“Privatizing Education: The GOP Sees School Vouchers As A Political Panacea
A few months ago, following a lengthy “autopsy,” the Republican National Committee unveiled a lengthy blueprint for the party’s recovery, and though there wasn’t much in the way of policy prescriptions, there was one issue the document mentioned three times: “school choice.”
“School choice,” a poll-test euphemism for private school vouchers, is generally characterized by GOP leaders as a way for Republicans to reach out to minority communities, position themselves as caring about domestic policy, and weaken labor unions, all at the same time. According to the Washington Times, the party is apparently taking the idea quite seriously.
A Republican Party still reeling from the November elections is hoping that advocating for school choice can help the GOP recapture moderate voters, arguing that the issue provides a natural link between their limited-government philosophy and the average voter’s desire for good local schools.
Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican speaking to grass-roots activists in Concord last week, said the party can bolster its national image by making school choice — giving parents the ability and the funds to choose between competing public and private schools for their children — a more prominent part of its message.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal hit a similar note two weeks earlier, saying at a fundraiser in Manchester that the issue is a political winner because it saves money and produces better results.
The policy is also being touted by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), among others.
I can appreciate the appeal among Republican policymakers, who generally don’t have much of a policy agenda to speak of. By pushing vouchers, GOP officials and candidates get to pander to social conservatives and satisfy the party’s libertarian wing, all while infuriating teachers’ unions. That the idea ostensibly gives Republicans a “compassionate conservative” veneer is gravy.
So why haven’t we heard more about this lately? Largely because vouchers aren’t the political panacea the GOP has been waiting for.
For one thing, there are serious constitutional concerns, as Jindal was recently reminded when his state Supreme Court scrapped his in-state voucher scheme.
Indeed, as we discussed last year, all problems that have plagued vouchers for years haven’t gone away — if you’re familiar with the larger debate, you’ll recall serious concerns over public funding of religion; leaving behind students in sub-par schools; and giving tax dollars to unaccountable private operations, many of which have little to no standards for quality education.
What’s more, there’s very little evidence that vouchers actually help students in any measurable way, despite many years of research.
And while we’re at it, let’s also note that Republicans are convinced this is a political winner for them, but there’s no evidence to support that, either — vouchers have polled poorly for many years; they’ve failed repeatedly when put on statewide ballots; and though Mitt Romney endorsed vouchers last year, he was generally afraid to talk about his position, probably because he didn’t want to deal with the political opposition.
The fact remains that conservatives have talked about vouchers and privatizing education for several decades now, and it’s never been a political winner for the right. There’s no reason to believe this new push will be any more successful than the previous ones.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2013
“The Use And Abuse Of Freedom”: The Elements Of Words That Explain The Mess We’re In
Last week David Brooks had an interesting column about a couple of studies that surveyed key words in a body of writings. (No, we’re not talking about tax examiners looking for Tea Party among applications.) He describes the “two elements” that he found:
“The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases. That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.
“The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently. The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent. ”
The question I have–and would have tried to answer, had not my attempts to find these studies through google led me to data bases that thwarted my efforts to access the pieces–is this: how did the word `freedom’ do?
One of the biggest changes in my adult life is what has happened to freedom, not just as a word, but as a value. It is, it seems to me, the only value Americans put much stock in. Equality, in which immigrants and labor unions invested so much energy and support and devotion during the first part of the 20th century, now seems a hostage of identity group politics. Freedom is it–it’s what we appeal to for everything, from gay marriage to Wall Street shortcuts to environmental pollution to smoking pot to war (Free Kuwait! Iraqi freedom!) These are the years of freedom triumphant, and boy, if anything explains the mess we’re in, it’s freedom. Try arguing for something in terms of Community, or Sacrifice. Go to Congress and make a case for Majority Rule, and you’ll get an earful from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul about the freedom of the minority to thwart the majority.
More than anyone, Ronald Reagan put us on this path. I can’t imagine a figure who would be able to get us to rebalance our values.
By: Jamie Malanowski, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 26, 2013
“Ted Cruz Against The World”: The Supercilious, Arrogant, Crackpot, Con Man Of The GOP
One bonus for Republicans in the trifecta of pseudo-scandals ensnaring the Obama White House this month is that it distracted the party from its looming civil war. It’s even possible that the Senate immigration reform got as far as it did partly because wingnut radio talkers and Tea Party xenophobes were consumed by their hatred of Obama, and paying less attention to GOP immigration sellouts.
