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Timothy Snyder: Why Trump Cannot Run for President

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2024 //
25

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, explains why Trump cannot run for President. Doing so violates the clear language of the Constitution.

He writes:

If you pick up your copy of the Constitution, as I have just done, you can see that its plain language forbids Donald Trump from running for office. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is as clear as can be on this point. Anyone who has taken an oath as an officer of government, and then taken part in an insurrection, may not hold any office thereafter.


I have been travelling in places where Trump has support, reading letters to the editor and editorials in local newspapers, and listening to what people have to say. The three arguments that I hear seem to be pretty much the same ones made by lawyers and in the broader media. I just can’t find any argument that would incline me to ignore what the Constitution clearly states.


The first move people make is to change the subject. It is not the Constitution. It is “the Democrats” who are just trying to keep Trump off the ballot.

The very best text I have read on the topic of Trump’s eligibility for office, the one that initiated this discussion at a level no one else has yet attained, was written by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. Though I do not know them, I will say with some confidence that these men are not registered Democrats.

This is only worthy of mention, though, because it affirms the hopeful proposition that people who hold various political views can agree about the fundamentals of the Constitution and about the desirability of constitutional rule.

We are all subject to the Constitution and we can all claim rights under it, regardless of those political commitments. To say that we can discard the Constitution because “the Democrats” or “the Republicans” or any other group appeal to it is to defy the document itself and to ignore what it means to have constitutional rule.

The second thing I hear is that in a democracy everyone can run for president.

Certainly one can have a debate about who should be able to run for office. In our constitutional system, however, a candidate for president must be a U.S. citizen, born in the United States, of a certain age, who has resided in the U.S. for a certain period, and who has not previously been an officer of government and taken part in an insurrection (directly or by giving aid and comfort).

Of those five limitations (citizenship, place of birth, age, residence, lack of insurrectionary past), surely the last is the least constricting. The citizenship requirement rules out more than 95% of the people in the world. Place of birth seems a bit unfair. It is not something that people choose. And it excludes people who have actually chosen America by becoming citizens. There are foreign-born citizens who want to run for president, and who would be strong candidates. Age might or might not be reasonable as a limitation — should we really exclude people under 35? And if we do, perhaps we should also exclude people over a certain age?

Compared to these limitations, the ban on insurrectionists seems the least debatable. It involves very few people, has to do with choices they themselves have made, and is motivated more clearly than the other limitations by the protection of constitutional rule as such.

The prior three paragraphs are me debating the merits of what the Constitution says. We can all do this. And perhaps the Constitution should be altered. What we all have to acknowledge, though, is that in our system, not everyone can run for the office of president.

The third point people make is that Trump is not an insurrectionist because he has not been convicted as such in court. I don’t think that this is an argument made in good faith. Trump himself does not contest the facts. Indeed, his purported campaign for president right now is based precisely on his participation in an insurrection, which he advertises in public appearances and in social media.

There are deeper points to be made, though. To read the Constitution in this way, as not executing itself, is to deny it of its basic dignity and purpose. There is also some political common sense to be applied here. When a high officer of the United States takes part in an insurrection, it would be expected that he (in this case it is “he”) would then try to alter lower-court decisions (as Trump in fact has).

In the specific case of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, the insurrection clause that we are discussing here, it is quite clear that the purpose was to establish a qualification for running for office, not to define a criminal offense. An insurrectionist might or might not also be a convict at the time of an election; either way, he is not eligible to run.

If we believe in the Constitution and in constitutional rule, the issue is clear. Donald Trump cannot run for any federal or state office. We might have strong feelings about this; but the reason we have a Constitution in the first place (and the rule of law in general) is to avoid government by strong feelings.

a large building with a flag on top of it

Our Supreme Court is dominated now by justices who claim to care about the plain reading of the Constitution, or the intent of the people who wrote its provisions. This should make this case particularly easy for them.

It is possible, of course, that these justices are simply politicians who espouse their textualism and originalism only when it suits them, in the service of supporting other politicians. Should this prove to be the case, their own office, and indeed the Constitution itself, would be in grave danger (a subject for another article).

We are about to find out.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Colorado: Armed Man Breaks into State Supreme Court Building

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
20

The following story was published by The Denver Post:

A man shot through a window and broke into the Colorado Supreme Court building early Tuesday morning and caused “significant and extensive” damage in several areas of the building before surrendering to police, according to the Colorado State Patrol.

The man was involved in a crash about 1:15 a.m. near 13th Avenue and Lincoln Street a short time before he forced his way into the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center, which houses the Colorado Supreme Court, the Colorado Court of Appeals and several other state agencies, according to a Colorado State Patrol news release.

This comes two weeks to the day after the state Supreme Court ruled Donald Trump cannot appear on the state’s primary ballot based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach and riot by his supporters, Jacob Factor reports.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Democracy, Elections, Guns, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Nikki Haley and the Death of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2023 //
139

Heather Cox Richardson sees something more ominous in Nikki Haley’s failure to mention slavery as “a cause” or “the cause” of the Civil War. She sees the death of what were once Republican Party ideals and the emergence of new style of authoritarianism, closely linked to parties that have effectively squelched the rights of their people.

She writes:

When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 

President Joe Biden put the cause of the Civil War even more succinctly: “It was about slavery.” 

Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.

That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national. 

So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party. 

At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.

Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets. 

When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration. 

Finally, with the Civil War over and the Union restored on their terms, in 1865 they ended the institution of human enslavement except as punishment for crime (an important exception) and in 1868 they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make clear that the federal government had power to override state laws that enforced inequality among different Americans. In 1870 they created the Department of Justice to ensure that all American citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws.

