The Grand Canyon Institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization in Arizona. Its latest report concludes that charter schools are more accountable than vouchers. Vouchers suck up nearly $1 billion a year in public money and are completely unaccountable. Oucher schools are subject to no financial audits, do not have to comply with the state curriculum, and are not audited for academic performance.
Step right up and get your free money, grifters! Courtesy of Arizona taxpayers and GOP legislators!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Charters are Accountable, Independent Private Schools are Not Yet nearly a billion public dollars flow to unaccountable private schools
Phoenix —On Monday, the State Board for Charter Schools, a public body, voted unanimously to issue a notice of intent to revoke the charter contract for ARCHES Academy, currently located in Apache Junction.
The school appears to have both academic and financial problems and recently addressed an issue with a fire marshal. This action represents the kind of responsible oversight of charter schools that serves to protect the interests of students, parents and taxpayers.
In sharp contrast, independent private schools are required to have no such oversight, even though they currently receive nearly $1 billion in state public funding. That nearly matches the state general fund support for the state university system. Public funds that support private schools come from redirected general fund dollars through tax credit donations to Student Tuition Organizations and by funds from Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA)/vouchers directly from the General Fund. Last year GCI estimates private school tax credits cost $285 million (the formal report is due by March 31) and ESA/vouchers cost $592 million, so, collectively, nearly $900 million in public support for unaccountable private schools (note: this figure includes an amount for ESA homeschooling).
The table below uses the case of ARCHES Academy to contrast charter schools (which are privately owned public schools) with private schools that operate independently with the level of oversight and accountability required.
Please open the link to see the table comparing Arches charter school and private schools receiving vouchers.
Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.
In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.
The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year.
Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states.
The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966.
Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign.
Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”
On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.
Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.
Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”
Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false.
The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status.
Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]
For a change, good news on the culture wars front arrives in Florida by way of successful activism, a less sycophantic Legislature — and a significant court settlement reached in a constitutional challenge to the state’s “Don’t Say Gay law.”
Students and teachers will be able to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom — as long as it’s not in the lesson plans. New, detailed guidelines from the state Department of Education about whatcan and can’t be said regarding sexual orientation and gender identity are supposed to be coming soon to school districts.
One can only hope these spelled-out rules focus on helping kids understand — and respect — all kinds of families that aren’t going away just because religious zealots desire it. And that they leave out the political hysterics of past years.
In other words, the rules need to be useful.
In addition to the court settlement, there were positive developments in the Legislature: Harmful censorship and rights bills infringing on free speech and a free press, and to ban abortion in the state, were left to die on the floor or in committees.
To save face and ego, the discriminatory “Don’t say gay” law’s chief instigator, Gov. Ron DeSantis, claimed the settlement as a victory over “activists and extremists.” As if we’re all blind to the fact that the activists at work spinning rage-provoking misinformation were, among right-wingers, the Moms for Liberty he heralded, a group now losing ground here and all over the country.
As for the state’s chief extremist, it’s DeSantis himself.
It bears repeating: Gender identity and sexual orientation was never part of the curriculum in kindergarten through third grade in Florida. As the legal challenge made clear, the overblown outrage created by falsehoods and exaggerations about “pornographic” books available to children was circulated by Republicans to set the stage to pass legislation.
They used the first ban on elementary school-aged kids as the conduit to extend anti-gay laws to prohibit the free speech of mature high school students. The courts saw that for what it was: an attempt to send back to the closet an entire community by silencing it.
Didn’t ‘stay the course’
Voters are tired of dogmatic hogwash hijacking educational institutions.
From the offensively watered-down teaching of Black history to the redefinition of subjects areas like civics — only patriotism allowed — plus, the more recent attempt to wipe out sociology the way diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs were, all these initiatives have brought negative, world-wide attention to Florida.
To add insult to the injury, the free-speech restrictions in public education are happening at a time when a voucher system allows parents to afford whatever private education they choose for their children. But it’s never enough. Republicans want to impose conservative ideology on the rest of us.
