Jennifer Rubin was a columnist for The Washington Post who departed when publisher Jeff Bezos bent his knee to Trump. Rubin, a journalist and lawyer, knows that Trump is a dangerous demagogue. She says in this piece that Republicans complain privately about Trump but refuse to stand up to him. They will pay for their cowardice in November, as they have in every special election since Trump returned.
Republicans made a calculated bet that by indulging Donald Trump’s ill-conceived and cruel schemes (e.g., unleashing ICE on cities, tariffs, wars with Venezuela and Iran, slashing healthcare to pay for tax cuts for the rich), the country would somehow stumble through. They figured congressional Republicans would share in any successes but somehow avoid any blame when things (inevitably) went haywire. Politics rarely works out that way.
(Credit: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson)
Through Trump’s Iran War, shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, futile effort to pass a Jim Crow-style voter suppression act (the so-called SAVE Act), and inflation-aggravating tariff scheme, Republicans are discovering they are tied at the hip with Trump. Refusing to deviate from his dictates, they will bear the brunt of his serial failures.
Whether the Iran War ends this month or months from now, Republicans cannot escape responsibility for the massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars, loss of life, rise in energy costs, regional instability, and damage to alliances Trump has wrought. Congressional Republicans refused to invoke the War Powers Act — or even to conduct meaningful oversight hearings — and applauded a senseless, unconstitutional war. Now they seem prepared to rubber-stamp a preposterous demand for $200B more in war spending. Republicans will have no place to hide come November when voters come looking for politicians to blame.
The latest CBS/You Gov poll has nothing but horrendous news for the Iran war cheerleaders: 90 percent say the war will make gas prices higher in the short term, 58 percent over the long term; 63 percent predict it will weaken the economy (a plurality assume we will be in a recession); a plurality of 49 percent think the war makes us less safe; and 57 percent say the war is going badly. Some 62 percent disapprove of how Trump is handling the war. Perhaps Republicans should have fulfilled their constitutional obligations rather than contenting themselves with sitting on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, Trump’s web of lies about immigrants and voting fraud have entangled him and Republicans in a political knot. Trump’s lie about mass voting fraud drove him to insist on the unpassable voter suppression SAVE Act. He then made that a precondition for any deal to resume DHS funding. Even to Republicans, this made no sense.
When Senator John Thune (R-SD) initially recommended that Trump agree to Democrats’ proposal to pass a DHS funding bill that would pay for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard (leaving ICE funding for later negotiations), Trump rebuffed him. By Monday night, however, Trump was considering a deal to do just that, namely to fund the rest of DHS and handle funding for ICE in reconciliation.
What happened between his refusal to relent on funding and his capitulation? Trump trotted out another senseless and entirely performative maneuver: deploying ICE to airports. ICE agents, untrained for any TSA duties, stood around with virtually nothing to do (reminding one of the National Guard deployed to D.C., who largely loiter around metro stations). This underscores Republicans’ responsibility for bollixing up air travel, Trump’s feebleness in resolving messes of his own making, and the dangerous transformation of ICE into a roving street militia Trump deploys to intimidate and harass Americans.
All the ICE/airport stunt accomplished was to trigger a robust blowback from Democrats and civil society groups, demonstrating once again Trump’s talent in supercharging the Resistance. Deploring Trump’s use of ICE as his “personal dystopian police force,” Public Citizen observed: “The confluence of authoritarian overreach of this moment is striking.” The ACLU likewise condemned using ICE at airports “despite their lack of training for airport security and interactions, and their clear track record of abusing their power, including through using excessive force against citizens and immigrants alike.” (Unsurprisingly, this venture, the ACLU noted, was the first time a president “sent armed ICE agents to airports to replace trained security agents and instill fear in families and other travelers.”)
