Adam Friedman of Tennessee Outlook wrote about the flood of dark money pouring into Tennessee to defeat legislators who oppose school choice, both moderate Republicans and Democrats. The biggest money is coming from Charles Koch (Americans for Prosperity).
Archives for category: Republicans
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a compelling piece about the challenges we face in the year leading up to the 2024 election. The media keeps warning us about ominous polls, about the dangers of Trump, about Biden potentially losing this or that demographic. Trump seems to be driven by two goals: 1) to stay out of prison (as president, he could pardon himself for federal crimes, not state convictions); and 2) the chance to wreak vengeance on his enemies.
Richardson wrote:
Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.
One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.
Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”
Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memoputs it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”
Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)
Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism.
MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”
In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.
Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him.
In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”
Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”
Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.
Mothers Against Greg Abbott is celebrating because Governor Gregg Abbott’s voucher proposal—his highest priority—was defeated for the fifth time this year. Once, in the regular legislative session, then again and again and again and again in four special sessions.
Abbott offered bribes: more funding for public schools, a pay raise for teachers—but the bribes didn’t persuade the rural Republicans who saw vouchers as a threat to their small community public schools.
Abbott threatened to primary Republicans who didn’t vote for vouchers. That didn’t work either. Now the Moms (MAGA!) have to go back to work to get their public schools funded.
This is their message, issued within hours after vouchers went down for the fifth time:
From Mothers Against Greg Abbott:
The Texas House has just voted down school vouchers.
This is a huge victory for Texas public schools… and for mothers, and others, like us. Today’s victory wouldn’t have been possible without the help you provided over the last several months. We asked you to help us support public schools, and you stepped up time and again.
Our hard work paid off.
I don’t want to spike the football to celebrate our success. Not least because our public schools might not have a football to spike if the voucher plan had succeeded. (Yes, I know that spiking the football in a high school game is a 15-yard penalty, but let’s go with the metaphor...)
The same people who tried to strip our public schools of funding, and to give that money to rich private schools instead, aren’t going away. They will be back.
And so will we: We defended our public schools today, and we will defend them again.
At Mothers Against Greg Abbott, we believe in high quality, free public education for our children. We support our public school teachers and our public school children. And we won’t let a handful of anti-school activists steal our children’s futures from us.
We’re here in support of public education, and we aren’t going anywhere. The next time public education is on the legislative table, we’ll be there to defend it.
We won’t spike the football then either. We’ll celebrate because our public schools will still be there — to educate our children, to help them become our future leaders, to create the civic engagement that we all need.
And, yes, to give our kids a football, a softball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a baseball, a basketball, arts programs, orchestra, school plays, reading specialists, school counselors, beloved school librarians, and so much more.
With love for our public schools and our public school educators,
Nancy Thompson, Founder
Mothers Against Greg Abbott
This week, our Mothers For Democracy Institute shares the mic with YOU this week on the newest episode of The Voucher Scam!
Hosts Claire O’Neal and Nichole Abshire ask listeners this week to share their love of public schools and their worries about vouchers. With today’s VICTORY on school vouchers in the Texas House, there is no better time to start streaming. Tune in to the conversation, here ›››
And, if you like what you hear, shoot over a donation and help support our podcast series.
Mothers for Democracy Institute is a 501(c)(3) and
donations are Tax Deductible. We just launched our podcast series The Voucher Scam, but we more planned for 2024 to further support democracy and civics education. And we
would love your support.
https://bit.ly/voucherscam
Mothers For Democracy / Mothers Against Greg Abbott is the largest coalition dedicated to defeating the extremist MAGA movement in Texas. While we don’t agree on every topic, we all agree the Texas GOP isn’t Texas values.
Since 2021, we’ve been helping lead the Democratic resistance in Texas, we’ve organized thousands of local voters and our public issue campaigns have reached millions of Texans in key battleground areas. Now, we’re backed by thousands of Texas parents who are mobilizing in their own neighborhoods to ensure the Texas we hand over to the next generation is better than the one we’ve inherited.