Some eager-beaver legislators heard him. But key players like Senate President Kathleen Passidomo of Naples and House Speaker Paul Renner of Palm Harbor didn’t follow his mandates this time like bobble-heads.
Perhaps they took their cues from Iowa caucus results: DeSantis pitched his “Make America Florida” — and got a no, thanks.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
State Senator Tina Bojanowski, teacher and legislator (@TinaforKentucky), tweeted:
KY House passes HB2, a bill to change our Constitution to allow vouchers and charters by creating an amendment that allows future legislation to disregard SEVEN sections of our Constitution. @kyhousedems
You may have noticed that very few bills have been passed by Congress this past year. As of mid-December, only 27 bills made it through to enactment. That’s due to fractured control—a Democratic President, a Senate controlled by Democrats, and a House of Representatives controlled by a slim Republican majority. And in the House, the Republicans are bitterly split between angry members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and traditional Republicans. The Freedom Caucus is prepared to grind everything to a halt unless they get what they want.
Axios offered a chart showing that this is the least productive Congress since at least 1989. In a typical year, Congress passed between 300-400 laws. Open the link and see the stunning chart.
Congress was in the news a lot this year, but mostly it was not for passing legislation. It left us wondering what they did actually manage to get signed into law. So we’ve called NPR congressional reporter Eric McDaniel, who has tracked it all. Hi, Eric.
ERIC MCDANIEL, BYLINE: Hey there.
SHAPIRO: All right. Underneath all of the fracas about the House Speaker and George Santos and on and on, was there much legislating happening?
MCDANIEL: No, basically not. I mean, there were only 27 bills passed through both chambers in the first year of this Congress, including three crisis bills, I guess I’d call them. These are the big ones, two short-term extensions of funding to keep the government open and one to raise the U.S. government’s borrowing limit – you may have heard it called the debt ceiling – essentially so the government could pay the credit card bills for the money Congress had already directed it to spend. So these are must-do stuff. But other than that, I mean, they named some Veterans Affairs clinics. They commissioned a commemorative coin for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps and not much else – way behind even previous years of divided government.
SHAPIRO: So you’re saying not only was the number of laws passed very low, but the laws that were passed were not exactly consequential. Why was this so much less productive than other times government has been divided between the parties?
MCDANIEL: Look. I mean, there are a couple ways to look at that, right? The first is divided government. Like we said, they do less. There’s a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. That means it’s hard to get all three sets of relevant folks to agree.
But the problem’s a lot deeper than that. I mean, in a lot of ways, the House is working the way that you’d expect it to, given the incentives that are involved. State lawmakers often draw congressional districts, the places that representatives represent, in a way that maximizes their own party’s advantage. I mean, I imagine people have heard that called gerrymandering, and it helps to create a system in which just 30 of the 435 House districts really have a say in who represents them in Congress by the time the general election rolls around. Many of the other 400-whatever seats are decided by party primaries way earlier in the year, often just by the voters from that party. That means these places are set up to elect the most partisan person possible rather than lawmakers who have to win the support of lots of different kinds of people. And as you might imagine, that makes compromise and legislating really, really hard.
SHAPIRO: Well, if the system is designed to disincentivize compromise and make it unlikely that voters will punish people for being unproductive, that suggests Congress, in the years to come, is not likely to be much more productive than it’s been this year.
MCDANIEL: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, voters often can’t punish people because of the way these elections are decided. And it means that Congress won’t change without systemic reform. There’s good news, though, right? A lot of places are already trying things that can help. California uses a nonpartisan top-two primary system. That means voters pick between the top two most popular candidates no matter which party they’re from. Alaska uses something called ranked-choice voting, which lets voters rank their preferences rather than just picking one person. And that helps to find consensus picks and really reduces the incentives for candidates during the election season to attack each other. There’s also bigger changes on the table, like proportional representation. And I should say none of these actually require changes to the U.S. Constitution.