Trump’s compounding calamities have fractured Republicans internally. Cultists demand perfect fidelity to Trump on the war abroad and bullying at home; others fret that a war betrays their America First ideology and the SAVE Act is a legislative cul-de-sac that now compounds the DHS shutdown disaster. (MAGA provocateur Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has become a chief enabler of Trump’s destructive schemes, “sparking a wave of mostly private animosity from GOP colleagues who believe his plan to push through legislation overhauling how federal elections are conducted is ill-conceived and potentially harmful to the party’s chances in the midterms,” Politico reports.)
Republicans fret privately that the Trump reign of chaos, coupled with the highly unpopular war, spells doom for them in November. One is tempted to ask about the private Republican hand-wringing:
What did Republicans think would happen when they fully empowered a delusional narcissist, one who is so clearly ignorant of government and keen to pursue his own wealth and power, the country be damned?
Some dim-witted MAGA Republicans remain true believers and actually think Trump’s antics will pay off. Others know Trump is nuts and recognize the party is headed for disaster, but lack the courage to say so. They are banking that they will survive the blue wave coming in November to fight another day. Their lack of patriotism may be galling, but their self-preservation strategy looks increasingly daft.
The damage Trump and his flunkies have inflicted on our democracy will reverberate for years to come. American families may take years to recover from the economic hits. It is a small consolation that MAGA lawmakers and right-wing media stooges, who have chosen the route of cowardly compliance over constitutional duty and self-serving propaganda over truth-telling, will shoulder much of the blame. History in the long run and voters in the near term will hold Republicans fully accountable for the blunders they countenanced.
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The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
Adam Kinzinger is the Republican Congressman who was brave enough to say that Trump inspired an insurrection on January 6, 2021. He was brave enough, with Liz Cheney, to join the January 6 Committee investigating the insurrection. Both Kinzinger and Cheney were reviled by other Republicans for daring to question Trump’s lies.
On his blog, he speaks out with independence and courage. In this one, he describes the Pentagon’s splurge on delicacies and luxury items:
For years we have heard the same talking point from the Trump administration and its allies: government waste is the problem. The answer, they said, was to slash programs, dismantle agencies, and create flashy new outfits like the so-called fake agency Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — to root out fraud and save taxpayer money. The pitch was simple. Government was bloated, and adults were finally back in charge.
But the reality looks very different.
According to a watchdog analysis, the Department of Defense spent $93.4 billion on grants and contracts in September 2025 alone, with nearly half of that money spent in the final five business days of the fiscal year.
Anyone who has worked inside government understands that the end of the fiscal year can become a mad scramble to spend money before it disappears, but the scale of what happened here raises serious questions about priorities.
Some of the spending is almost comical if it weren’t real taxpayer dollars. The Pentagon spent $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $1 million on salmon in September alone. There were 272 orders of doughnuts totaling $139,224, along with $124,000 for ice cream machines and $12,000 for fruit basket stands.
That same spending spree included $60,000 for Herman Miller recliners, a $98,000 Steinway piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, and millions spent on electronics like Apple and Samsung devices. Even more staggering, the Defense Department spent $3.5 billion on cable television services.
At the same time Americans were struggling with rising grocery costs, borrowing money just to buy food, and falling behind on car payments, the Pentagon was filling shopping carts with lobster and ribeye.
What makes this particularly jarring is that this administration simultaneously dismantled programs that actually matter to people around the world. Under the banner of eliminating waste, they gutted much of the United States Agency for International Development. For decades, USAID helped prevent famine, stabilized fragile regions, and projected American compassion and leadership around the globe.
That money fed starving people.
But apparently feeding the world was wasteful. Lobster for the Pentagon was not.
I spent years in uniform flying the RC-26B surveillance aircraft with the Air Force. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t flashy. But it was effective. The aircraft supported counter-terrorism missions and provided intelligence that helped protect American troops on the ground.
In 2023, the program was cancelled.
Why? Because the Air Force didn’t want to spend about $20 million a year to keep it going.
Think about that for a moment. The entire annual cost of a program that directly supported operational missions was less than what the Pentagon spent on lobster tail in a single month. Programs that actually protect American lives were eliminated in the name of efficiency, while luxury purchases and end-of-year spending binges rolled on.
