Ohio adopted a voucher program. Then another and another. There are five different voucher programs. The Republicans who control the State Legislature hate public schools, so they eventually decided to make vouchers universal. They removed the income limit so that every family could obtain vouchers.
Do Ohioans really want to underwrite the tuition of every student who chooses to enroll in nonpublic schools?
You will not be surprised to read that the vast majority of students who use vouchers are already students in private and religious schools.
Poor kids are not being “saved” by vouchers. Affluent families are getting a subsidy from the states. Many private schools have raised their tuition in response to the new voucher money.
Ohio also has many charter schools. Typically they get worse academic results than public schools. Some have been mired in financial scandals. The most notorious charter scandal involved an online for-profit school called The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). Over two decades, it collected $1 billion from the state. Its owner contributed to politicians. It had big-name speakers at its graduation ceremonies, like the Governor and, on another occasion, Jeb Bush. It has the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. When the state auditor asked ECOT to return $67 million due to phantom students, it declared bankruptcy.
Steve Dyer, former legislator and perennial budget hawk, tracks wasteful spending on charter schools in Ohio in this post. Ohio is throwing away billions on charters and vouchers, at the expense of its public schools, which typically outperform its privatized schools. A pro-charter analyst concluded that Ohio’s charter schools were among the worst in the nation.
It’s difficult to say that a $1.3 billion state program can go under the radar, but lately it seems that Ohio’s charter school industry has done just that, thanks in large part to the absolute explosion of taxpayer funded subsidies given to wealthy private school parents.
And while the state’s largest taxpayer ripoff ever — in excess of $200 million plus — happened as the result of the infamous ECOT scandal (the state is only going after about $100 million of the $200 million plus that I calculated because they just didn’t do the forensic audit of years prior to the couple prior to the school shutting down), the per pupil funding explosion in Ohio’s charter schools has been equally remarkable.
The amount of money the state sends, on average, to Ohio’s charter schools is now more than what 129 Ohio School Districts SPEND per equivalent pupil, including all locally raised property and/or income taxes.
That’s right.
Ohio now provides Ohio’s Charter Schools (all but 5 of which rated in the bottom 25% of all schools nationally) more money on average than 1 in 5 Ohio school districts spend per equivalent pupil, including all their local property tax money.
I’ve included a list of all the school districts that spend less per equivalent pupil than Charter Schools receive on average in state aid.
That’s quite a list, don’t you think?
This explains how Ohio’s charter schools now get nearly $1.3 billion in state aid while having fewer students than they had in the 2013-2014 school year, I suppose. That year — the record for number of charter school students — had about $300 million less going to charters despite having about 1,000 more students than today.
This is why it’s critical to keep our eyes on all the privatization efforts, not just the shiniest one in front of us.
It is. Inevitable.
Organize and vote accordingly.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in about 25 years of following, analyzing and writing Ohio education policy, it’s that there is nothing more certain than Ohio Republican elected officials taking tax dollars out of the hands of our 1.4 million public school students and instead stuffing the bank accounts of political contributing profiteers and wealthy private school parents.
Marilou Johanek is a veteran journalist in Ohio. She writes here about the Republican politicians who used their power to impose universal vouchers on the state. The main beneficiaries are children of the affluent who are already enrolled in private and religious schools and who can already afford the tuition. The losers are the vast majority of public school students, whose schools are underfunded.
What does the future hold for states that skimp on the education of the next generation while lavishing billion-dollar subsidies on the families of the well-off?
Johanek writes:
My way or the highway may be your boss’s motto and your cross to bear. But if that is the mantra of publicly elected officials in a representative government — as it sure seems to be in Ohio — all of us have a problem. A big one.
The political bosses in Ohio conduct the people’s business with take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums. They’re not running a democracy; they’re dictating decisions made. They do not entertain questions about their extremist agenda to ban invented threats, ignore real ones, claw back rights, reduce women to breeders, welcome polluters to state parks, or defund public education to pay for private schools.