In the years after the Civil War, the Republican vision of a harmony of economic interest among all Americans quickly swung toward the idea of protecting those at the top of society, with the argument that industrial leaders were the ones who created jobs for urban workers. Ever since, the party has alternated  between Lincoln’s theory that the government must work for those at the bottom and the theory of the so-called robber barons, who echoed the elite enslavers’ idea that the government must protect the wealthy. 

During the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt reclaimed Lincoln’s philosophy and argued for a strong government to rein in the industrialists and financiers who dominated society; a half-century later, Dwight Eisenhower followed the lead of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. 

After each progressive president, the party swung toward protecting property. In the modern era the swing begun under Richard Nixon gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since then the party has focused on deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and taking power away from the federal government and turning it back over to the states, while maintaining that market forces, rather than government policies, should drive society. 

But those ideas were not generally popular, so to win elections, the party welcomed white evangelical Christians into a coalition, promising them legislation that would restore traditional society, relegating women and people of color back to the subservience the law enforced before the 1950s. But it seems they never really intended for that party base to gain control.

The small-government idea was the party’s philosophy when Donald Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 to announce he was running for president, and his 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy indicated he would follow in that vein. But his presidency quickly turned the Republican base into a right-wing movement loyal to Trump himself, and he was both eager to get away from legal trouble and impeachments and determined to exact revenge on those who did not do his bidding. The power in the party shifted from those trying to protect wealthy Americans to Trump, who increasingly aligned with foreign autocrats.

That realignment has taken off since Trump left office in 2021 and his base wrested power from the party’s former leaders. Leaders in Trump’s right-wing movement have increasingly embraced the concept of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” as articulated by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has demolished Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. On the campaign trail lately, Trump has taken to echoing Putin and Orbán directly.

Those leaders insist that the equality at the heart of democracy destroys a nation by welcoming immigrants, which undermines national purity, and by treating women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people as equal to white, heteronormative men. Their focus on what they call “traditional values” has won staunch supporters among the right-wing white evangelical community in the U.S.

Ironically, MAGA Republicans, whose name comes from Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” want the United States of America, one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.

MAGA’s determination to impose white Christian nationalism on the United States of America is a rejection of the ideology of the Republican Party in all its phases. Rather than either an active government that defends equal rights and opportunity or a small government that protects property and relies on market forces, which Republicans stood for as recently as eight years ago, today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society. 

They back strict abortion bans, book bans, and attacks on minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Last year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis directly used the state government to threaten Disney into complying with his anti-LGBTQ+ stance rather than reacting to popular support for LGBTQ+ rights. Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey early this month used the government to go after political opposition, launching an investigation into Media Matters for America after the watchdog organization reported that the social media platform X was placing advertising next to antisemitic content. “I’m fighting to ensure progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets cannot manipulate the marketplace in order to wipe out free speech,” Bailey said. 

Domestically, the new ideology of MAGA means forcing the majority to live under the rules of a small minority; internationally, it means support for a global authoritarian movement. MAGA Republicans’ current refusal to fund Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression until the administration agrees to draconian immigration laws—which they are also refusing to participate in crafting—is not only a gift to Putin. It also suggests to any foreign government that U.S. foreign policy is changeable so long as a foreign government succeeds in influencing U.S. lawmakers. Under this system, American global leadership will no longer be viable.

When Nikki Haley said the cause of the Civil War “was how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” she did more than avoid the word “slavery” to pander to MAGA Republicans who refuse to recognize the role of race in shaping our history. She rejected the long and once grand history of the Republican Party and announced its death to the world. 

—

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Republicans

Joshua Zeitz: Why Nikki Haley Did Not Admit that Slavery Was a Leading Cause of the Civil War

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2023 //
37

Joshua Zeitz is a historian and contributor to Politico. He writes here about Nikki Haley’s failure to admit that slavery was a leading cause, maybe THE leading cause, of the Civil War.

Someone asked her the question at a New Hampshire town meeting. What caused the Civil War? She released a word salad about rights and freedoms but failed to memention the peculiar institution of slavery. The next day, she realized that her omission was a major gaffe, and she insisted that everyone knows that slavery was an important cause of the devastating war, implying that it was not worth mentioning what everyone knew.

Jacob Zeitz wrote an analysis of her omission. He believed she was echoing the “Lost Cause” nostalgia so beloved to sons and daughters of the Confederacy.

As a high school student in the 1950s in Houston, I recall that our American history textbook spouted “Lost Cause” propaganda. Slaves in the South were treated kindly, it said. Plantation owners never wanted to damage their expensive human property. The Civil War was about “states’ rights,” not slavery. Many years later, when visiting an ante-bellum mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, the docent said the slaves were content; she referred to the Civil Was as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

Nikki Haley echoed Lost Cause sentiment.

Zeitz wrote at Politico:

In William Faulkner’s novel, Sartoris, someone asks the title character, Colonel John Sartoris, why he had fought for the Confederacy so many decades before. “Damned if I ever did know,” replied the aging veteran, now a pillar of his community in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Of course, we know why Colonel Sartoris raised arms against the United States. So does anyone with a high school diploma — assuming they used up-to-date textbooks. And so did Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in 1861 famously asserted that the “cornerstone” of the new Southern nation rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

All of which makes it disappointing, though not surprising, that at this late date — almost 160 years after the Civil War — Nikki Haley, a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, shares Colonel Sartoris’ selective amnesia on the topic. When asked a softball question this week about the causes of the Civil War, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, flubbed the answer, calling it a “difficult” question and mumbling on about “basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

This morning, Haley qualified the comment on a radio show called “The Pulse of New Hampshire,” and followed the clean-up job with a press release, stating: “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”

But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.