This is the fundamental problem with the politics of “waste.” The loudest critics of government spending are often the least interested in actually fixing it. They are interested in headlines and ideological targets. Programs that help poor people or foreign populations are easy political punching bags. Quiet spending inside the defense bureaucracy is not.
Now, a quick aside. Yearly budgeting and spending can be difficult. Let’s just take my personal Congressional budget per year of around $1.3 million. That covered everything from salaries, new printers, paper, and correspondence, to travel. If I went over my budget for the year, I was personally on the hook for the overspending. So naturally, we saved a lot of expenses for the end of the fiscal year so that we could make sure we stayed within the allowance. Some end of year splurging is understood, but this amount from DOD? Simply insane.
Real fiscal responsibility is not about cutting programs that feed the hungry or abandoning alliances that stabilize the world. It’s about making serious choices about priorities.
If the government wants to talk about waste, we should start with the billions spent on furniture, electronics, luxury food, and end-of-year spending sprees that do little to strengthen national security.
Because the truth is simple.
We didn’t stop feeding the world to save money.
We stopped feeding the world so someone else could buy lobster.
As many of you know, I was born and raised in Texas. I grew up in Houston, third of eight children. I went to public schools, then to college in Massachusetts. I have never stopped being a Texan. I live in Brooklyn now but a part of my heart will always be in Texas. So I keep a close watch over developments in my home state.
The victories of James Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for Governor put Texas Democrats in a good position to turn Texas blue.
Gina Hinojosa coasted to victory in the Democratic primary over seven opponents. Soon after the polls closed, she had 61% of the vote. She will face incumbent Greg Abbot in November.
Talarico won the primary by 52.8% to Crockett’s 45.9%.
(Full disclosure: I contributed to all three campaigns.)
Talarico was a member of the state legislature. He has studied theology and is working towards a Master of Divinity at the Austin Presbyterian Seminary. He hopes to win independents and Trump voters with his deep religious faith and his rhetoric of love and reconciliation.
Under Governor Greg Abbot–now seeking his fourth term–Texas became an extreme MAGA state. Abbot echoes whatever Trump says , or says it first. Abbot is mean and has a stone heart.
Gina Hinojosa swept the Democratic primary for Governor. She is smart, articulate, beautiful, and Hispanic. One of the reasons that Democrats have not won a statewide office since 1994 is low turnout and growing Hispanic support for Trump. Gina was a featured speaker at the last conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, and she was wonderful! As she explains in her PBS interview, strengthening neighborhood public schools is her top priority.
The Republicans running for Senate will compete in a May run-off. Jon Cornyn, the incumbent, is a reliable vote for Trump but not really MAGA. He seems like a moderate Republican who votes with Trump to protect his hide. Cornyn is running for his fifth term.
His opponent Ken Paxton is Attorney General of Texas, and it’s fair to say that he’s been scarred by scandals. His wife is a state senator. He cheated on her. Some of his staff blew the whistle on him and said he took payoffs from men he was investigating. The Republican House impeached him; the Republican Senate cleared him, thanks to generous donations by hard-right MAGA billionaires.
Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff in May.
Talarico will be a strong candidate for the Senate. Hinojosa will be a strong candidate against Abbot, if Texans are sufficiently sick of pay-to-play politics.
The outcome will depend on turnout. Right now, Texas is run by a handful of oil billionaires. They want low taxes and minimal public services. They are Christian nationalists who love money and power.
If Talarico can attract the support of non-MAGA Republicans and if Gina can bring Hispanic voters to the polls, Texas will flip blue.
See Gina Hinojosa speaking at the Network for Public Education conference in April 2025, before the Republican-dominated Texas legislature passed vouchers. The passage of vouchers happened only after Governor Abbot primaried anti-voucher Republicans with the millions given him by billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania.
See Talarico on how the worst people quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day and then violate his teachings every other day of the year.
Talarico on Christian nationalists, who–he says–are “more committed to the love of power than to the power of love.”