We’re sick and tired of being linked to a handful of extremist MAGA spokesmen—divisive politicians like Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz. We know it’s going to take all of us to defeat them this election cycle. The power of mothers and others like us means we know we can do it: It’s time for democracy to prevail.
100% of our work is powered by individual donations and our average donation is just $23. We can’t stop until our children have the future they deserve. So this election cycle, we’re taking down Ted Cruz and dozens more of his Texas MAGA cronies. With you by our side, we’ll deliver the kind of leadership everyone living in Texas can be proud of.
The Texas House of Representatives met in special session for the fourth time, called together by Governor Greg Abbott specifically to pass voucher legislation. The House voted to strip vouchers out of HB1.
Rural Republicans sunk the voucher program, joined by every Democrat.
The vote to kill vouchers passed by 84-63.
Those opposed to vouchers included 21 Republicans, which was 25% of all Republicans in the House.
The vote for vouchers was 63 Republicans and 0 Democrats.
Will Governor Abbott understand? Vouchers will not pass. Rural Republicans support their public schools.
I don’t know how Thom Hartmann does it. He puts out one brilliantly researched article after another, connecting the dots and explaining why our country and our democracy are in trouble. The Democrats want to build a sturdy safety net; the Republicans want everyone to fend for himself or herself. If you are rich, the Republican formula works; if you are not, you are in trouble. It’s amazing that so many who rely on government programs give their vote to a party pledged to kill those programs.
He writes:
In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation.
While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow.
Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life.
Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.
A new study published by the National Academy of Sciences in the journal PNAS Nexus looked at “excess deaths” (they called them “missing Americans”) in our country versus others around the world. The researchers from Boston University School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School and TH Chan School of Public Health found:
“The United States had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s–1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the United States began experiencing a steady increase in the number of missing Americans, reaching 622,534 in 2019 alone.”
The excess deaths, it turns out, are almost all entirely the result of Republican policies, both at the federal and state level.
The researchers found:
“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality. A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment.
“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people.
And it’s worse in Red states:
“Increasingly divergent policies at the state level have resulted in widening health gaps across US states. In those geographic areas of the United States where excess mortality has increased the most, voters have turned towards policy-makers who have further undermined population health, e.g. through refusal to expand Medicaid or to implement firearm regulations.”
While not coming right out and saying that people live longer in Blue states than Red states, that’s largely what the study found. And it’s not a small effect:
“In 2021, there were 26.4 million years of life lost due to excess US mortality relative to peer nations…”
While President Eisenhower ran for re-election in 1956 by bragging about how on his watch millions more Americans had gotten good union jobs or signed up for Social Security, by 1981, when Reagan took office, the 1978 efforts of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to legalize political bribery were beginning to seriously take hold.
That’s when everything changed. Since 1981, millions of Americans have died unnecessarily because of neoliberal austerity policies: their lives were sacrificed on the altars of increased corporate profits and lower taxes for billionaires.
— Reagan told us that the “union bosses” were just out for themselves and the best thing American workers could do was to rely on their employers’ good will. He also claimed that the minimum wage actually hurt low-wage workers because, he said, it prevented employers from hiring more people.
Both were lies, as history has vividly shown, and both contributed to our epidemic of early and unnecessary deaths, as Red state minimum wages are still as low as $7.25/hour and Red “Right to Work for Less” states make it nearly impossible to unionize.
“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.
— The Republican backlash to Obamacare extending Medicaid to everybody in the country wasn’t limited to their lawsuit before the Supreme Court that ended up letting Red states opt out of coverage, or to the Astroturf “Tea Party” movement funded by rightwing billionaires.