SHAPIRO: Well, that’s hopeful that there are some possible changes and improvements in the works. In the meantime, what does 2024 look like for Congress? What is likely to pass even this divided House and Senate?
MCDANIEL: Yeah, that’s all long-term stuff. In the near term, Senators are working on something that we’ve talked about on this show before, a foreign aid/national security deal. So they’re looking at aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, aid to the Indo-Pacific – think Taiwan – and U.S. immigration reform. So senators have been negotiating over the holiday season, and as soon as they get back, both the House and the Senate have to deal with government funding deadlines to keep the government open. They’re trying to pass 12 budget bills for a full year, actual spending. But we could see more short-term resolutions. Those deadlines are January 19 and February 2.
NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter has been reviewing the religious schools that now receive public funding and frequently posts his findings on Twitter (X is banned here).
Taxpayers in North Carolina should be outraged to learn where their dollars are going.
He writes:
A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization….
Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here).
In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).
I would venture to say that the vast majority of North Carolinians would prefer NOT to have their hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing institutions that espouse hateful and violent philosophies like Bobby Leonard’s.
Unfortunately, private schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students based on factors like religious beliefs and sexual orientation, even when they’re receiving public funding.
And discriminate they do.
This voucher-receiving school in Fayetteville, NC specifically bans “Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, non Messianic Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists” and refers to homosexuality as “deviate [sic] and perverted.”
Please open the link and see how well compensated these religious schools are by North Carolina’s taxpayers.
Chris Tomlinson is a regular opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle. I tuned in to a zoom with him yesterday and learned that he is known for his fierce independence. I signed up for his column and discovered his thoughts about “the immigration crisis,” which Americans tell pollsters these days is the most serious problem facing the nation. Tomlinson thinks both parties have failed to tell the truth, so he did. Trump, in particular, has demagogued the issue with his fear-mongering.
Tomlinson writes:
The two-ring presidential circus performed along Texas’ border on Thursday, injecting cash into the local economy but adding little to the national debate over one of the year’s most consequential issues.
President Joe Biden met with local officials in Brownsville and blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking new border security spending for political advantage. He correctly stated the broken asylum system encourages desperate people to gamble their life savings for a chance to live in the United States.
“If they get by the first day, they’ve got another five, seven, eight years before they have to do anything because they know (the immigration courts) cannot handle the caseloads quickly, and they’ll be able to stay in this country,” Biden said.
“With the new policies in this bill and the addition of 4,300 additional asylum officers, we’ll be able to reduce that process to less than six months,” he added.
Former President Donald Trump paraded before U.S. flags and uniformed National Guard troops in Eagle Pass. He renewed themes popularized by the Ku Klux Klan a century ago, sowing fear of foreigners and painting his opponent as a friend of dark-skinned criminals.
“They’re coming from jails, and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums. And they’re terrorists. They’re being let into our, our country,” Trump said in a rambling, bigoted speech. “It’s not just South America. It’s all over the world. The Congo, very big population coming in from jails from the Congo.”
Immigration is the most critical problem facing the nation, Americans told a recent Gallup poll. The issue was top of mind for 57% of Republicans, 22% of independents and 10% of Democrats.
“A separate question in the survey finds a record-high 55% of U.S. adults, up eight points from last year, saying that ‘large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally’ is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” Gallup added.
Most voters believe Trump would do a better job on border security, while only 28% of Americans approve of Biden’s immigration policies. Biden is in deep trouble, with only a 38% approval rating and a base already angry over his Middle East policies.
Anyone who’s spent time along the border will tell you most Americans don’t understand what goes on there. For example, asylum seekers are not invading the country; they turn themselves in as quickly as possible. Most of the $29 billion worth of drugs smuggled into the United States crosses at commercial entry points, which are the arterial roads keeping our economy going.
Migrants, documented or not, are critical for our workforce and society. I know people like to draw distinctions between documented and undocumented migrants, but both contribute more to the United States economy than they take. Most undocumented workers would happily pay a fine to get right with the government.