I love these two and will support them both. There will be a tidal wave of money pouring into Texas Republican coffers from other states to try to stop these two exciting Democrats!
Blogger Meg White posted on her WordPress blog (@reflectionsined) about Senator Bernie Sanders’ opposition to vouchers, which are overwhelmingly used by students who are already enrolled in private schools and are free to discriminate. The Trump administration has passed voucher legislation and is encouraging the spread of vouchers. In theory, vouchers enable poor students to transfer to better schools. In practice and in reality, vouchers are a subsidy for the rich.
Meg is an advocate for public schools and co-author of a valuable book about desegregation in New Orleans and how it affected one school: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans.
Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) released a report that addresses the federal school voucher program. In the report, Sanders charges that “The Trump administration’s school privatization agenda threatens our nation’s public schools and harms working-class students, students with disabilities, and students from diverse religious backgrounds” (forbes.com). Sanders is a ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP).
Sanders said, “President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America: private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely under-funded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable. This report makes clear that vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion, and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America. Trump’s voucher program will only make a bad situation even worse(sanders.senate.gov).
The report analyzed state-level school voucher programs, including 111 SGOs and 1,600 voucher-accepting private schools across eleven states.
The report finds that school voucher programs:
Subsidize private education for the rich. School vouchers, on average, cover just 39% of middle school private school tuition across the sampled states. Even with a private school voucher, tuition prices are often out of reach for working-class families, meaning that the vouchers function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education.
Allow private schools to systematically deny admission to students with disabilities, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities or charge extra tuition. While public schools must provide all students with the same opportunities to learn and excel, 48% of private schools analyzed in this report choose not to provide all students with disabilities with the services, protections and rights provided to those students in public schools under the IDEA.
Enable private schools to discriminate against students based on their religion. This report finds that despite the fundamental right of freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution, voucher programs benefit private schools that discriminate against students based on their religious beliefs. Specifically, 17% of private schools reviewed in this report charge different tuition rates based on the family’s religious beliefs.
Benefit private schools that lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements. Fewer than half of states reviewed require private schools to be accredited, while even fewer require student learning assessments. Unacceptably, only two states require teacher credentials in private schools receiving vouchers (sanders.senate.gov).
“Bottom line, in my view, we should be strengthening and expanding public education, the foundation of American democracy, where Black and White and Latino, rich and poor kids come together in one room” rather than privatizing public education, Sanders said (k-12.com).
The report comes ahead of a HELP Committee hearing where Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia will testify about the harms of private school vouchers in her state, which has the nation’s largest universal school voucher program and is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation. The state is now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers, while public schools are being forced to shut down (sanders.senate.gov).Researchers found that the use of vouchers in Arizona is highest in affluent school districts, and lowest in poorer school districts. More than half of voucher students came from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Most of those students have never attended public schools (azmirror.com).
After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children. But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected. When students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised. “On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education” (msn.com). in 2023, of the 122,895 new students who signed up for vouchers, 69% (84,505) were already in private school, 13% (16,096) came from public schools, and the remainder were new kindergarteners (ncpecoalition.org).
According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in the state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher (ncpecoalition.org).
Most students in Indiana’s voucher program come from well-off families. During the 2022-2023 school year, voucher recipients were more likely to come from families that made more than $100,000 per year than families that made less than $50,000 per year (the74million.org).
Since Ohio expanded its voucher program to wealthy families, the percentage of low-income students using vouchers in Cleveland fell from 35% to 7%. Now, most Ohio voucher students did not attend public schools before they took a voucher: the percentage of voucher students statewide who had already attended a private school in the year prior jumped from 7% in 2019 to almost 55% in 2023 (ncpecoalition.org).
State-provided data shows that about two-thirds of students receiving vouchers in Iowa’s new statewide program were already attending private schools before getting taxpayer money for tuition. Only about 13% of voucher recipients had ever previously attended a public school (ncpecoalition.org).