— To this day, more than a decade later, there are still a dozen Red states that have taken the five Republican justices up on their offer and refuse to expand the program. Those Republican-controlled states have also thrown hundreds of bureaucratic roadblocks to people getting any kind of state services, from food stamps to unemployment insurance to housing assistance.
“A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.
— A collaborative research project between the University of Texas and the University of Toronto published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the Red state preference for deregulation and a lack of oversight:
“…explained 9.2% of an enrollee’s odds of receiving prolonged opioids… The correlation between a county’s Republican presidential vote and the adjusted rate of … prolonged opioid use was 0.42 (P<.001). In the 693 counties with adjusted rates of opioid prescription significantly higher than the mean county rate, the mean Republican presidential vote was 59.96%, vs 38.67% in the 638 counties with significantly lower rates.”
— Cancer alley is alive and well in Texas and Louisiana thanks to Republican governments’ in those states refusal to enforce environmental regulations that would keep carcinogens out of the air and water.
— A child living in Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from gunshot than a child in Massachusetts because Republicans in Mississippi refuse to adopt rational, constitutional gun control regulations like Massachusetts has had for decades.
— Obesity and the diabetes, heart disease, and strokes associated with it are vastly more prevalent and thus deadly in Red states than Blue states because so many more people are living in poverty in Red states and junk food is cheaper than healthy food.
— Twenty-nine states, encompassing virtually all the nation’s Red states, have no state-level workplace safety agencies; those only exist in 21 mostly Blue states. As a result, Red Wyoming has 10.4 workplace deaths per 100,000 workers while Blue Rhode Island only has 1.0 deaths per 100,000 workers.
“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people” wrote the researchers about unnecessary/early deaths in America.
When The Washington Post looked into the differences between Red and Blue states, what they found was shocking.
For example, noted the authors:
“Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.”
While it would be easy and glib to say that Republican politicians want the citizens of their states to die young, the simple truth is that they don’t care: their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states and keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low.
Author Mark Jacob noted on Xitter:
“Voting for Republicans is like eating poison.”
In fact, eating poison is a choice. Most people trapped in Red states, though, don’t have the means or ability to move to a Blue state because they’ve been denied a good education, are saddled with medical debt, and/or haven’t made enough at their work to afford the transition.
Blue states, for their part, are fighting back on behalf of their citizens. As Bernie’s poverty advisor Nikhil Goyal wrote for The New York Times:
“Fourteen [Blue] states have adopted a state-level child tax credit, with many featuring a fully refundable provision so that families with little to no income can benefit. This year, New Mexico has expanded free preschool seats and made child care free for families earning up to four times the federal poverty rate — roughly $120,000 for a family of four.
“In the upcoming fiscal year, Minnesota will pour more than $250 million of additional funding into early childhood education to reduce the costs of child care and create thousands of new preschool slots. This includes $10 million to supplement funding of the federal Head Start program, which serves children up to the age of 5 and should be bolstered by states.
“Today, nine [Blue] states have universal free school breakfast and lunch on the books. Just last month, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, established a $20 million initiative that will help fund grocery stores in food deserts.”
But every action draws a reaction, as Isaac Newton was quick to point out. Republicans are now trying to do to Blue states — to all of America — the same damage they’ve done to Red states over the past 40 years.
In the eleven months since Republicans have taken control of the US House of Representatives, child poverty in America has doubled. This is because Republicans in the House refused to renew programs Democrats put in place providing health care, food assistance, housing support, the child tax credit, and subsidized child care: all have now expired.
In the past 40 days, 3.2 million children lost access to healthcare, 70,000 childcare and preschool programs have closed, and the child tax credit has expired. So have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments. As of yesterday, 10,046,000 Americans have been kicked off Medicaid, nearly all in Red states.
And it’s all intentional.
Republicans will proudly tell you it’s necessary to keep taxes low on their billionaire donors, and to prevent poor people from becoming “lazy.” Speaker MAGA Mark Johnson will tell you that it’s the Christian way, just like trashing queer people and forcing 10-year-old rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term.