With red states doing battle with American history, seeking to erase the legacy of violence and inequality that counterbalance the great good also inherent in our national story, it’s worth revisiting the rise of the Lost Cause, not just to remember how damaging it was, but to confront just how damaging it still is.

In the immediate aftermath of the war,the work of interpreting the rebellion fell to a small group of unreconstructed rebels. The pioneers of Confederate revisionism included wealthy and influential veterans of the Confederacy like Jubal Early, B. T. Johnson, Fitz Lee and W. P. Johnson, who helped formulate the Lost Cause myth that would take hold by the 1880s.

The narrative strains were simple. They painted a picture of Southern chivalry — mint juleps, magnolias and moonlight — that stood in sharp contrast with the North, a region marked by avarice, grinding capitalism and poverty. The rebellion, by this rendering, had been a legal response to the North’s assault on states’ rights — not a violent insurrection to preserve chattel slavery. Even Confederate veterans like Hunter McGuire knew that to admit the war had been about slavery would “hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor … our children, instead of revering their fathers will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.”

The myth gained steam by the end of the century, largely because of the work of organizations like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), groups that offered a compelling story that people could wrap their minds around — including many Northerners, who were eager to put the war behind them. Because the Lost Cause emphasized heroism and honor over slavery, it venerated military figures like Robert E. Lee and swept politicians like Jefferson Davis under the rug. So it was that in May 1890 over 100,000 citizens gathered in Richmond for the dedication of a statue of Lee.

The decade saw hundreds of towns across the former Confederacy raise similar monuments to their heroes and war dead. These marble and steel memorials were often planted in town squares and by county courthouses to help sanitize not only Confederate memory but the new Jim Crow order. After all, if secession had been a noble thing, so was the separation of the races.

The signs of revisionism ranged from subtle to clear. During the war, for instance, Confederate soldiers had keenly embraced the term “reb,” but the new gatekeepers of Southern memory abandoned the term. “Was your father a Rebel and a Traitor?” asked a typical leaflet. “Did he fight in the service of the Confederacy for the purpose of defeating the Union, or was he a Patriot, fighting for the liberties granted him under the Constitution, in defense of his native land, and for a cause he knew to be right?” Equally important was figuring out what to even call the war. It couldn’t be the “Civil War,” which sounded too revolutionary. It couldn’t be “the War of Rebellion” which smacked of treason. In the late 1880s, the UCV and UDC approved resolutions designating the conflict that killed 750,000 Americans the “War Between the States.” The term stuck for generations to come.

It wasn’t just Southerners who suffered willful memory loss in these years. Jaded by the experience of Reconstruction and in the thrall of rising scientific racism, many Northerners were equally eager to remember the war as a brothers’ quarrel over politics rather than a struggle over slavery and Black rights. The jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who began the war as a committed abolitionist, later erased the roots of the conflict and celebrated the battlefield valor of both Union and Confederate troops. “The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,” he said, “in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”

Of course, historians agree that most Union troops did know why they were fighting. So did Holmes. But years after the fact, he was willing to forget. As were tens of thousands of veterans who attended Blue and Gray reunions well into the 20th century, including a massive camp gathering of 25,000 people who gathered at Crawfish Springs, Georgia, in 1889, near the Chickamauga Battlefield, for a picnic and public speeches. These mass spectacles helped Yankees and Confederates rewrite the history of the 1850s and 1860s, ostensibly in the service of national reunion and regeneration, but also in a way that fundamentally reinforced the emerging culture and politics of Jim Crow.

The Lost Cause mythology was more than bad history. It provided the intellectual justification for Jim Crow — not just in the former Confederacy, but everywhere systemic racism denied Black citizens equal citizenship and economic rights. Its dismantling began only in the 1960s when historians inspired by the modern Civil Rights Movement revisited the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, adopting the views of earlier Black scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, who always knew what the war was about and had shined a spotlight on the agency of Black and white actors alike.

That’s why the recent retreat to Lost Cause mythos is troubling. One would think that a Republican candidate for the presidency might be proud of the party’s roots as a firmly antislavery organization that dismantled the “Peculiar Institution” and fomented a critical constitutional revolution during Reconstruction — one that truly made the country more free.

With GOP presidential candidates waffling on the Civil War, rejecting history curricula in their states and launching political fusillades against “woke” culture, it remains for the rest of us to reaffirm the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, who in the last years of his life stated: “Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. … Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-president of the Confederacy, described the true purpose of the South’s secession: to preserve slavery. Read his famous Cornerstone speech here.

Here is the key section of his speech:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.

Categories Elections, Extremism, History, South Carolina

How Idaho Moms Beat Back the Culture Warriors

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2023 //
6

One of the biggest obstacles to waking up the public is that most people have no knowledge of the privatization movement. They don’t understand that the attacks on teachers and public schools are part of a long-range plan to destroy public education as a community asset and turn it into an individual consumer choice, like choosing what kind of milk you want when you go grocery shopping (as Florida Governor Jeb Bush memorably said at the 2012 Republican Convention). The culture wars over LGBT issues, trans kids, and critical race theory are part of the same plan to sow distrust of a valued community institution.

This story appeared in Vanity Fair. It was written by Laura Pappano and produced by The Hechinger Report. It brings the controversy to an audience that is not immersed in education politics. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024. By the way, I just subscribed to a digital edition of Vanity Fair for only $1 a month. There is an educator price of only $8 a year. What a bargain for a publication with excellent content like this story.