Savannah Newhouse, Department of Education Press Secretary commented, “Opponents of President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit are quick to lecture about equity and fairness, but they’re fighting to keep families trapped in failing government-run schools and environments that don’t meet kids’ needs. The reality is this historic tax credit, funded entirely from private philanthropic dollars, puts parents in the driver’s seat—supporting scholarships that can be used for tutoring at public schools, tuition, and essential services for students with disabilities. Expanding school choice levels the playing field so that every family, no matter their income or needs, can better prepare their child for success”. (forbes.com).
Sure, because it’s working so well.
Public Schools in the U.S. educate 90% of the children. Strengthening and supporting public education is essential to maintaining a fair and equitable society. As Sanders’ report illustrates, universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy, leaving working-class families behind. Diverting billions of dollars to unregulated private schools not only creates massive budget shortfalls but also destabilizes neighborhood schools that serve the vast majority of American children.
These are my reflections for today.
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All my life I have heard Republicans lecture about the importance of small government. They said that government should not try to control people, other than protecting their rights. A Republican named William Weld ran for Governor of Massachusetts on a pledge to get government out of our wallets and out of our bedrooms. For decades, Southern Republicans complained about the federal government intruding into “internal” issues like segregation.
How things have changed!
Under today’s Republican Party, the federal government assumes the power to snoop on you at all times.
A blogger who calls herself @JofromJerz posted the following sage observation on Substack:
Republicans want to decide what books you can read, what history your kids can learn, which medicines you’re allowed to take, what surgeries you can have, what gender you’re permitted to be, what sports you can play, which bathroom you can use, who you can love, and who you can marry.
They want to tell you how many dolls and pencils your kids can have and how much food they can eat.
They want to own your library, your classroom, your hospital bed, your bedroom, your remote control, your kitchen table, and your front door.
They want the right to break into your home, disappear your neighbor, take your children, beat you, execute you in the street, and then tell you—despite the evidence of your own eyes and ears—that what you saw is not what you have seen.
They want you afraid: afraid to record, to document, to criticize, to stand up, to speak out, to organize, to protest, to protect, to utter words they don’t like. They want to own the page, the pill, the joke, the chant, the kiss, the very pronoun in your mouth and the weapon on your waist. They want to decide where you can go, what you can say, and which of your rights they can take away.
They want the power to take your life and then lie about it.
They want to play judge, jury, and executioner and they want you to shut up about it or you’ll be next.
This is tyranny failing miserably to masquerade as order.
But sure—tell me how it’s the liberals who are “coming for your freedoms,” won’t you.
Garry Rayno, veteran journalist, reports on the latest Republican plan to defund public schools in New Hampshire. They are moving quickly to enact a plan that will fatten rich districts and impoverish poor districts. They have already passed a voucher plan without income limits; the overwhelming majority of students taking vouchers were already attending private schools. in other words, state welfare for the rich.
Rayno writes in IndepthNH.com:
What’s the hurry?
Last week the Senate was in a hurry to pass two bills that will significantly harm the majority of school districts and students in public schools, while property wealthy districts and well-to-do families will benefit, all in the name of school choice.
The plan is to have the House agree Thursday to the amended version of House Bill 751, which would allow a New Hampshire public school student to enroll in any other public school in the state rather than the school where he or she lives.
The Republican controlled House is expected to concur or agree to the Senate amendment, sending the bill to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk for her action.
The bill would go into effect immediately instead of next school year as Senate Bill 101 would do, which is nothing more than an attempt to cut short the beating a similar plan has already taken at deliberative sessions in annual school district meetings around the state.
Something this complicated needs more than a few weeks to implement or it will create chaos and uncertainty.
As it stands, the open enrollment plan would make property poor school districts donor communities to property wealthy communities while increasing per student costs for the poorer districts and lowering the per student costs for the wealthier districts.
This really is Robin Hood in reverse.
And this bill is way more financially harmful to poorer communities than a $5,000 grant through the Education Freedom Account program as school districts would owe other districts tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The open enrollment plan would exacerbate the already alarming inequities between the schools in property wealthy communities and those in property poor cities and towns.