Welcome to the 2023 GOP and their plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” and drag America back to the 19th century.
Mark Jacob was right about the poison part. But instead of Republican voters eating it, their politicians are determined to force it down the throats of all of us, our children, and our grandchildren.
The Houston Chronicle published a stunning editorial denouncing the voucher legislation that Governor Abbott demands. Abbott has called four special sessions of the Legislature, and so far rural Republicans have blocked vouchers. Now the Governor threatens to run a candidate in the primary against every Republican who opposes vouchers. Why the pressure? To satisfy two billionaires.
The editorial board writes:
In March, when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the state’s new school voucher program into law, she repeated several talking points that advocates use to justify using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school tuition.
“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty,” said Sanders. “We’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings.”
Arkansas tried to avoid the pitfalls of some other states’ voucher programs. Participating private schools would have to select a standardized test to use — a small measure of, if not accountability, at least transparency. Likewise, the schools must prove they are accredited or working toward accreditation. And the state set eligibility requirements that should have helped target funds toward the neediest students, including those in foster care, enrolled in failing public schools, experiencing homelessness or living with a disability.
But in the first annual report on the program since its launch, the state found that of the more than 4,700 participants, nearly all were either new students enrolling in kindergarten or existing private school students.
The promise of transforming the lives of poor students trapped in failing public schools hasn’t materialized. Instead, the state has taken on significant new costs to fund both existing public school students and voucher recipients.
SPECIAL SESSION: School vouchers, border bills fall short as Gov. Abbott calls fourth session
From what we can see, Texas lawmakers — whom Gov. Greg Abbott called abruptly back into special session Tuesday for the fourth time this year — have worked to craft school voucher bills that also seek to avoid some of the worst abuses seen in other states. Bills have included some degree of required testing, fraud guardrails, effective enrollment caps and prioritization for lower-income students and those with disabilities. There have also been sweeteners for folks planning to stay in public schools: an increase in the per-student allotment and one-time teacher bonuses, among others. As voucher bills go, the House version proposed last special session was one of the most palatable around.
It still wasn’t good enough for Abbott, who continues to push for a more universal program.
And it isn’t good enough for us, either. Because there is no such thing as a good voucher bill. Not the bill passed by the Senatethat would create $8,000 vouchers nor the one that, for the first time this year, made it through the House committee Friday that would offer students $10,500 annually to attend private schools. Even seemingly benign or narrowly tailored bills have a way of ballooning in cost and generating underwhelming results.
Not only have wide-scale voucher programs largely failed to produce resounding academic improvements for participants, states have consistently seen the programs benefit existing private school students, whose parents most likely could already afford the tuition. They don’t really benefit the struggling public school students often used to sell them.
In Arkansas, restrictions meant to target students with disabilities have been almost meaningless after the state lowered its standards for approval. Investigative reporting there revealed that some of the 44% of students who were granted vouchers based on disabilities had as little as a doctor’s note worth of documentation. Here in Texas, the current House version — an omnnibus school spending bill with education savings accounts wedged inside like a booby trap waiting to spring — makes clear that students who are currently in private schools would still be eligible for the voucher.
TOMLINSON: Texas school vouchers would be financially ruinous, fundamentally unfair or quite likely, both
Then there’s the price tag. The estimated price of the Senate’s voucher program put forward in the previous session was $500 million for the first year.
But buyer beware, that’s just the first year. What voucher advocates want is a foot in the door. And within two or three budget cycles, the number of participants will soar and — more than likely — all those careful (or not so careful) restrictions meant to narrow the program would disappear.
“They’re telling you you’ve got an interest free payment: You can sign up to get vouchers for the next, say, two, three budget cycles. And then the price tag really comes due,” said Josh Cowen, a policy analyst and professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He has been following voucher bills — often nearly identical ones — working their way through state legislatures and sees a cautionary tale in Arkansas.