Pappano writes:

In Priest River, Idaho, the moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites—grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow—suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other.

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!”

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community.

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31% of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine.

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs—but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,” Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids—or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies”—come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon.

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50% to nearly 32,000.

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running—a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner.

Priest River police chief Drew McLaindates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction—on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website—is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher.

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins,a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup.

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues—then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”)

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60% of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.”

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election—but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.”

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown—along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist—had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three.

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies—and presumably guns—present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.”

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do—like negotiating a teacher contract—but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state.

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. Sergeant Chris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. Sergeant Chris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.”

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.”

She wasn’t the only one thinking that—but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice.

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100% pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve.

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild”—blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote?

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9% turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items—“Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”—raised alarms.

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall.

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years—since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022—the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March).

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set—picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown—the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.”

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly,Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances—and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100% lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric.

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms.

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.”

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning—we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname.

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods.

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do—a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back—but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Courage, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Idaho, Parents

Is the U.S. a “Democracy” or a “Republic?”

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2023 //
51

I first heard this question posed when I was in high school in the 1950s. The question was always posed by the John Birch Society, an extremist rightwing group. Frankly, I never truly understood why folks on the right kept hammering this as a big deal. Whichever term you use, you are talking about a society governed by a representative body.

A reader recently posted the claim that the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.

Our reader Democracy responded:

When someone says that the US is actually a “republic” and not a democracy,” it is actually a good sign that he is a Know-Nothing who subscribes to authoritarianism and is OPPOSED to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Constitutional scholar Eugen Volokh wrote this in The Washington Post more than eight years ago:

“John Adams used the term ‘representative democracy’ in 1794; so did Noah Webster in 1785; so did St. George Tucker in his 1803 edition of Blackstone; so did Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Tucker’s Blackstone likewise uses ‘democracy’ to describe a representative democracy, even when the qualifier ‘representative’ is omitted…”

“James Wilson, one of the main drafters of the Constitution and one of the first Supreme Court Justices, defended the Constitution in 1787 by speaking of the three forms of government being the ‘monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical,’ and said that in a democracy the sovereign power is ‘inherent in the people, and is either exercised by themselves or by their representatives.’ And Chief Justice John Marshall — who helped lead the fight in the 1788 Virginia Convention for ratifying the U.S. Constitution — likewise defended the Constitution in that convention by describing it as implementing ‘democracy’ (as opposed to ‘despotism’), and without the need to even add the qualifier ‘representative.’”

“… there is no basis for saying that the United States is somehow ‘not a democracy, but a republic.’ ‘Democracy’ and ‘republic’ aren’t just words that a speaker can arbitrarily define to mean something (e.g., defining democracy as ‘a form of government in which all laws are made directly by the people’). They are terms that have been given meaning by English speakers more broadly. And both today and in the Framing era, ‘democracy’ has been generally understood to include representative democracy as well as direct democracy.”

I’d say we are a “democratic republic” and let it go with that.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism

Thom Hartmann: Do Not Be Fooled By These GOP Scams

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2023 //
113

Thom Hartmann explains the lies, hoaxes, And scams that Republicans use to deceive middle-income people to vote for them, against their self-interest. He shows how Jeb Bush tilted the election of 2000 in favor of his brother George.

This is a must-read.

Hartmann writes:

The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics.

Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:

Healthcare and quality education for all. Treat all people and religions with respect and fairness. Trust women to make their own decisions. Raise the pay of working people and support unionization. Get assault weapons off the streets. Do something about climate change. Clean up toxic waste sites and outlaw pesticides that damage children. Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Nonetheless, the media persists in treating the two parties as if they were equally honest and equally interested in the needs of all Americans. In part, that’s because one of the GOP’s most effective scams — the “liberal media bias” scam — has been so successful ever since Lee Atwater invented it back in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.

For example, right now there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in the media about how the Supreme Court might rule in the case of Trump being thrown off the ballot in Colorado. They almost always mention “originalism” and “textualism” as if they’re honest, good-faith methods for interpreting the Constitution when, in fact, they’re cynical scams invented to justify unjustifiable rulings.

Thus, the question: how much longer will Americans (and the American media) continue to fall for the GOP’s scams? 

They include:

— Originalism: Robert Bork came up with this scam back in the 1980s when Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court and he couldn’t come up with honest or reasonable answers for his jurisprudential positions, particularly those justifying white supremacy. By saying that he could read the minds of the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, Bork gave himself and future generations of Republicans on the Court the fig leaf they needed.

The simple fact is that there was rarely a consensus among the Framers and among the politicians of the founding generation about pretty much anything. And to say that we should govern America by the standards of a white-men-only era before even the industrial revolution much less today’s modern medicine, communications, and understanding of economics is absurd on its face.

— Voter Fraud: This scam, used by white supremacists across the South in the years after the failure of Reconstruction to prevent Black people from voting, was reinvented in 1993, when Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress succeeded in passing what’s today called the “Motor Voter” law that lets states automatically register people to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses. Republicans freaked out at the idea that more people might be voting, and claimed the new law would cause voter fraud (it didn’t).

By 1997, following Democratic victories in the 1996 election, it had become a major meme to justify purging voting rolls of Black and Hispanic people. Today it’s the justification for over 300 voter suppression laws passed in Red states in just in the past 2 years, all intended to make it harder for working class people, minorities, women, the elderly dependent on Social Security, and students (all Democratic constituencies) to vote.