When challenged over their arguably lawless mandates, Ohio Republican leaders mount a full court press to dismiss, disparage, intimidate, and circumvent countervailing forces that dare confront absolute power. Consider the all-out effort of GOP chieftains to scuttle a statewide lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Republican fetish to fund private schools with hundreds of millions of apparently unlimited public tax dollars.
The partisans sprang into action to protect the $1-billion-dollar-and-counting boondoggle they created last year with universal vouchers that pay private school tuition for the affluent few at the expense of the many — a majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public-school districts. Ever since GOP lawmakers — led by Ohio Senate President and go-to financier of diocesan schools Matt Huffman — opened the government dole to any private school student with their voucher change slipped into the state budget, unaccountable public spending on private schools has exploded.
The amount of tax dollars going to students already attending private, mostly religious schools tripled the first school year uncapped voucher money was there for the taking. Many of the private school families sweeping up the easy cash earn north of $250,000 annually. The initial Republican rationale for diverting state educational funding from public to parochial schools was that the public handouts offered low-income families in failing school districts access to better school options.
But that excuse was a ruse to subsidize religious education with taxpayer money and gradually starve public education of critical financial support. The flood of public funds to prop up Catholic schools came from the same general revenue pool that was supposed to keep public school districts afloat not be shortchanged by private education giveaways.
The fallback for fiscally depleted districts is school levies that fail more often than not. Which, as every public school parent knows, means likely cuts to staff, extracurricular programs, student support services, and capital improvements, decades overdue, shelved again.
Little wonder that more than 200 school districts across Ohio have joined a growing coalition contesting the unprecedented release of public funds to every private school family — regardless of income or quality of home district — in a lawsuit bound for trial.
They argue the private school “EdChoice” voucher expansion breaking the public education budget violates the state constitution by creating a separate, unequal and segregated school system of privatized education bankrolled with money the state is constitutionally obligated to spend on public education alone. Meanwhile public school students go to class in crappy buildings erected in the 1950s (because there’s no money to build a new ones) and enjoy fewer, if any, electives in music and art, or reading tutors, or enough counselors, AP course offerings, gifted services, or small class sizes, etc.
The billion-dollar windfall to offset private school tuition many families can afford would be a godsend to public schools making do with less. God bless those who choose to send their students to expensive parochial institutions. But none of us agreed to collectively finance your private school choice that, frankly, serves a private interest, not a public one.
We agreed instead to fund what serves the greater good, not what satisfies individual preference. We do the same with other public services (besides free public education) when our taxes support local law enforcement, fire protection, mental health resources, metro park amenities and other community systems that benefit everybody. The lawsuit to strike down Ohio’s harmful universal vouchers recently added the Upper Arlington school district, in a suburb of Columbus, to its ballooning list of participants.
Ohio’s Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted personally pressured the district to pass on the legal fight before the school board voted to join it. Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Dave Yost tried and failed to get a Franklin County court to dismiss the voucher lawsuit altogether. Huffman, the architect of the school privatization scheme in the legislature, refused to sit for a lawsuit deposition.
He even balked at submitting written answers. Finally, the Lima Republican appealed to the Republican-majority state supreme court (he engineered) to judge him above accountability per the litigation. The GOP my-way-or-the-highway bosses aren’t finished trying to out-maneuver public school advocates fighting for fair and equitable public funding. But their secret is out.
In the school year that just ended, taxpayers forked over a billion dollars’ worth of tuition payments for a slice of well-off students enrolled in pricey private schools. That’s not okay with public school families eying another school levy or their kids will do without. The state’s autocrats bosses should be on notice; their take-it-or-leave-it dictate on universal vouchers went too far.
It provoked a public education crusade willing to see you in court, Messrs. Huffman, Yost and Husted. So save the trial date. It’s Nov. 4.
Jan Resseger writes with cogency and insight about the frightening trend to defund public education. Trump once said that he loves the poorly educated—the rubes who buy whatever lies he is peddling, the gullible who hang on his every word, the low-information voters who trust him—and that same philosophy seems to be dominant in red states. That is, to defund public schools with a costly combination of tax cuts and privatization, while enriching grifters, religious proselytizers, and stripmall charters.