In Houston, immigrants make up almost a quarter of the population and 31% of the workforce, U.S. census data analyzed by the American Immigration Council, the Texas Association of Business and the Center for Houston’s Future found. Immigrants in the Houston statistical area earned $66.5 billion and paid $11.1 billion in federal taxes.
If Trump rounded these people up and deported them, as he promised, the construction, hospitality and hospital services would collapse.
Houston is home to more than 572,000 undocumented migrants whose households earned $13 billion in 2021. Most have fake documents and paid $794.8 million in federal taxes and $595.6 million in state and local taxes, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reported.
Meanwhile, Biden must come up with a new approach to processing asylum seekers after Congress made it clear they will not help. But he must overcome opposition from within his party and federal courts.
Federal and international law requires the United States to grant asylum to anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution. However, establishing which claims meet that high standard under current policies can take years.
Michael Podhorzer is a political analyst who has worked for the AFL-CIO. His is a widely respected voice thanks to the depth of his knowledge and wisdom. He maintains here that the MAGA movement is more aligned with the Confederacy than most people realize. He posted this piece soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not remove Trump from their ballots even though he participated in an insurrection.
I am posting it in part. Open the link to read it all.
The Supreme Court rejected Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off the ballot. Ahead of the ruling, many constitutional scholars and historians made strong legal arguments that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding public office again. Others argued that if the Supreme Court upheld a Colorado high court ruling it would compromise the legitimacy of our democratic process.
Here, I want to use this episode to show how the debate itself was really about the legitimacy of America itself.
Since the January 6, 2021, insurrection, there has been speculation about whether America might break apart as it did in 1861. Some even fear that removing Trump from the ballot will ignite a new civil war. But when we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of the American nation. We put the secessionists then—and the MAGA movement now—on an equal footing with the legitimate American government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.
The original designation of the military engagement from 1861 through 1865 was the “War of Rebellion.” This wasn’t just the Union’s perspective; the Confederate States understood themselves to be seceding to form an independent “slaveholding republic.” They called themselves “rebels.” It was not a civil war in which combatants fought to control one nation.
The leaders of what I call the Red Nation, which has 10 of the 11 Confederate states at its core, consistently reveal that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. (See the Appendix of my post on “The Two Nations of America” for more on how I define Red Nation.) They continue to be in the same relationship with America today as the Confederate states were before the War of Rebellion—unwilling to acceptthe legitimacy of the federal government, even if, in most periods, they have acquiesced to its superior force.
When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was obvious why Section 3 was included. When a nation cannot disqualify from public office those who have sought to destroy it, it casts doubt on its own legitimacy. That is especially true of the unrepentant Trump. Even Confederate generals admitted they lost by swearing allegiance to the United States. Trump still insists that he didn’t lose. Meanwhile, most Republicans dodge whether President Joe Biden won the election legitimately by grudgingly acknowledging that Biden is president.
The MAGA faction is not “conservative,” and even calling it “extremist” misses the point dangerously. Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal. Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. They, like their Confederate ancestors, are not patriots.
When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the free states saw it as most of us do today—enshrining a government for a unified nation. To the enslaving states, however, the Constitution did not create a single nation. Rather, as Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and two dozen other Red States say, it is merely a “compact” among the states. Due to the gravity of threats from abroad (Britain, France, Spain) and at home (Native Americans and enslaved people), the enslaving states agreed to a mutual defense pact (the Constitution) only insofar as they were confident that it protected their “peculiar institution.”
At Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the Confederates did not surrender so much as acknowledge that their best hope to preserve their “way of life” was not on the battlefield where they were badly outmatched but in a campaign of terror against Reconstruction. Once the South had made Reconstruction too costly to continue, it enacted Jim Crow Constitutions and updated its forced labor economy. This is a well-told story, for example, in Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War.
Our devotion to an “America” that strives to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has never been accepted by the Confederate faction, which has always been (and remains) committed to theocracy. We believe that the warrant for government is “the consent of the governed”; they believe its legitimacy is God-given….