But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.
Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.
But Cruz was having none of it, because he insisted sneaky Democrats might use the committee to raise the debt ceiling. He got support from Tea Party allies Mike Lee and Rand Paul, as well as Marco Rubio (trying to claw back the Tea Party credibility he lost by working on immigration reform). McCain reminded Cruz and his friends that their party controls the House. “So we don’t trust the majority party on the other side of the [Capitol] to come to conference and not hold to the fiscal discipline that we want to see happen? Isn’t that a little bit bizarre?”
Here’s where Cruz set himself apart, one man against a corrupt world. He responded to McCain on the Senate floor the next day: “The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans … Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this mess.”
That made the senior senator from Arizona apoplectic. He accused Cruz and friends of trying to “paralyze the process.” He singled out Utah’s Mike Lee, who is not as bright a light as Cruz, for his ignorance of the way Congress works. Lee made the conference committee sound like a political brothel facilitating “backroom deals.” McCain shot back: “How do we reconcile legislation that’s been passed by one body and the other body? That’s what we’ve been doing for a couple hundred years. Perhaps the senator from Utah doesn’t know about that.”
Poor John McCain. He gave the world Sarah Palin, and Palin helped give us Cruz, Lee, Paul and Rubio. Still, Ted Cruz’s self-righteous grandeur puts him in a class by himself. He oozed condescension, openly mocking McCain, declaring that Senate Republicans would side with him on the budget impasse. “I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected,” a reference to McCain calling Cruz, Paul and Justin Amash “wacko birds” earlier this year.
What’s clear is that we’ve reached a new state of warfare in the normally collegial Senate, where increasingly, a minority faction of the minority party has the power to grind everything to a halt. McCain blasted that point of view Thursday: “It’s not the regular order for a number of senators — a small number, a minority within a minority here — to say they will not agree to go to conference. We’re here to vote, not here to block things,” he said.
That’s clearly Cruz’s plan. Watching the supercilious Cruz mock the sputtering McCain, I was struck by how much he enjoyed preening for the cameras. All senators do, but Cruz stands out, with his proud contempt for Republicans along with Democrats. As he dreams of the White House, with barely five months in the Senate under his belt, look for him to play a leading role in the next debt ceiling battle.
In other news: Michelle Malkin and friends are calling me a racist for referring to Cruz as a “skeezy huckster” on Twitter yesterday as I watched him insult McCain. I admit it wasn’t my most elegant turn of phrase, but I wasn’t aware that “skeezy” or “huckster” were slurs associated with Hispanics/Latinos. Maybe that’s because I don’t travel in the same circles as Malkin. Can you say “projection”?
Still, they weren’t the most artful choice of words. If I had it to do over again, I would call Cruz a “supercilious con man.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 24, 2013
“Deeply Confused”: The Republican War On Data
The politics of paranoia can lead policymakers into some unfortunate directions. On everything from homeland security to education to guns, paranoid politicians invariably end up pushing some truly bizarre proposals for no good reason.
In the latest example, some far-right congressional Republicans have decided to wage a war on census data because they have paranoid ideas about “big government.”
A group of Republicans are cooking up legislation that could give President Barack Obama an unintentional assist with disagreeable unemployment numbers — by eliminating the key economic statistic altogether.
The bill, introduced last week by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), would bar the U.S. Census Bureau from conducting nearly all surveys except for a decennial population count. Such a step that would end the government’s ability to provide reliable estimates of the employment rate. Indeed, the government would not be able to produce any of the major economic indices that move markets every month, said multiple statistics experts, who were aghast at the proposal.
“They simply wouldn’t exist. We won’t have an unemployment rate,” said Ken Prewitt, the former director of the U.S. Census who is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University.
The core issue is something called the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau uses as a supplemental to the decennial reports, providing information on commuting, income, family structure, educational attainment, housing, and finance. The results are used extensively by businesses, researchers, academics, and government agencies, and have been an invaluable tool for decades.