While some districts may feel the loss of public funding, the real threat, Cowen explains, is that this program will end up helping existing private school families. Meaning the state — and you, dear taxpayer — will be on the hook for two systems.
There are many reasons to oppose vouchers: They don’t guarantee academic improvements; they’ve been shown to increase segregation; they don’t protect the legal rights of students with disabilities in private schools that can discriminate against them; they use public dollars to support private and often religious instruction.
Lawmakers can nip and tuck to address some concerns. But there’s not much they can do to make vouchers less economically disastrous or to slake the thirst of deep-pocketed, pro-voucher advocates pouring in buckets of dollars. Those Wilks and Dunn types aren’t funding this because they want to help low-income students escape failing public schools. They want a universal program that undoes the power of the public school as a secular, accountable, publicly funded institution.
CARTOON EXPLAINER: Austin’s the new Kremlin! A guide to vouchers and puppet masters Wilks and Dunn.
Some want to use carrots to lure lawmakers. Others prefer a stick, threatening to primary out those rural Republicans who have stood up time and again for their communities and against vouchers. There’s a reason this is so hard. It’s clear that, after decades of bipartisan rejection, Texans don’t want this voucher scheme.
So why are we on the verge of passing it, of making the same mistake as Arkansas and other states?
State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, said it best amid the marathon testimony that opened the latest special session: “All this for one man and two billionaires.”
Only Abbott, Wilks and Dunn will benefit if bipartisan opposition crumbles. Texas public schoolchildren and taxpayers will lose.
Recently, there has been a trend in states with a supermajority of Republicans in the Legislature to seize the reins of power in every realm. First, they gerrymander the state to assure that the other party has no chance to win control. Then they strip power where Democrats exercise any authority. In North Carolina, the Republican Legislature removed power from the Democratic governor. In Wisconsin, the Republican Legislature followed suit. In Ohio, with a Republican Legislature and Governor, the Governor took control of education away from the mostly elected State Board of Education.
The Ohio State Board resisted. It even sued. But a judge ruled that the governor had the authority to take control of education policy away from the State Board, even though voters gave those powers to the State Board in 1953.
Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy provided the context:
Judge rules that state level governance of education can return to the Governor’s office, notwithstanding that Ohioans, in 1953, transferred education governance from the Governor’s office to the State Board ofEducation via a constitutional amendment.
Article VI, section 4 was added to the Constitution in 1953 by the citizens of Ohio. At that time, the governance of education was embedded in the governor’s office. Ohioans passed a constitutional amendment to have education governed with the same model as used at the local level—citizens elected on a non-partisan basis to govern school districts. Local districts were not and are not now governed by other governmental jurisdictions—mayors, city councils, county commissions, township trustees.
In Ohio’s current political climate, the will of the people is summarily disregarded, even though the Ohio Constitution states that “all political power is inherent in the people.” (Article I, section 2) Notwithstanding this powerful constitutional safeguard for the folks, a Senate leader in Ohio recently said publicly, “We kinda do what we want…”
The Court, in other words, overturned the will of the voters and the state constitution.
Jan Resseger, who lives in Ohio, describes the evisceration of the State Board of Education.
She writes:
Education Week‘s Libby Sanford recently covered the education governance battle in Ohio, where the legislature just seized control of public education standards and curriculum by eviscerating the power of the Ohio State Board of Education and moving control of the state’s public schools under the political control of the governor and his appointees.
Sanford explains how the leaders of Ohio’s gerrymandered, supermajority Republican legislature folded the school governance takeover into the state budget after the legislature had failed on its own to enact the the plan to gut the power of the State Board of Education: “(T)he Republican-led Ohio state legislature passed a two-year budget that included a provision converting the Ohio Department of Education, led by a superintendent chosen by the State Board of Education, into the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, led by a director appointed by the governor. The budget also… includes a requirement that schools adopt a state-approved reading program by the next school year and a ban on the use of the three-cueing method in literacy instruction. The move changing how education is overseen in The Buckeye State strips the 19-member State Board of Education—of which 11 members are elected and eight are appointed by the governor—of its powers to… set academic standards and set frameworks for school curricula, limiting the board to decisions on teacher disciplinary and licensure cases and disputes over school boundaries.”