Ohio’s fiscal troubles certainly have been exacerbated by the hugely expensive universal EdChoice Expansion voucher expansion now projected to divert over a billion dollars in the current fiscal year out of the school foundation budget line (that also funds the state’s public schools) to pay for private school tuition mostly for upper income students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
But the depletion of the state’s fiscal capacity isn’t merely attributable to the universal school voucher expansion. In mid-May, The Statehouse News‘ Jo Ingles published a brief warning from Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine about the tax cut his Republican legislative colleagues inserted into the budget he signed in June of 2023: “Ohio’s tax revenue has come in below projections for four out of the last five months. And while some state leaders who advocated for tax cuts in the last budget say they’re still waiting to see more data, Gov. Mike DeWine said he thinks that’s why the state is seeing a shortfall.” Ingles elaborates: “The Office of Budget and Management had projected close to $23.2 billion in tax revenue by this point in the fiscal year, but it’s collected just under half a billion less… DeWine hasn’t included an income tax cut in any of the three budgets he’s proposed. But his fellow Republicans in the legislature passed $3.1 billion in tax cuts in the budget that took effect last July, largely through consolidation of four tax brackets into two. DeWine signed the budget into law.”
As part of a major report last November on the danger of state tax cutting, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reviews what happened in Kansas back in 2012, when according to far-right dogma, the Kansas legislature and Governor Sam Brownback tried to boost the state’s economy through what they hoped would be economic growth followed by trickle-down economics: “Billed as a way to boost the state economy, the tax cuts led instead to plunging revenues and cuts in K-12 schools and higher education, as well as other public services… In 2017 lawmakers agreed on a bipartisan basis to repeal most of the tax cuts.” (States’ Recent Tax-Cut Spree Creates Big Risks for Families and Communities, report, p. 10)
Tax cutting in Ohio has never been quite as damaging as it was in Kansas, but it has been a persistent problem for years. Back in 2017 after the state passed a biennial budget without a tax cut, PolicyMatters Ohio’s Zach Schiller celebrated: “The biggest news about taxes in the new Ohio budget is what isn’t in it… Ohio has been on a tax-cutting spree that has lasted most of the last dozen years. These cuts have sapped the state of billions of dollars a year of vitally needed revenue….”
Times have changed, however. A week ago the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities launched a project to track tax slashing today across far-right Republican states. One story features Ohio: “States have gone on a tax-cutting spree in recent years. More than half have slashed income taxes for wealthy people and corporations, in some cases by extraordinary amounts.” In Ohio: “Republican members of the state legislature are blaming slowing economic growth for the emerging revenue gap, but that is likely compounding the problem rather than causing it. The more straightforward culprit is a pair of personal income tax cuts passed in 2021 and 2023 (the two most recent biennial state budgets). The cuts are already costing the state nearly $2 billion in lost revenue each year… Ohio also made a flurry of other costly tax and budget choices last year. Most notably, the state cut its Commercial Activity Tax and removed income limits for its private school voucher program, leading to a spike in enrollment. These changes, which mostly benefit corporations and wealthy families, could exacerbate the state’s revenue shortfalls.”
When states cut taxes as Ohio just did in the two most recent biennial budgets, the result is not merely a one time revenue loss. In last November’s report, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities details what has been happening in Ohio and 25 other states: “State policymakers nationwide have embarked on a tax-cutting spree over the past three years, using the cover of temporary budget surpluses stemming from robust federal aid in response to COVID-19 and the economic recovery that followed. The tax cuts—-most of which are both permanent and tilted toward wealthy households and corporations—-will weaken state revenues by large and growing amounts over time, limiting these states’ ability to maintain support for schools and other vital public services….”
Permanent tax cuts affect state budgets again and again, year after year: “Twenty-six states cut their personal income tax rates and/or corporate income tax rates, 13 of them multiple times. Permanent cuts to tax rates are especially harmful to state balance sheets since they reduce revenues every year going forward absent further legislative action, in contrast to temporary or one-time tax cuts… Combined, the cuts will cost those 26 states an estimated $124 billion by 2028, including $13 billion that they have already lost (2022-2023) and $111 billion over the next five years….”