To add insult to injury, any shifting of schools for children from poor families will be out of reach because their parents cannot afford transportation or the difference in per student costs they would have to pay if their school district spends less per student than the school their child wants to attend.
The best and well-to-do will be able to go to schools in Bedford, Bow, Amherst, New Ipswich, Rye, Hanover, etc. but the majority of students will be in school districts with declining state aid as it follows the child after the first year and their parents will face ever increasing property tax bills.
This plan is not something that should be fast-tracked, unless you want to destroy public education, which is the goal of the Republican majority in the Legislature.
Under the plan, school districts would have to determine the capacity of the school and the grade levels and update the information each month.
Unlike current law, school districts do not have to vote to approve participating in open enrollment because the state says they shall participate.
The parents of a student living outside the district could apply to attend a different school anywhere in the state if there is a vacancy and the student has not been a disciplinary problem or been expelled from his or her resident school or has a history of chronic absenteeism.
Receiving schools are prohibited from making admission decisions based on “grade or age levels, pupil needs, areas of academic focus, aptitude, academic or athletic achievement.”
Now for the fun part, the home district of the student would pay the receiving district its average per pupil costs, which are determined annually by the Department of Education.
If the sending district’s per-pupil costs are less than the receiving school’s, the parents would have to make up the difference.
It appears if the sending school’s per-pupil costs are more than the receiving school’s, that amount of money would be sent to the receiving school.
Remember the outrage over donor communities, over property taxes raised in one community being sent to another community’s schools, this will make property poor communities donor towns to property wealthy communities who most likely have nicer facilities, better paid teachers and more activities and programs for their students.
It is still exporting property taxes raised in one community to another community’s school district.
The likely scenario is that students whose parents have the economic ability will be enrolled in the better school districts in the state.
That will do two things: It will provide more revenue to a school district that already has a significant tax base, while lowering the money for the student’s home district.
It also will increase the cost per student for that district because there will be a lower number of students, while decreasing the per-pupil costs for the receiving district because there are more pupils.
Analysis by Reaching Higher NH indicates over time, the per-pupil cost of the sending district will be more than the receiving district.
The organization uses the towns of Newport and Sunapee and the scenario of five students leaving Newport each year for Sunapee schools over a five-year period.
The per-pupil cost in Newport is $29,290 and the cost in Sunapee is $31,464.
Newport would have to send Sunapee $146,450 and each family would pay $2,174 to make up the difference, and Sunapee nets $157,320.
The bill allows districts to negotiate to lower the tuition by 80 percent and if that occurs each parent would have to pay $8,032.
During the five-year period, Newport’s per-pupil costs would rise to about $34,000 per pupil and Sunapee would go down to about $29,800.
“Within four years, and after the migration of 20 students, Newport’s cost per-pupil has surpassed Sunapee’s cost per-pupil. The good news for transferring parents is they no longer have to pay out of pocket to cover the difference. The bad news for Newport and its taxpayers is that the bill from Sunapee keeps getting larger, since the cost of open enrollment is tied to the sending district’s cost per pupil,” according to the analysis on the group’s website.
The state school aid, as little as it is, about 22 percent, would follow the child to Sunapee after the first year because the child is now included in the Average Daily Attendance of the Sunapee school district not Newport’s.
What this plan does not do is add one cent to state public education aid, although New Hampshire provides the least amount of state aid of any state in the country including Mississippi or Alabama.
While New Hampshire pays 22 percent, the national average is 47 percent, which is more than double.
If New Hampshire paid the national average, about $1 billion dollars would come off of local property tax bills.
But even with two recent court cases finding the state has failed to live up to its constitutional obligation to provide its students with an adequate education and to pay for it, lawmakers have yet to do anything to address that, any more than they have in the three decades since the original Claremont lawsuit ruling.
