2023, and that overwhelmed the narrative. Beyond that, the 289,000 jobs gained per month during Biden’s term is the highest for any president in modern history. And I could offer similar huzzahs with respect to wages and GDP.
To drill down to the auto industry, it’s doing far better during Biden’s tenure than it did during Trump’s. In the first place, the auto industry under Trump lost jobs, but here we need to provide the fuller context that those losses came after the pandemic.
Nevertheless, even if we don’t count the pandemic against Trump, the Biden-era numbers easily top the Trump-era numbers. Trump’s pre-pandemic tally saw auto and parts manufacturing employment go up by 27,900. Under Biden, those two categories have gained 127,800 jobs.
Moreover, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that slapping hefty tariffs on certain imports might make for a great applause line at a rally. But outside of the sugar high that comes from that, they pave the way for retaliatory tariffs that hurt U.S. consumers. The U.S.-China Business Council, that well-known outpost of Marxist vermin, estimated in a 2021 study that Trump’s trade policies cost nearly 250,000 American jobs.
So much for the economic bloodbath if he’s not elected. But now let’s cut to the chase.
It is true that many outlets Sunday yanked the “bloodbath” remark out of context. But this is also true: Trump is the king of no context. He speaks in constant half-utterances, uncompleted thoughts, sentences constructed like straw huts in hurricane zones (“Nobody’s been treated like Trump, in terms of badly”), and even facial expressions and grunts…
So: Did Trump call for a bloodbath if he loses? No. However: Did Trump stop himself mid-sentence to broaden his indictment and deliberately use a phrase—not once but two times, for emphasis—that is ambiguous, open to dark interpretation? He most certainly did.
And having done that, he will now, at some future rally, get a little closer to just saying it. And then a little closer, and then a little closer still. By October—still probably without Trump ever saying it outright—the message will have been clearly communicated that any scenario that ends with Trump as the loser, even a clear-cut one that isn’t close enough to dispute, will be one in which the shedding of blood to water the tree of liberty will be necessary…
So let’s not exaggerate what Trump said Saturday. But let’s be clear—it wasn’t just car talk.
There was some back-and-forth on the blog today about what Trump meant when he referred to a “bloodbath” in a campaign speech.
George Conway 3rd has a wonderful twitter feed. He is a great explainer of Trump.
He tweeted today about the confusion surrounding Trump’s use of the term “bloodbath.” Did he mean that there would be a bloodbath if Biden won? Or did he refer to a financial bloodbath if his plan to slap 100% tariffs on foreign cars was not enacted?
Conway tweeted the following:
There’s some commentary on here saying we should disregard Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks last night because he was talking about potential harms to the auto industry.
That is misguided. 1/x
Trump may well have been referring to a “bloodbath” in that industry. He’s sufficiently incoherent that, as is so often the case with him, it’s hard to tell one way or the other what exactly he’s talking about at any given moment. 2/x
I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or the danger he and his rhetoric pose. 3/x
What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. 4/x
It’s a classic trait and technique of authoritarian demagogues. He catastrophizes everything to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding. 5/x
That’s dangerous all around because he’s encouraging them to believe that conditions are so bad or will become so bad, and that the political opposition is so awful, that anything is justified—including law-breaking and violence—to prevent those conditions and to destroy the opposition. 6/x
And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border—it doesn’t matter. 7/x
He’s a dangerous psychopath, and after more than eight years of watching his sick behavior, we must not give him the benefit of the doubt. 8/8 (end).
Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.
In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.
The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year.
Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states.
The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966.
Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign.
Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”
On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.
Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.
Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”
Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false.
The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status.
Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]
Donald Trump is unhinged. He is running in desperation to stay out of prison. His desperation leads him to be insulting and vulgar towards anyone who stands in his way.
Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.
With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.
The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.
The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.
If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
Mr. Trump also stoked fears about the influx of migrants coming into the United States at the southern border. As he did during his successful campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump used incendiary and dehumanizing language to cast many migrants as threats to American citizens.
He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, who is currently Lt. Governor. He just won the Republican primary, which says a lot about the state party. Robinson is a Black man, and there is a long list of groups that he is denounced.
Faced with questions about whether he is antisemitic, homophobic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic, Robinson, who is Black, naturally responded by arguing that, actually, he is the real victim of bigotry.
When Kirk asked why Robinson believes he’s such a threat to the “MSNBC crowd,” the candidate cried racism. According to Robinson, liberals are only reminding people of his extremism because they fear a Black man holding power in the Republican Party might appeal to disaffected Black voters in the Democratic Party.
He said:
In my case, what they really see is they see a candidate that is able to reach out to those folks, bring common sense solutions to the problems they face, and then they see someone who looks like them and ultimately what happens there is we get into office and there’s success, and all of a sudden voting dynamics in North Carolina are changing for decades. And quite possibly, it starts across the nation. They’re very afraid of that. They don’t want that to happen. They cannot have a conservative Black man at the helm in North Carolina or in any state. Because it’s gonna show the great results of what president Trump did at the national level.
(Robinson has conceded at times that he wrote posts that were “poorly worded” but claims that they were not antisemitic.)
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As for Robinson’s supposed strategy, there’s no evidence he has any sort of broad appeal among Black voters. In his 2020 lieutenant governor’s race, his opponent won, by a large margin, all of the majority-Black counties in the state. Robinson is, however,the type of candidate Republicans like to prop up to give voters the impression that far-right ideals have valence among Black folks — Black men in particular.