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that by 2028, the tax cuts that were part of Ohio’s biennial budgets passed in 2021 and 2023 will cost the state more than $10.5 billion.
The fiscal consequences for Ohio will, of course, also be complicated by the annual cost of the uncapped, ever-expanding universal EdChoice Expansion vouchers, enacted in the budget passed in 2023. Ohio has five different private school voucher programs. Earlier this week, the leader of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School funding, Bill Phillis published data showing that in the past year, due to the legislature’s action, the new EdChoice Expansion vouchers grew explosively by 274.3 percent.
In late March, the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reported that the enormous expansion of EdChoice Expansion vouchers in Ohio will bring the state’s investment in its five private school tuition voucher programs to at least a billion dollars by the end of the current fiscal year on October 1, 2024. In Ohio, a total of 152,118 students, according to Hancock’s data, now attend private schools using tax funded vouchers, with most of the new participants in the universal EdChoice Expansion program upper income students who were already enrolled in private schools at their parents’ expense. The state simply began giving away to these families $6,165 for each K-8 student and $8,407 for each high school student.
Ohio is on the cusp of completing the enactment of the Fair School Funding plan, a new public school funding formula designed to ensure that Ohio’s 610 public school districts can all afford the real costs of the services necessary to meet the needs of Ohio’s 1.6 million students in public schools, including the needs of disabled students, English learners, and students in districts where family poverty is concentrated. Our legislators have always said the phase-in must be renegotiated in each biennial budget because its full enactment will depend on the amount of state revenue available. In 2023, Ohio’s legislators completed the first two steps of the phase in.
Clearly the full funding of the third step of the plan in the budget that must pass by June 30, 2025 will be threatened by a revenue shortage created by not only the extravagant voucher expansion for the wealthy but also by the legislature’s repeated state tax cuts.
Stephen Dyer, former state legislator in Ohio, wrote in his blog “Tenth Period” that the 85% of Ohio’s children who attend public schools are being shortchanged by the state. First the state went overboard for charter schools, including for-profit charters and virtual charters and experienced a long list of money-wasting scandals. Then the state Republicans began expanding vouchers, despite a major evaluation showing that low-income students lost ground academically by using vouchers. As the state lowered the restrictions on access to vouchers, they turned into a subsidy for private school tuition.
He writes:
Since 1975, the percentage of the state budget going to Ohio’s public school students has dropped from 40% to barely 20% this year — a record low.
This is stunning, stunning data. But the Ohio General Assembly and Gov. Mike DeWine today are committing the smallest share of the state’s budget to educate Ohio’s public school kids in the last 50 years. And it’s not really close.
What’s going on here?
Simple: Ohio’s leaders have spent the last 3+ decades investing more and more money into privately run charter schools and, especially recently, have exploded their commitment to subsidize wealthy Ohioans’ private school tuitions. This has come at the expense of the 85% of Ohio students who attend the state’s public school districts.
Look at this school year, for example. In the budget, the state commits a little more than $11 billion to primary and secondary education. That represents 26.6% of the state’s $41.5 billion annual expenditure. However, this year, charter schools are expected to be paid $1.3 billion and private school tuition subsidies will soar to $1.02 billion (to give you an idea of what kind of explosion this has been, when I left the Ohio House in 2010, Ohio spent about $75 million on these tuition subsidies). So if you subtract that combined $2.32 billion that’s no longer going to kids in public school districts, now Ohio’s committing $8.7 billion to educate the 1.6 million kids in Ohio’s public school districts. That’s a 21.1% commitment of the state’s budget.
Some perspective:
That $8.7 billion is about what the state was sending to kids in public school districts in 1997, adjusted for inflation.
The 21.1% commitment currently being sent to kids in public school districts is by far the lowest commitment the state has ever made to its public school students — about 7% lower than the previous record (last year’s 22.2%) and 20% lower than the previous record for low spending in the pre-privatization era.