The most recent iteration of it is Donald Trump‘s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost by fully 7 million votes, was stolen from him by voter fraud committed by Black people in major cities.

As a massive exposé in yesterday’s Washington Post titled “GOP Voter-Fraud Crackdown Overwhelmingly Targets Minorities, Democrats” points out, the simple reality is that voter fraud in the US is so rare as to be meaningless, and has never, ever, anywhere been documented to swing a single election. 

But Republicans have been using it as a very effective excuse to make it harder for Democratic voters to cast a ballot, and to excuse their purging almost 40,000,000 Americans off the voting rolls in the last five years.

Right To Work (For Less): back in the 1940s, Republicans came up with this scam. Over the veto of President Harry Truman, they pushed through what he referred to as “the vicious Taft-Hartley Act,” which lets states make it almost impossible for unions to survive. Virtually every Red state has now adopted “right to work,” which has left their working class people impoverished and, because it guts the political power of working people, their minimum wage unchanged.

— Bush v Gore: The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency. Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election and then, when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won, she invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary; there is no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it. The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

— Money is “Free Speech” and corporations are “persons”: This scam was invented entirely by Republicans on the Supreme Court, although billionaire GOP donors — infuriated by campaign contribution and dark money limits put into law in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals — had been funding legal efforts to get it before the Court for years.

In a decision that twists logic beyond rationality, the five Republicans on the Court — over the strong, emphatic objections of all the Democrats on the Court — ruled that our individual right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment also includes the “right to listen,” as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and they wrotein Citizens United:

“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”

Without being able to hear from the most knowledgeable entities, they argued, Americans couldn’t be well-informed about the issues of the day.

And who was in the best position to inform us? As Lewis Powell himself wrote in the Bellottidecision, echoed in Citizens United, it’s those corporate “persons”:

“Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster…”

“Political speech is ‘indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.’ … The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual.”

They doubled down, arguing that corporations and billionaires should be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of money into the political campaigns of those politicians they want to own so long as they go into dark money operations instead of formal campaigns. What was called “bribery” for over 200 years is now “free speech”:

“For the reasons explained above, we [five Republicans on the Supreme Court] now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

— Cutting taxes raises revenue: As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, the idea promoted by Reagan, Bush, and Trump to justify almost $30 trillion in cumulative tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations is “The Biggest Tax Scam in History.”

Reagan first pitched this to justify cutting the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 25% in the 1980s, and it was reprised by both George W. Bush and Donald Trump for their own massive tax breaks for their well-off donors and peers.

The simple fact is that America went from a national debt of over 124% of GDP following World War II to a national debt of a mere $800 billion when Reagan came into office. We’d been paying down our debt steadily, and had enough money to build the interstate highway system, brand new schools and hospitals from coast to coast, and even to put men on the moon.

Since Reagan rolled out his tax scam, however, our national debt has gone from less than a trillion in 1980 to over 30 trillion today: we’re back, in terms of debt, to where we were during WWII when FDR raised the tippy-top bracket income tax rate to 90% to deal with the cost of the war. We should be back to that tax rate for the morbidly rich today, as well.

— Destroying unions helps workers: In their eagerness to help their corporate donors, Reagan rolled out a novel idea in 1981, arguing that instead of helping working people, corrupt “union bosses” were actually ripping them off.

Union leaders work on a salary and are elected by their members: the very idea that they, like CEOs who are compensated with stock options and performance bonuses and appointed by their boards, could somehow put their own interests first is ludicrous. Their only interest, if they want to retain their jobs, is to do what the workers want.

But Reagan was a hell of a salesman, and he was so successful with this pitch he cut union membership in America during his and his VP’s presidency by more than 50 percent.

— Corporations can provide better Medicare than the government: For a corporation to exist over the long term, particularly a publicly-traded corporation, it must produce a profit. That’s why when George W. Bush and friends invented the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 they allowed Advantage providers to make as much as 20 percent in pure profit.

Government overhead for real Medicare is around 2% — the cost of administration — and corporations could probably run their Advantage programs with a similar overhead, but they have to make that 20% profit nut, so they hire larger staffs to examine every single request to pay for procedures, surgeries, tests, imaging, and even doctors’ appointments. And reject, according to The New York Times, around 18% of them.

“Advantage plans also refused to pay legitimate claims, according to the report. About 18 percent of payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019.”

When they deny you care, they make money. If they ran like real Medicare and paid every bill (except the fraudulent ones), they’d merely break even, and no company can do that. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to claim that “choice” in the marketplace is more important than fixing Medicare.

With the $140 billion that for-profit insurance companies overcharge us and steal from our government every year, if Medicare Advantage vanished there would be enough money left over to cut Medicare premiums to almost nothing and add dental, vision, and hearing. But don’t expect Republicans to ever go along with that: they take too much money from the insurance industry (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— More guns means more safety: Remember the NRA’s old “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? They’re still at it, and there’s hardly a single Republican in America who will step up and do anything about the gun violence crisis that is uniquely experienced by our nation.

Bullets are now the leading cause of death among children in the US, and we’re literally the only country in the entire world for which that is true. And a child living in Red state Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from a gun than a child in Blue state Massachusetts. But as long as the NRA owns them, Republicans will never do anything about it.

— The media has a liberal bias: This canard was started by Lee Atwater in an attempt to “work the refs” of the media, demanding that they stop pointing out the scams Republicans were engaging in (at the time it was trickle-down). The simple reality is that America’s media, from TV and radio networks to newspapers to websites, are overwhelmingly owned by billionaires and corporations with an openly conservative bent.