Right-wing lawmakers, however, have come to believe nefarious government officials are collecting the information as part of a larger scheme — it’s never been entirely clear to me what they see as the point of the plot — that must be stopped. Sen. Rand Paul (K-Ky.), who revels in strange conspiracy theories, proposed legislation in March to make elements of the American Community Survey optional, apparently because he didn’t realize that they were already optional.
But it’s not just the American Community Survey that congressional Republicans are eager to crush.
Indeed, Rep. Jeff Duncan’s (R-S.C.) bizarre proposal, which has 10 co-sponsors, would also explicitly eliminate the agricultural census, economic census, government census, and mid-decade census.
As a consequence, Duncan’s bill would eliminate the existence of the unemployment rate and the measurement of the nation’s GDP, among other thing.
Maurine Haver, founder of business research firm Haver Analytics and a past president of the National Association for Business Economics, told the Huffington Post‘s Michael McAuliff, “Do they understand that these data that the Census Bureau collects are fundamental to everything else that’s done? They think the country doesn’t need to know how many people are unemployed, either?”
The answers to these questions are unclear — Duncan and other supporters of this proposal have not explained why they oppose the data, why they see the need to eliminate the data, or even if they understand what it is they’re doing.
Duncan, incidentally, is the same deeply confused congressman who spewed bizarre conspiracy theories about the Boston Marathon bombing, going so far that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano felt the need to say Duncan’s ignorant inquiries were “full of misstatements and misapprehensions,” and “not worthy of an answer.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 2, 2013
“It’s Official, The Tea Party Is Back”: Once Again, Fantasies Of A Pragmatic GOP Prove Illusory
Say what you will about Politico, but aside from the many bits of useful phenomenological data its vast minions gather each day, it serves as a sort of public utility in instantly and thoroughly expressing the shifting perspectives of the MSM. Today, having misinterpreted and buried the Tea Party Movement a thousand times, Politico (in this piece by Tarini Parti) now takes judicial notice of its return on Capitol Hill:
The Tea Party Caucus is back in action with a new strategy and a growing membership.
Roughly 20 House Republicans attended a closed-door meeting Thursday evening in the Rayburn House Office Building, along with staffers from nearly 40 congressional offices, including those of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.
It comes as conservatives continue to flex their muscle, making life difficult for GOP leaders in the House on issues like Obamacare, and as the debate on immigration legislation heats up.
Conservative mainstays such as Reps. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) were among those at the meeting. A source said the entire GOP House delegation from South Carolina was there as well.
Mike Shields, chief of staff to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, spoke at the meeting – an indication that the GOP establishment is making an effort to work with the tea party lawmakers.
Also in attendance: Conservative radio talk show host Rusty Humphries and representatives from organizations including the Tea Party Express and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. TheTeaParty.net organized the meeting, which was closed to press.
The possibility that high attendance at the caucus meeting might reflect a continuing presence rather than a sudden resurgence was indirectly addressed by this quote from Louie Gohmert:
“I thought it was the energy we had when we first started things,” Gohmert told POLITICO after the meeting. “The Tea Party beliefs and movement never really went away. It was just that the caucus wasn’t really having meetings.”
True dat. You could make the case, in fact, that the relative quiescence of the Tea Party Caucus was attributable to its consolidation of power within the Republican “Establishment.” Now that strategic disagreements within the congressional GOP are re-emerging, it’s time to get loud and proud again. But the whole phenomenon shows how shallow all the talk about the GOP “rebranding” and “adjusting to new circumstances” really was–much less the fatuous chatter about “bipartisan breezes wafting through Congress.”
It’s entirely possible, not soon but in the foreseeable future, that the Republican Party and even the conservative movement can genuinely move beyond the “Spirit of 2010” and begin to act like a political party rather than a wrecking crew. But anyone who has paid genuine attention to the Tea Party Movement must understand that these are people who violently oppose the idea of “moving on” or “adjusting to circumstances.” The whole point of “constitutional conservatism” is the belief in an eternal, perhaps even divinely ordained, governing model that never, ever, goes out of season. Maybe they’ll lose influence in the GOP and the country as a whole, but they aren’t going away or changing. Their periodic rediscovery by the MSM when once again fantasies of a “pragmatic” GOP prove illusory is one of the maddening but abiding aspects of contemporary political journalism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 26, 2013
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