The voucher expenditure alone now drops state commitment to public school kids by nearly 10%.
The commitment to all students, including vouchers and charters, represents the fifth-lowest commitment since 1975. Only four years surrounding the initial filing of the state’s school funding lawsuit in 1991 were lower. The lowest commitment ever on record was 1992 at 25.2% of the state budget. Don’t worry, though. Next year, the projected commitment to all Ohio students will be 25.3% of the state budget.
What is clear now is that every single new dollar (plus a few more) that’s been spent on K-12 education since 1997 has gone to fund privately run charter schools and subsidize private school tuitions mostly for parents whose kids already attend private school.
What’s even more amazing is that even if charters and vouchers never existed and all that revenue was going to fund the educations of only Ohio’s public school students, the state is still spending a smaller percentage of its budget on K-12 education than at any but 4 out of the last 50 years. And next year it’s less than all but 1 of those last 50 years.
Ohio’s current leaders have essentially divested from Ohio’s greatest resource — its children and future — for the last 30 years.
Please open the link and finish reading the post. Ohio has also slashed funding for public higher education.
Does this disinvestment in children and higher education make any sense? Who benefits?
In Ohio, as in every other state, most children go to public schools. You would think that their elected officials would work hard to ensure that their district’s public schools are well-funded. In red states like Ohio, you would be wrong. Safe in their gerrymandered districts, Republicans are shoveling money to charters and vouchers, not public schools. Their generosity to nonpublic schools ignores the long list of scandals associated with charters, as well as their poor performance. Nor are Republicans concerned by the lack of accountability of voucher schools, not to mention their discriminatory practices.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Capital Journal’s Susan Tebben reported: “Ohio House Democrats have laid out a plethora of bills targeting the education system in the state, impacting everything from teacher pay to oversight of private school vouchers and the overall funding of the public school system…’Our principles are pretty clear on that front,’ said House Minority Whip Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. ‘There is no better investment we can make in the future of our state than investing in the education of our students, and that every kid, no matter which corner of the state they grow up in, deserves a world class education.’
There is a problem, however, blocking most pro-public school legislation. Only 32 of 99 Ohio House members are Democrats, and in the Ohio Senate, only 7 Democrats serve in a body of 33 members. Due to gerrymandering, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the district maps that are being used today, but the Court did not enforce its ruling. This means that, except in the state budget where compromises sometimes are demanded, most of the Democratic priorities languish. In the recent budget, the legislature enacted a second stage of the three-budget, phase-in of a new public school funding formula, but it was accompanied by a universal private school tuition voucher expansion.
Here, according to Tebben, is what has happened to a bill to prioritize and protect the new public school funding formula:
“At the top of the (Democrats’) list is House Bill 10, which seeks to hold legislators to the six year phase-in plan that was assigned to the Fair School Funding Plan, legislation that funds public schools based less on property values and more on the needs of individual school districts. HB 10 is a bipartisan bill which simply ‘expresses the intent of the General Assembly to continue phasing in the school financing system,’ which was inserted in the 2021 budget bill, ‘until that system is fully implemented and funded,’ according to the language of the bill. The bill was introduced in February 2023 and quickly referred to the House Finance Committee, but has not seen activity since.”
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican supermajority won’t commit to the eventual full funding of the state’s public school system because, they say, revenue projections are unsure in the context of growing privatization and years of cutting taxes in budget after budget.
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican legislators instead operate ideologically and far to the right. After Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to deny medical care for transgender youths last winter, legislators immediately overrode the veto. Far-right bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council and other bill mills, and bills endorsed by the extremist but powerful Columbus lobby, the Center for Christian Virtue, now housed in the building it purchased across the street from the Statehouse, dominate legislative deliberation and get lots of press.
Kikandi Lukambo has reinvented himself many times in his life.
After war forced him, his parents and siblings to flee their home in the Congo, he became a tailor, catering to the fashionable ladies of Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Nearly a decade later, in 2015, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program resettled Lukambo in Columbus. He quickly found a job with a perfume manufacturer, then at a distribution warehouse.