According to the provisions of a 1953 state constitutional amendment, Ohio’s state board of education will continue to exist but will lack any power to control significant policy. Its members will continue to appoint a state superintendent of public instruction, but that individual will serve as a mere advisor to the governor’s appointee who will control the state’s primary public education governance and operations.
In Ohio, two members of the State Board and another parent, on behalf of their children enrolled in public schools, along with the Toledo Board of Education filed a lawsuit to block the governor’s seizure of the powers of the state board. A judge has allowed the takeover to move forward, however, while the case makes its way through the courts. On November 3, 2023, plaintiffs’ attorneys submitted a brief in support of the plaintiff’s objections to the magistrate’s decision.
Sanford examines the political takeover of Ohio’s public schools in the context of a broader national trend among legislatures and governors to introduce partisan bias into governance of an institution that has historically been protected: “(T)he state (Ohio) isn’t the first to make a move of this kind… (E)specially over the past few years, lawmakers and state leaders have taken more aggressive action on state education policy, enacting laws that limit what teachers can talk about in the classroom, greatly expanding school choice, and requiring that schools notify parents when their children seek to use pronouns or names that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth.”
Sanford interviews Jeffrey Henig, a professor of education and political science at Teachers College, Columbia University, who identifies Ohio’s insertion of politics into the governance of the state’s public schools as part of a growing trend across the states. He calls the move, nonetheless, “a high-risk proposition.” Henig explains: “(A)t the start of the 20th century, around two-thirds of states elected their chief school officers. By 2010 that number had dropped to less than 30 percent. Many states, like Ohio, gave the power to choose a state school officer to state boards, while others gave that power to the governor. ‘The general story is there’s been this long, slow shift in formal authority… but more recently governors getting more directly involved.”
Citing examples like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida and Governor Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Henig hopes that perhaps the new trend will run its course: “Public education can be a hot potato issue… You can get your hands burned by being too closely involved… General-purpose politicians will realize that education isn’t a sure winner for them and succumb to the pressures, many of which are legitimate, to make their mark in other areas of domestic policy rather than stick their noses right in the middle of these swirling waters of culture wars.”
As a citizen in Ohio who values public schooling, I hope Henig is correct. The danger for our children of inserting politics and ideology into the public schools has become clearer not only through the insertion of culture war bias into state legislation, but also as lobbyists pressure politicians to adopt ideology-driven education theories and even specific curricula from think tanks with known political biases. Ohio is an example. Dee Bagwell Haslam, whose family owns the Cleveland Browns, is a major contributor to the campaigns of Ohio’s Republican politicians. She also serves on the board of Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd. Dee Haslam has lobbied Governor Mike DeWine and the Ohio Legislature to promote one of ExcelinEd’s priorities: the Science of Reading. In this year’s state budget, the Ohio Legislature mandated that all Ohio public schools will adopt the Science of Reading as their sole reading curriculum.