But the fact that he’s shrouding himself in victimhood, portraying himself as some sort of Black icon under attack from leftists, suggests he recognizes that the remarks may be hurting him in the general election. And he’s looking for some way — any way — to get past them.
I watched clips of yesterday’s hearings about the report of Robert Hur, who was selected by Merrick Garland to be Special Counsel to investigate Biden and documents found in his home and offices. The big takeaway from his voluminous report was that he considered Biden’s memory to be weak and that a jury would treat him as a kindly old man with a poor memory.
Republicans wanted to use the hearings to demonstrate that Biden is senile. Democrats wanted to use the hearings to show that Trump has a worse memory than Biden and that—unlike Biden— he willfully retained top-secret documents and refused to return them.
Hur resigned from the Department of Justice the day before the hearing and hired a Trump insider to represent him.
Mary Trump includes in her post the video introduced by Eric Swalwell. It shows Trump in numerous gaffes, memory lapses, and moments of incoherence. Trump later claimed all the clips were generated by AI.
Not included is the question posed by Eric Swalwell that was shown last night on Laurence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show. Swallwell read the transcript of Hur’s interview and quoted it. At one point, the transcript says, Hur observed that Biden had “a photographic memory” of the layout of his home. Not a sign of a poor memory. Apparently the transcript portrayed Biden differently than Hur’s report.
One of the Republicans read the dictionary definition of senile and asked Hur if he believed Biden was senile. Hur did not.
The question I kept wondering was why Merrick Garland thought that it was a good idea to select a trusted Trump appointee to investigate Biden.
You may have noticed that very few bills have been passed by Congress this past year. As of mid-December, only 27 bills made it through to enactment. That’s due to fractured control—a Democratic President, a Senate controlled by Democrats, and a House of Representatives controlled by a slim Republican majority. And in the House, the Republicans are bitterly split between angry members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and traditional Republicans. The Freedom Caucus is prepared to grind everything to a halt unless they get what they want.
Axios offered a chart showing that this is the least productive Congress since at least 1989. In a typical year, Congress passed between 300-400 laws. Open the link and see the stunning chart.
Congress was in the news a lot this year, but mostly it was not for passing legislation. It left us wondering what they did actually manage to get signed into law. So we’ve called NPR congressional reporter Eric McDaniel, who has tracked it all. Hi, Eric.
ERIC MCDANIEL, BYLINE: Hey there.
SHAPIRO: All right. Underneath all of the fracas about the House Speaker and George Santos and on and on, was there much legislating happening?
MCDANIEL: No, basically not. I mean, there were only 27 bills passed through both chambers in the first year of this Congress, including three crisis bills, I guess I’d call them. These are the big ones, two short-term extensions of funding to keep the government open and one to raise the U.S. government’s borrowing limit – you may have heard it called the debt ceiling – essentially so the government could pay the credit card bills for the money Congress had already directed it to spend. So these are must-do stuff. But other than that, I mean, they named some Veterans Affairs clinics. They commissioned a commemorative coin for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps and not much else – way behind even previous years of divided government.
SHAPIRO: So you’re saying not only was the number of laws passed very low, but the laws that were passed were not exactly consequential. Why was this so much less productive than other times government has been divided between the parties?
MCDANIEL: Look. I mean, there are a couple ways to look at that, right? The first is divided government. Like we said, they do less. There’s a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. That means it’s hard to get all three sets of relevant folks to agree.
But the problem’s a lot deeper than that. I mean, in a lot of ways, the House is working the way that you’d expect it to, given the incentives that are involved. State lawmakers often draw congressional districts, the places that representatives represent, in a way that maximizes their own party’s advantage. I mean, I imagine people have heard that called gerrymandering, and it helps to create a system in which just 30 of the 435 House districts really have a say in who represents them in Congress by the time the general election rolls around. Many of the other 400-whatever seats are decided by party primaries way earlier in the year, often just by the voters from that party. That means these places are set up to elect the most partisan person possible rather than lawmakers who have to win the support of lots of different kinds of people. And as you might imagine, that makes compromise and legislating really, really hard.
SHAPIRO: Well, if the system is designed to disincentivize compromise and make it unlikely that voters will punish people for being unproductive, that suggests Congress, in the years to come, is not likely to be much more productive than it’s been this year.
MCDANIEL: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, voters often can’t punish people because of the way these elections are decided. And it means that Congress won’t change without systemic reform. There’s good news, though, right? A lot of places are already trying things that can help. California uses a nonpartisan top-two primary system. That means voters pick between the top two most popular candidates no matter which party they’re from. Alaska uses something called ranked-choice voting, which lets voters rank their preferences rather than just picking one person. And that helps to find consensus picks and really reduces the incentives for candidates during the election season to attack each other. There’s also bigger changes on the table, like proportional representation. And I should say none of these actually require changes to the U.S. Constitution.
SHAPIRO: Well, that’s hopeful that there are some possible changes and improvements in the works. In the meantime, what does 2024 look like for Congress? What is likely to pass even this divided House and Senate?
MCDANIEL: Yeah, that’s all long-term stuff. In the near term, Senators are working on something that we’ve talked about on this show before, a foreign aid/national security deal. So they’re looking at aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, aid to the Indo-Pacific – think Taiwan – and U.S. immigration reform. So senators have been negotiating over the holiday season, and as soon as they get back, both the House and the Senate have to deal with government funding deadlines to keep the government open. They’re trying to pass 12 budget bills for a full year, actual spending. But we could see more short-term resolutions. Those deadlines are January 19 and February 2.
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