Recently, he founded a transportation business that shuttles other immigrant workers — including people from Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere — to and from their workplaces in Greater Columbus.
Sitting in Kivu Transportation Services’ small office in the Northland neighborhood recently, Lukambo, 37, spoke of his gratitude for the opportunities Ohio has afforded him.
“(Ohio) has a very good reputation of employment,” he said. “We have the best life here.”
Lukambo, who became an American citizen in 2022, also found love locally. Four months ago, he and his fiancée Wedny Dauphin, an immigrant from Haiti, became parents to a baby boy.
Foreign-born people like Lukambo and Dauphin have been essential to Columbus’ population growth and economy in recent years, according to new government data and local economists.
Because native-born Americans are having fewer children and are moving away from Ohio, the state’s population shrunk by about 13,000 between mid-2020 and mid-2023. But it would have shrunk by about 61,000 more if it weren’t for the flow of immigrants moving in, according to Census Bureau estimates.
Mark Partridge, an urban economist at Ohio State University, told The Dispatch that population expansion comes with certain growing pains, such as greater demand for housing and public services like schools.
But he said immigrant-driven population growth is a “first-order factor” benefitting the region’s economy — in contrast to shrinking cities like Youngstown, where relatively few immigrants settle.
“Population growth drives demand for businesses. … And (likewise), population growth (increases) the supply of workers that firms want to hire,” he said.
“It’s easy to scapegoat immigrants. … However, if it wasn’t for immigration in a state that struggles retaining population like Ohio, we would have much faster population loss. Once you start losing population, it’s pretty easy to turn into a vicious cycle downward.”
Lukambo had never driven a car before moving to the U.S. nine years ago. Soon after arrival, he and his brother paid another Congolese refugee $1,000 to teach them how to drive so they could get to work, he said.
While his job at a warehouse provided some stability, Lukambo dreamed of starting his own business. At first, he thought of starting a language school for other immigrants, since he speaks English fluently. But then he realized that very few of his potential students would have a means of transportation to get to class. This insight led him to start the transportation company, which now has contracts with a sawmill in Newark, the refugee resettlement agency Jewish Family Services and elsewhere.
Lukambo and Dauphin drive vans for their company while also working other jobs — Lukambo is a weekend supervisor at a Macy’s warehouse in Groveport, and Dauphin works for Cheryl’s Cookies in Westerville.
“I don’t really take time off,” Lukambo, who works seven days a week, said with a chuckle.
Bill LaFayette, an economist who owns the local consulting firm Regionomics, told The Dispatch that immigrants are good for the economy in part because Columbus-area firms are in desperate need of workers.
“Our employment growth has been somewhat stunted since mid-2022, just because there aren’t enough workers,” LaFayette said. “(Immigrants) tend to be younger than the population as a whole, and they tend to be more likely in the labor force.”
LaFayette said that immigrants are also significantly more likely than native-born people to become entrepreneurs.
“My guess is that (is because) they have pulled up stakes and moved to a completely different part of the world, and they are inherently risk-takers,” he said.
He pointed to Morse Road as an area with an abundance of immigrant-owned businesses, which he said retain a greater percentage of their sales revenue within the local economy than national chains.
Studies also show that immigrants are a boon to the local tax base.
“Whether you come from Cleveland or Calcutta, you still need a place to live,” he said.
Skeptics of immigration sometimes raise concerns about immigrants taking jobs away from native-born people, but LaFayette said this is not a concern in central Ohio, at least not right now.
“Our unemployment rate’s barely above 3%. … All you’ve got is pretty much frictional unemployment — people going from one job to another,” he said. “We need everybody we can get.”
Partridge, the Ohio State professor, said economists still debate the size of this effect, though most agree it is small. He believes that low-wage workers are most affected, but “it’s not a massive effect.” On the other hand, he said immigrants often come up with innovations or insights that help firms expand into markets abroad — boosting wages for high-skill workers.