Cutting the Branches, Leaving the Roots
Consider Germany, which is rightly credited for taking responsibility for the Holocaust. Last summer, I visited Berlin and saw how robust these efforts have been. For example, the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods have been broken up by Stolpersteine—stumble blocks—which call attention to the homes the Nazis stole from Jews and, where known, the fate of those Jews. But it’s not as if there aren’t similar landmarks commemorating our past, including the Legacy Museum/Lynching Memorialin Montgomery, Alabama, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
No, the real difference is exactly the difference between conceptualizing today’s toxic politics as “civil war” or “polarization” instead of a rebellion. In Germany, the idea that there would be monuments or streets named after Adolf Hitler or his generals is unthinkable. No popular culture there valorizes those who fought for the Führer or waxes nostalgic for a lost way of life. There’s no bawdy comedy, The Dukes of Bavaria…
Please open the link to read this provocative article in full.
State legislatures these days tthjnkbthat they should pass laws telling teachers how to teach reading and what to teach in social studies. The latest example comes from Ohio, where the far-right legislature is in the midst of mandating a course on capitalism.
Denis Smith, retired educator, writes:
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, our republic is on fire. And that’s not being hyperbolic.
Incendiary language is now the norm in Congress and across the nation, further fanning the flames of overheated rhetoric in an election year. Indictments pile up against a former president, along with criminal trials looming in multiple jurisdictions. Perhaps even more ominous, jurors, judges, and election workers are being threatened with harm by extremists across our land.
But that’s only the short version of a narrative about a country at the brink, where democracy is threatened by the specter of authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, back in Ohio, the legislature has examined the state of the state and determined that in today’s volatile world, there is a pressing need to modify public school curriculum by teaching … capitalism.
That’s right. Ohio Republicans have decided that teaching about capitalism is more important in troubled times than strengthening student learning opportunities about democracy. Yes, learning about capitalism is more important for Ohio students than the critical need for media literacy and increased research and critical thinking skills in an age of artificial intelligence and fake news.
Add to that the importance of teaching about character and caring about others, a key cornerstone of character education.
To Republicans, whose former House Speaker and former state party chair are now serving prison sentences, along with their twice-impeached presidential front runner facing 91 felony criminal counts, there appears to be no pressing need for young people to learn more about personal ethics, citizenship, and the importance of character.
But we probably should know that when it comes to Republicans, caring about the needs of others might be tantamount to socialism.
After the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 17 by a margin of 64-26 on Feb. 7, a measure which calls for the addition of teaching about capitalism in high school financial literacy standards, one Democratic legislator told the Cincinnati Enquirer/USA Today Network that adding capitalism to carefully crafted financial literacy classes only dilutes the amount of content students can learn in this important course of study designed to prepare students for assuming adult roles and functions.
‘This bill is one part partisan message, one part ideological warfare and one part a poor fix’ to Ohio’s financial literacy class requirement, said Rep. Joe Miller, D-Lorain, a former social studies teacher who instructed students on the principles of capitalism.
The educator and legislator, now serving his third term in the Ohio House, is quite savvy in knowing the usual lockstep behavior of Republicans, none of whom voted against the bill. An additional observation by Miller might have also been influenced by knowing the tired rhetoric of one of the bill’s co-sponsors in the Ohio Senate, Andrew Brenner, who famously said in 2014 that public education was “socialism” and should be privatized.
The Enquirer piece continued, saying Miller worried opponents of the bill would be labeled socialists in future campaigns.
With Brenner and Senate President Matt (“we can kind of do what we want”) Huffman, it’s only a matter of time before they use the words socialism and socialist, along with other Republicans, as tired descriptors for the noun Democrat.
Come to think of it, if the titular head of the Republican Party is constantly complaining about witch hunts, what if we soon find out that the latest supply chain issue generated by the GOP might result in a shortage of witches? If they do run out of witches, look for socialist hunts in this election year.