There are over 1500 rightwing radio stations (and 1000 religious broadcasters, who are increasingly political), three rightwing TV networks, and an army of tens of thousands of paid conservative activists turning out news releases and policy papers in every state, every day of the year. There are even well-funded social media operations.

There is nothing comparable on the left. Even MSNBC is owned by Comcast and so never touches issues of corporate governance, media bias (they fired Brian Stelter!), or the corruption of Congress by its big pharma and Medicare Advantage advertisers.

— Republicans are the party of faith: Republicans claim to be the pious ones, from Mike Johnson’s creepy “chastity ball” with his daughter, to their hate of queer people, to their embrace of multimillionaire TV and megachurch preachers. But Democrats, who are more accepting of people of all faiths and tend not to wear their religion on their sleeves, are the ones following Jesus’ teachings.

Jesus, arguably the founder of Christianity, was emphatic that you should never pray in public, do your good deeds in private as well, and that the only way to get to heaven is to feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, and love every other human as much as you love yourself.

Republicans, on the other hand, wave their piety like a bloody shirt, issue press releases about their private charities, and fight every effort to have our government feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, or even respect, much less love, people who look or live or pray differently from them.

— Crime is exploding and you’re safer living in an area Republicans control: In fact, crime of almost all sorts is at a low not seen since 1969. Only car thefts are up, and some of that appears to have to do with social media “how to” videos and a few very vulnerable makes of autos.

New FBI statistics find that violent crime nationwide is down 8 percent; in big cities it’s down nearly 15 percent, robbery and burglary are down 10 and 12 percent respectively. 

But what crime there is is overwhelmingly happening in Red states. Over the past 21 years, all types of crime in Red states are 23 percent higher than in Blue states: in 2020, murder rates were a mind-boggling 40 percent higher in states that voted for Trump than those Biden carried.

— Global warming is a hoax: Ever since fossil fuel billionaires and the fossil fuel industry started using the legal bribery rights five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court created for them, virtually every Republican politician in the nation is either directly on the take or benefits indirectly from the massive infrastructure created by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel barons. As a result, it’s almost impossible to find even one brave, truthful Republican who’s willing to do anything about the climate crisis that is most likely to crash not just the US but civilization itself.

— Hispanic immigrants are “murderers and rapists”: Donald Trump threw this out when he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, saying, “They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In fact, Hispanic immigrants (legal or without documentation) are far less likely, per capita and by any other measure, to commit crime of any sort than white citizens.

— Helping people makes them lazy. The old Limbaugh joke about “kicking people when they’re down is the only way to get them up” reveals the mindset behind this Republican scam, which argues that when people get money or things they didn’t work for it actually injures them and society by making them lazy. The GOP has used this rationalization to oppose everything from unemployment insurance in the 1930s to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing supports today.

In fact, not only is there no evidence for it, but studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI), where people are given a few hundred dollars a month with no strings attached, finds that the vast majority use the extra funds to improve themselves. They upgrade their housing, look for better jobs, and go back to school.

If the morbidly rich people behind the GOP who promote this scam really believed it, they’d be arguing for a 100% estate tax, to prevent their own children from ending up “lazy.” Good luck finding any who are leaving their trust-fund kids destitute.

— Tobacco doesn’t cause cancer: Back in 2000, soon-to-be Indiana Governor and then-Congressman Mike Pence wrote a column that was published statewide saying, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Pence’s family had made money off tobacco for years with a small chain of now-bankrupt convenience stores called “Tobacco Road,” but he was also being spiffed by the industry.

Similarly, George W. Bush pushed the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as president after big contributions from the timber industry: “healthy” meant “clear cut.” Bush also had his “Clear Skies Initiative” that let polluters dump more poison into our air. And the Trump administration, after big bucks and heavy lobbying from the chemical and Big Ag industries, refused to ban a very profitable pesticide used on human food crops that was found to definitely cause brain damage and cancer in children.

— For-profit utilities produce cheaper and more reliable electricity than government-owned and -run ones: This one goes back to the Reagan era, with Republicans arguing that the “free market” will always outperform government, including when it comes to generating and distributing electricity. In fact, each of us has only one wire coming into our homes or offices, so there is no possible competition to drive either improved performance or lower prices among for-profit utilities.

In fact, non-profit community-owned or government run utilities consistently produce more reliable electricity, serve their customers better, and charge lower prices. And the differences have become starker every year since, in 1992, President GHW Bush ended federal regulation of electric utilities. It’s why Texas, which has almost completely privatized its power grid, suffers some of the least reliable and most expensive electricity in the nation when severe weather hits.

— The electoral college protects our democracy: There was a time when both Democrats and Republicans wanted to get rid of the Electoral College; a constitutional amendment to do that failed in Congress by a single vote back in 1970. But after both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the White house by a half-million and three million votes respectively but ended up as president anyway, Republicans fell newly in love with the College and are fully planning to use it again in 2024 to seize power even if ten million more people vote for Biden this time (Biden won by 7 million votes in 2020).

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans are now defending billionaires buying off Supreme Court justices and most recently Lever News found that they’ve been spiffing over 100 other federal judges — who regularly vote in favor of the interests of corporations and the morbidly rich — in addition to Alito, Thomas, Roberts, et al.