As Columbus’ foreign-born population continues to grow, Lukambo hopes to expand his business by partnering with more employers and by offering driving classes for newly arrived immigrants.
“I’m under obligation to help other people — because I don’t like to see people struggling the way I struggled with at the beginning when I came here,” he said.
Lukambo said many of his relatives and friends from his refugee camp in Uganda resettled elsewhere in the U.S. But when they come to visit Columbus, he makes the pitch for them to relocate here — which, increasingly, they accept.
“(Congolese) people used to say, ‘Ohio is like a village. Ohio is not a really good state.’ But with time … a lot of refugees and a lot of immigrants are coming here. … With the economy, you can be at least successful with one job, and you manage your time and you feel like you are having a good life,” he said.
“Ohio is growing.”
Peter Gill covers immigration and new American communities for The Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America here:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
George Will is widely viewed as the dean of conservative opinion writers. He has been writing a regular column for The Washington Post for years, extolling conservative ideas and manners.
But he is repulsed by Donald Trump. Will does not like Trump’s policies, his crudeness, his vile behavior, his incivility, nor his lack of knowledge. I agree with him about that. Conservativism can’t be represented by people who have no ideas other than hatred’s, nor should they be represented by people lacking dignity.
Needless to say, Will doesn’t like the candidates who style themselves to be as vulgar as Trump.
In this column, he excoriates Kari Lake, who is running against Congressman Ruben Gallego for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat in Arizona, and businessman Bernie Moreno, who is running for Senate in Ohio. Will doesn’t want the Republicans to lose control of the Senate but as I read him, he would rather lose the Senate than see these two vulgarians elected.
He writes:
PHOENIX — From Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken for every pot” (1928) to Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” (1984), some campaign slogans have been humdingers. The slogan of Republican Kari Lake’s Senate campaign could be: “Oh, never mind.” Here in Arizona and in Ohio, GOP Senate candidates force conservatives to choose between awful outcomes: the consequences of losing the Senate, or the disappearance of the conservative party.
Running for Arizona’s governorship in 2022, Lake practiced the kamikaze politics of subtraction. Today, she says she was joking when she told John McCain voters — they elected him to two House and six Senate terms — to “get the hell out” of a GOP event. McCain voters were not amused. She lost, then mimicked her hero, saying that her election was stolen. Courts disagreed.
Today, she seems intermittently aware that many Arizonans are weary of her high-decibel imitation of Donald Trump’s sour, self-absorbed, backward-looking, fact-free, sore-loser, endless grievance tour. So, she sometimes seems to say of her protracted harping on 2022: Oh, never mind.
In Ohio, Bernie Moreno is running against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
Bernie Moreno once called Trump a “maniac” and a “lunatic” akin to “a car accident that makes you sick.” He scoffed at Trump’s claims of election fraud and called the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “morons” and “criminals.” But Trump, like a marsupial, has tucked Moreno into his pouch, and the amazingly malleable Moreno calls (as does Lake) the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” and says the 2020 election was “stolen,” Joe Biden should be impeached and Trump is swell.
Moreno, who projects the Trumpkins’ chest-thumping faux toughness, disdains bipartisanship. Evidently, he plans to advance his agenda with 60 Republican votes. There have not been 60 Republican senators since 1910…
The nation no longer has a reliably conservative party of sound ideas and good manners. If conservatism is again to be ascendant in their party, Republicans must stop electing the likes of Lake and Moreno. They would join other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas, from industrial policy (government allocation of capital, which is socialism) to isolationism. And whose unconservative temperaments celebrate coarseness as an indicator of political authenticity and treat performative poses as substitutes for governance.
Gallego and Brown are mistaken about much, but they are not repulsive. Conservatives can refute them and, by persuading electoral majorities, repeal or modify progressive mischief. The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for “squishes,” a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.
The current version of Moreno says: About my talk regarding the maniac, lunatic, sickening-car-accident Trump? Oh, never mind. Moreno and Lake are useful, if only as indexes of today’s political squalor. Neither, however, should be a senator.
Diane Ravitch's blog 