Instead Republican lawmakers have voted to ban books; divisive concepts; diversity, equality and inclusiveness’ made record keeping more onerous and repetitive; will spend $112 million this biennium mostly benefiting kids already in religious and private schools, or homeschooled; sought a statewide school budget cap; failed to provide enough money for special education and building costs, sending the bill to local property taxpayers; cut businesses taxes largely benefiting multinationals and large corporation; eliminated the state’s only progressive tax on interest and dividends; and everything else they could do to destroy public education, as they appear to agree with the chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, that public schools are leftist indoctrination centers.
This open enrollment plan is the latest in a long line of distractions from the one thing the legislature legally has to do: Pay for a constitutionally adequate education for the state’s students.
Supporters of the open enrollment plan call it a market approach to education. That would be fine if there were a level playing field, but there is not.
The education funding system they don’t want to change has sentenced the students and taxpayers of the property poor communities to higher taxes and a less than adequate education creating an economic death spiral.
Yet those who can afford a private or religious school education are given state subsidies at taxpayer expense that include season passes to Gunstock and tuition to religious summer camps.
The Legislature’s first job should be to provide an adequate education to the state’s students and pay for it. That should be the first priority, not an afterthought.
The Associated Press reports that Republicans in Congress released a bipartisan budget bill that funds the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The bill ignores Trump’s efforts to rename it as the Trump Kennedy Center. The bill also ignores Trump’s desire to rename the Center’s opera house for his wife Melania. (Who knew Melania is a patron of opera?)
So Republicans are willing to stand up to Trump on small matters like name-change but not on major issues like his rejecting Congressional authority over going to war and kidnapping the President of another nation. Actually the name-change might mean more to the egotistical Trump.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump may have his name on the building, but it’s still the Kennedy Center to Congress.
A bipartisan spending package released Monday by House Speaker Mike Johnson includes $32 million for operating expenses at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through Sept. 30, 2027.
Trump made a series of leadership changes at the center shortly after he took office in 2025 that ended with the Republican president’s handpicked board of trustees voting in December to rebrand the venue as the Trump Kennedy Center by adding his name to Kennedy’s on the exterior of the building and the website.
The Kennedy Center said the vote recognized Trump’s work to revitalize an institution he had criticized as being too liberal-leaning. But since he took over the center, numerous artists have canceled appearances, ticket sales and attendance have fallen, and viewership for December’s broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors program — which he predicted would soar because he was the host — was down by about 35% compared to the 2024 show.
This is an important development. Our nation needs at least two sensible political parties. A two-party system with vigorous third parties is healthy for our democracy.
When one of our two major parties is captured by an extremists cult, it’s a very bad sign. When that cult revels in cutting ties with our historic allies, in brutalizing immigrants and even citizens who look like immigrants (brown skin color), in sending troops to American cities, in killing people on boats that might or might not be transporting drugs instead interdicting them, in abandoning civil rights laws, and in treating the president as a king to be obeyed and worshipped, that cult is not a normal participant in American politics because it is not bound by the Constitution.
Thus, in my opinion, it is very good news that sane conservatives are abandoning the Heritage Foundation–whose leader was the architect of Project 2025–and joining forces with Mike Pence.
Pence is a conservative through and through, and I disagree with him on most issues. But in 2020, he refused Trump’s direct order to join the insurrection by refusing to certify Biden’s election. Pence certified Biden’s election and was reviled by MAGA for following the Constitution, not Trump. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence” on January 6, 2021, and even built a scaffold outside the U.S. Capitol. Trump shrugged with indifference, and the mob searched for Pence.
More than a dozen staffers at The Heritage Foundation are leaving the conservative think tank to join a nonprofit led by former Vice President Mike Pence as the embattled organization continues to reel from ongoing turmoil.
Advancing American Freedom — founded by Pence in 2021 “to defend liberty and advance policies that build a stronger America” — announced Monday that three senior officials who led the legal, economic and data teams at Heritage would be joining the group next year, along with several members of their teams.
This is good news for the conservative Republican Party and good news for our democracy. Genuine conservatives can’t abide the extremism of MAGA.
I’ll be watching to see what Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger do in the future.