In Schoolhouse Burning, his excellent exploration of the history of public education, Derek Black, an attorney and professor of constitutional law, describes the reasons why, in the period immediately following the Civil War, the authors of many of the state constitutions created state boards of education that would be independent and resistant to political meddling in public schools’ standards and curriculum:
“States… guarded against the politicization of education by vesting constitutional authority in the hands of education professionals (or at least people solely focused on education)… Following the Civil War, state constitutions increasingly established a state superintendent and/or state board of education. Doing so ensured that the individuals entrusted with administering education and setting various education policies would not be wedded to any geographic or political constituency. They were to act on behalf of all the state’s children and exercise their best judgment, hopefully devoid of the normal politics of the state house. And unlike the heads of transportation, agriculture, commerce, and police, for instance, these education officials would not serve at the pleasure of the governor or legislature.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 220-221)
Sarah Posner, a columnist for MSNBC, summarizes what has been learned about the theocratic vision of Mike Johnson, the recently elected Speaker of the House. Johnson was, of course, a prominent and active election denier. In addition, his views are radically fundamentalist. Whenever possible, he cites the Bible—not the Constitution—as the source of his ideology. Those who do not share his religious views may rightly wonder how someone so deeply indoctrinated in his faith can lead without alienating the majority of his fellow citizens. We know already that he is deeply antagonistic to abortion rights and to those who are LGBT+. In time we will learn what other prejudices he holds and how he will deal with them.
Posner wrote:
The sudden elevation of Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.,to House speaker pushed his record’s vetting to after his election. So it was only once he became second in line to the presidency that most people learned Johnson played a key role in the House’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is virulently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ Americans, and has promoted teaching the Bible as a history book in public schools.
Now Johnson and his allies are hitting back against his critics. Remarkably, their response to the exposure of Johnson’s turbocharged theo-politics is not to argue that media reports exaggerate or misapprehend his record as a lawyer or legislator, or his intentions as speaker. Instead, Johnson’s closest allies are amplifying his extreme views, and recasting them as mainstream “truths” that are beyond challenge.
This week Johnson gave an interview to the Daily Signal, the news site of the Heritage Foundation, an agenda-setting hub for the right, and particularly the religious right. Johnson was able to “open up,” as the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan put it, about how his Christian faith “informs his politics.” While he’s hardly been tight-lipped about that topic, this fresh clarification of his central political philosophy makes his rapid, uninterrogated ascension even more worrisome.
“It’s a central premise of the Bible that God invented civil government,” Johnson told Olohan, who added that, “like many Americans of faith, Johnson sees government as a ‘design of God’ and ‘a gift to mankind in a fallen society.’” If those jarring statements do not comport with your own understanding of the Bible, or of the constitutional separation of church and state, you are not alone.
The Washington Stand, the news site of the Family Research Council, whose president Tony Perkins is a longtime friend of the new speaker, similarly assailed Johnson’s critics. In an article entitled “Johnson Critics Mistake Christianity, American Principles for ‘Theocracy,’” the Stand senior writer Joshua Arnold turned to the director of FRC’s own Center for Biblical Worldview, David Closson. (The Center for Biblical Worldview, according to its website, says that “a person exhibits a biblical worldview when their beliefs and actions are aligned with the Bible, acknowledging its truth and applicability to every area of life.”)
Closson defended Johnson’s beliefs as “just basic Christian belief coming right out of the Bible.” That “basic Christian belief,” argued Closson, includes that “God is the one that ordains authority. God is the one that gives delegated authority to human beings to wield it on his behalf.” Closson went on to suggest that Johnson’s critics are biblical illiterates who lack any understanding of Christianity. He described them as “folks who don’t have any reference to what the Bible teaches, trying to scare millions of Americans, when so many of us would just be saying ‘Amen.’”
If anything has come into sharper focus over the past week or so, it’s that Johnson has spent his legal and political career immersed in an insular world where everyone around him believes there are certain “truths,” like regressive gender roles, or creationism, or that separation of church and state is a “myth.” Or, as Johnson stated this week without equivocation, “God invented civil government.”
While these views are commonplace on the Christian right, they are far from commonplace among Christians more broadly. “Most Christians wouldn’t say that this is a ‘central premise’ of the Bible, but Johnson’s focus on authority, as well as the way he distinguishes ‘civil government’ from other forms of government, tracks with the language of Christian reconstructionism,” Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida and author of “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” told me. As Ingersoll’s work has illuminated, reconstructionism, a movement developed in the 1970s, teaches that God ordained separate “spheres” of governmental authority — the family, the church and “civil government.” In the reconstructionist view, “civil government” should not do anything that interferes with (conservative Christian) families or churches or what they consider to be their inviolable right to impose their religious beliefs in the public square.