Republicans are also claiming that:

— Trump isn’t a threat to our democracy and his promises to be a dictator are “mere hyperbole.” 
— Letting Putin take Ukraine won’t put Taiwan and other democracies at risk.
— Ignoring churches routinely breaking the law by preaching politics while enjoying immunity from taxes is no big deal. 
— Massive consolidation to monopoly levels across virtually every industry in America since Reagan stopped enforcement of our anti-trust laws (causing Americans to pay an average of $5,000 a year more for everything from broadband to drugs than any other country in the world) is just the way business should be run.
— Teaching white children the racial history of America will make them feel bad, rather than feel less racist and more empathetic. 
— Queer people are groomers and pedophiles (the majority in these categories are actually straight white men).
— Banning and burning books is good for society and our kids.
— Ending public schools with statewide voucher programs will improve education (every credible study shows the opposite).

I could go on, but you get the point. When will America — and, particularly, American media — wake up to these scams and start calling them out for what they are?

I’m not holding my breath, although you could help get the ball rolling by sharing this admittedly incomplete list as far and wide as possible.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Bush, Jeb, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Fake, Florida, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans

Commonweal: The Battle Against School Vouchers in Idaho

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2023 //
13

Commonweal is a liberal Catholic magazine. It publishes thoughtful articles without deference to Church dogma. This article is an excellent example; Luke Mayville of Idaho explains why vouchers are bad for the common good, bad for society. This is a bold stance to take in a Catholic publication. The usual deep-pocketed voucher advocacy groups pumped money into Idaho to promote universal vouchers (vouchers for all without income limits). They were unsurpringly opposed by the Idaho Education Association and the Democratic Party, which saw the danger to public schools. Even State Senate Republicans opposed them because of concerns about cost and accountability.

Luke Mayville explains the secret of Idaho’s success in rejecting vouchers: grassroots organizing.

Mayville writes:

Ever since Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” economic libertarians have dreamed of privatizing America’s system of public schools. In place of a school system that is publicly funded, democratically governed, and accessible to all, policy entrepreneurs have sought to transform American education into a commodity—something to be bought and sold in a free market.

In the push to privatize education, the tip of the spear has always been school vouchers—policies that extract funds from public schools in order to subsidize private-school tuition. Milwaukee established the nation’s first voucher program in 1990. In the following twenty-five years, voucher experiments were rolled out in fits and starts, often meeting with stiff public resistance. Voucher advocates gained significant footholds in Ohio, Washington D.C., Indiana, and elsewhere, but lacked the power to fundamentally transform the nation’s public-school system.

The cause has gained unprecedented momentum during the past five years. In their book A Wolf at the School House Door (2020), Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider sounded the alarm about “an increasingly potent network of conservative state and federal elected officials, advocacy groups, and think tanks…backed by deep-pocketed funders,” all of them committed to dismantling public education as an institution. The new assault on public education intensified in the pandemic era, as voucher advocates seized the opportunity of mass school closures to propose—and in many cases enact—sweeping privatization schemes. In states across the country, the voucher agenda went hand in hand with efforts to sow distrust in public education by claiming, usually without evidence, that schools had become centers for critical race theory, “gender ideology,” and other forms of “social-justice indoctrination.” Meanwhile, voucher proponents were energized by landmark decisions of the United States Supreme Court, most notably Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, both of which appeared to remove constitutional obstacles to the use of public dollars for private religious education.

The nationally coordinated push to privatize public education is one of the most corrosive developments in American life. While Catholics and members of other faith communities have rightly cherished private parochial education, they, too, have strong reasons to support America’s public schools even if their own children do not attend them. It is an essential feature of the mission of public education to affirm the dignity of every child and to prepare each child to be a full participant in civic and economic life. As Berkshire and Schneider put it, public education “is our collective effort to realize for all young people their full human potential, regardless of circumstance.”

Fortunately, the coordinated attack on public education has met strong resistance from educators, students, parents, and citizens in several states across the country. During the 2023 legislative session here in Idaho, legislators presented a long series of voucher bills. One proposal sought to enact universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs) that would be available to every Idaho family—including the affluent. Other bills proposed tax-credit schemes or more targeted approaches. Every single proposal failed. Remarkably, Idaho remains voucher-free even as the voucher movement has enacted sweeping legislation in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Grassroots organizing has been indispensable in Idaho’s fight against vouchers. A strong coalition of educators, parents, and advocacy organizations—including Reclaim Idaho, an organization I cofounded—has proved to be an effective counterweight to the voucher movement’s deep-pocketed lobbying efforts.

A recent poll by the Idaho Statesman found that public opinion in Idaho is dead set against vouchers, with 63 percent opposed and just 23 percent in support. The mission of organizers has been to translate widespread public opposition into effective political action. To that end, we’ve organized in communities across this vast state and helped citizens become defenders of public schools and sharp critics of voucher schemes. We’ve helped local advocates understand and articulate the arguments against vouchers that resonate most with the public: that vouchers are fiscally reckless, costing far more than advertised; that voucher programs tend to diminish student achievement and discriminate against students with disabilities; and that voucher programs are especially harmful for rural communities where no private-school options exist.

In local efforts to resist vouchers, grassroots organizing can harness the power of personal stories. The voucher movement has attempted to tell their own personalized story by evoking images of poor, marginalized children who’ve been “trapped” in failing public schools. The promise of “school choice” is to give struggling parents the choice to move their children into private schools that better fit their needs. However, as more states adopt voucher programs, the vast majority of voucher funds are flowing not to students who’ve left public schools but to private-school students who were never in public schools to begin with. A total of 89 percent of voucher funds in New Hampshire, 80 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Wisconsin have gone to students already enrolled in private schools, and these students disproportionately belong to affluent families living in suburban and urban areas.