It’s typical in American politics that the party that wins the Presidency usually loses the mid-term elections two years later. The other party picks up seats, sometimes enough seats to dominate one or both Houses, enough to stymie the President’s agenda and enough to hold investigations that embarrass the President.
With Trump’s low standing in the polls, the rising cost of living, the backlash against tariffs, and the evident cruelty of ICE, Republicans have worried about an electoral wipeout in November 2026.
Some clever Republican strategist devised a plan to protect the Republican dominance in the House of Representatives. Simple. Persuade red states to redistrict (gerrymander) their Congressional maps, creating more Republican seats while eliminating Democratic seats. This was out of the ordinary, because states usually redistrict every ten years, after the latest census.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a loyal MAGAT, was first to act. He pushed through a new map that split up Democratic districts and created five new Republican seats. The U.S. Supreme Court supported the Trump goal, as usual, and approved the Texas gerrymander.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California was quick to respond. He called a referendum that would redistrict the state and produce five new Democratic seats. Newsom’s new map is being changed in the Supreme Court, but it’s difficult to see the Court approving the Texas gerrymander while rejecting California’s.
The administration began pressuring other red state governors to follow the lead of Texas. Some Democratic states set about redrawing their maps.
Indiana is a deep-red state with a Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Republicans hold seven Congressional districts, Democrats only two. Trump wanted those two seats.
The Trump operatives thought the state leaders would quickly fall in line. When they didn’t, the Trump operatives decided to unleash their usual tools: bullying, pressure, threats, intimidation, even death threats. At least 14 Republican state senators received death threats.
INDIANAPOLIS — As the redistricting battle began to pick up steam in Indiana last month, state Sen. Jean Leising’s grandchildren were receiving odd text messages.
Ads from little-known outside groups had spliced the longtime Republican lawmaker’s image next to prominent Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some of the messaging was sloppy, referring to Leising as “him.”
A conservative and supporter of President Donald Trump, Leising, 76, was furious. Following months of conversations with her constituents, she felt they were generally opposed to redrawing Indiana’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — even though such an effort would favor her party and was backed by her president. So in mid-November, she fired off a statement making it official: She wouldn’t support it.
“The negative campaigning just put me over the top,” she said in an interview with 13WTHR in Indianapolis, an NBC News affiliate, at the time. “He may wonder why Indiana is struggling to get on board. Well, it’s probably the antics they used.”
It was a sign of things to come. Ultimately, the months of pressure applied by Trump and his supporters from outside of Indiana to pass a redrawn map that would split up the state’s two Democratic districts backfired. On Thursday, Leising joined a majority of Republicans in the state Senate in voting to sink the map in the face of potential future primary challenges, a flurry of online attacks — and in some cases, violent threats.
The result was one of the biggest rejections that Trump, who has otherwise largely ruled over the GOP with an iron fist, has faced since returning to office, and it could cost the party in its bid to preserve its narrow House majority….
“You have to know Hoosiers. We can’t be bullied, we don’t like it,” GOP state Sen. Sue Glick said after voting against the map.
Despite intense lobbying by Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnston, Republican leaders in the state were not enthusiastic. They resented the pressure.
When Rodric Bray, the leading Republican in the State Senate, warned that there were not enough votes to pass the new map, Trump lashed out at him. He threatened to run an opponent to Bray, but Bray didn’t tremble because he’s not up for re-election until 2028.
Trump wrote on Truth Social:
“In the entire United States of America, Republican or Democrat, only Indiana ‘Republican’ State Senator Rod Bray, a Complete and Total RINO, is opposed to redistricting for purposes of gaining additional Seats in Congress,” Trump wrote in one Truth Social post of the well-liked Republican leader in the Senate. “The Rod Brays of Politics are WEAK and PATHETIC.”
When the vote shifted to the State Senate, the map was resoundingly defeated, 19-31, with 21 Republicans voting against it.
Trump lost the vote of one State Senator when he called Tim Walz “retards.” The State Senator has a child with Down Syndrome. Others said they would not be bullied.
Diane Ravitch's blog 