There is virtually no one in today’s religious right who would claim the label “Christian reconstructionist,” largely because they do not want to be tied to the positions of its founder R.J. Rushdoony, who cited supposed “biblical law” to support slavery and the death penalty for homosexuality. But the broad contours of Rushdoony’s framework, as Ingersoll has documented, has left an indelible mark on the modern religious right. The insistence that a “biblical worldview” should bear on every government decision shapes right-wing Christians’ positions on a range of issues. Their objections to abortion and marriage equality, for example, is based on their claim that civil government lacks the God-ordained authority to create laws that (they say) conflict with the Bible. They also consider public education to be an improper, unbiblical exercise of government authority. Because of that, they have undermined public schools, created their own Christian schools, and advocated for and shaped the Christian homeschooling movement.
These kinds of crude dismissals of Johnson’s critics serve two purposes: they reassure the GOP base that their “biblical worldview” is the only correct way to view both the Bible and the government, and that any critiques of it evince a lack of “understanding of just basic Christian tenets,” as Closson put it. Second, and more crucially, they aim to bully reporters and political opponents into retreating from examining Johnson’s record and drawing attention to the ways it threatens pluralism, democracy and the rights of others. By repeating the lie that Johnson’s beliefs are “basic” Christianity, and accusing anyone who fails to understand that of ignorance, the Christian right, and the Republican Party it controls, want scrutiny of Johnson to evaporate. We can only hope their efforts will backfire, as millions of Americans wake up to what it really means to have a top government official proudly tout his supposedly “biblical worldview.”
We keep hoping that some sane Republican will emerge and eclipse The Former Guy. It’s probably a vain hope, but one likely prospect was Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina and Trump’s Ambassador to the UN.
While campaigning in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Haley expressed her negative views about the nation’s public schools. Sadly, she parroted the standard Republican tropes.
She said:
“Stop the gender pronoun classes that are happening in the military,” Haley said, as the crowd cheered in response.
Mirroring the recent culture wars that have unfolded in local school districts like Goffstown, Haley called for “complete transparency in the classroom.”
“No parent should ever wonder what’s being said or taught to their children in the classroom,” Haley said.
Haley implored for the end of “national self-loathing” in schools. “Our kids need to know to love America,” Haley said, claiming that kids are being told America is a racist, rotten country.
“I was elected the first female minority governor in history,” Haley said. “America is not racist, we’re blessed.”
Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reports that House Republicans are itching to cut the food stamp program, but running into opposition from Democrats and farm-state Republicans.
Mike Johnson‘s new role as House speaker heightens the chances of a major political clash next year over one of the nation’s largest welfare programs and the government’s preeminent aid package for farmers and rural America.
The fallout is likely to reverberate in countless congressional races, not to mention President Joe Biden’s attempts to win back rural votersin the 2024 presidential race.
Johnson, more so than previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is a proponent of more hardline GOP efforts to overhaul the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s largest anti-hunger program that serves 41 million low-income Americans. As a senior member of the conservative-leaning Republican Study Committee, Johnson backed proposals to roll back food aid expansions under Biden and block states from exempting some work requirements for SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. In 2018, Johnson referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.”
Now, the RSC, Freedom Caucus hardliners and other Republicans are pressing to include similar measures in the next farm bill. Such a move would upend the fragile bipartisan coalition needed to pass the legislation — a blow to House Republicans who represent the majority of rural and farm districts, including Johnson, as well as more centrist GOP members who will be fighting for their political lives in 2024.
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Didn’t Jesus say something about feeding the hungry and clothing the needy? Why do these people rattle on about Christianity but ignore the words of its leader?
Diane Ravitch's blog 