The “school choice” story is mostly a fiction, and grassroots organizing can refocus the conversation on personal stories that paint the full picture. When people get organized on the voucher issue, the question can suddenly shift from “Do families deserve more choice?” to “Why would we pull scarce funds from our public schools—especially in rural areas—in order to subsidize tuition for affluent suburban families?” During testimony before the Idaho Senate Education Committee on a bill to create universal ESAs, a public-school supporter named Sheri Hughes phoned in to testify remotely from Challis—a mountain town of 922 people located 190 miles from the state capital. “I know the power and strength of consolidated public money for education, especially in rural Idaho,” Hughes said. She told the committee that her grandfather had served on the Challis school board and helped build the town’s first high school, that her mother—also a school-board member—helped get the high school rebuilt after the 1983 Challis earthquake. “Based on Arizona’s ESA Voucher experience,” Hughes went on, “the money proposed to be removed off the top of Idaho’s education funding budget would take an estimated 17–20 percent of funding away from Challis schools—in an area with no private alternative choices, and where home-school students still access public-school resources for proctoring, band, sports, special ed, and other extracurricular activities.”

Please open the link and learn how Idaho parents and teachers and citizens organized to beat back the out-of-state money behind vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Idaho, Vouchers

California: Federal Judge Overturns Law that Bans Guns in Many Public Places

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2023 //
23

Governor Gavin Newsom and the California legislature crafted a gun law intended to limit the places where it was legal to have a gun. That law was struck down by a federal judge who said it was “repugnant” and stripped gun owners of their rights. The judge referred to the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision last year that overturned New York state’s strict gun laws.

Let’s get this right: Restricting guns is repugnant but mass murders are not. Or, maybe mass murders are less repugnant than restricting the right to carry a gun almost anywhere.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

A new California law that would bar licensed gun holders from carrying their firearms into an array of public places will not go into full effect on Jan. 1 as scheduled, after a federal judge blocked major parts of it as unconstitutional Wednesday.

The law, Senate Bill 2, was part of a slate of new gun control measures passed this year by California Democrats in response to two things: a sweeping U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reined in gun control measures nationally last year, and several high-profile mass shootings in the state this year — including in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park.

In his decision to block the law Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that the law’s “coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed the bill into law and has called for tougher gun restrictions in the state and at the national level, immediately swung back with his own statement in defense of the measure.

“Defying common sense, this ruling outrageously calls California’s data-backed gun safety efforts ‘repugnant,’” Newsom said. “What is repugnant is this ruling, which greenlights the proliferation of guns in our hospitals, libraries, and children’s playgrounds — spaces which should be safe for all.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, in his own statement, said Carney “got it wrong,” and the state will appeal his decision to a higher court.

The law would have precluded licensed gun carriers from having their firearms on public transportation, at public gatherings and special events, in parks and at playgrounds, in stadiums, arenas and casinos, in medical facilities, religious institutions or financial institutions, anywhere that liquor is sold and consumed, in all other private commercial spaces where the owner has not explicitly posted a sign to the contrary, and in many parking areas, among other places.

Democrats had championed the law as a workaround to the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen last year, which held that sweeping restrictions on licensed gun holders to carry their weapons in public were unconstitutional, in part because they stripped those people of their constitutional right to self-defense.

The Bruen decision made certain exceptions, including for bans on guns in certain “sensitive places” that historically had been protected from gun holders — such as in schools and courtrooms. State Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-Burbank) introduced SB 2 as a means of extending the list of “sensitive places” under California law.

The law was to apply to concealed-carry permit holders in major metropolitan centers such as Los Angeles but also to open-carry permit holders in rural, less populated parts of the state.

In his ruling Wednesday, Carney, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said the new law went too far — as the “sensitive places” exception cited by the Supreme Court had to do with relatively few, historically restricted places, not most public spaces in society.

He said an injunction against the law taking effect as litigation in the case continues was warranted because those suing the state over the measure are likely to win their case and would suffer “irreparable harm” if they weren’t allowed to carry their firearms in the meantime.

That last line is rich. Gun owners will suffer “irreparable harm” if they can’t bring their gun to a hospital or church or a public park or a playground.

Categories California, Elections, Extremism, Guns

Maurice Cunningham on the Rise and Fall of Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor who is a specialist in dark money in education politics, surveys the meteoric rise and fall of the rightwing group Moms for Liberty in The Progressive. First, the recently formed organization gathered plenty of publicity as a fearsome force censoring books, accusing teachers of “indoctrinating” students, attacking anything in the schools that acknowledged the existence of gay students or families, and opposing teachers unions. The Moms launched with a big budget, more than anyone could gather at a bake sale. But came the school board elections of 2023, and their candidates took a shellacking. Recently came news that one of their prominent co-founders, Bridget Ziegler, was caught in a sex scandal—a threesome—and the organization was publicly humiliated.

Maurice Cunningham wonders how this checkered organization will survive.

He writes:

On June 30, 2023, a Washington Post headline declared “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023, after a raft of school board elections across the country, the Post ran another headline: “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

The pre-election headline reflected the messaging skills that M4L has carefully honed to make itself more palatable. By November, however, the reality on the ground became clear.

To learn the origins and context of this group, open the link and read on. The article doesn’t mention the Ziegler sex scandal. Cunningham wrote about that in an article in the Tampa Bay Tribune, but it’s behind a paywall. The Moms are on a downhill slide as a result of their election losses, followed by Bridget’s bisexual tryst. Her ex-friends removed her name from the Moms website.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy
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