Evidently, the Johnson County Commissioners never heard of the Supremacy Clause.
Let’s just add this tidbit to the growing pile of evidence that Americans are constitutionally illiterate and seriously paranoid.
CommentsMonthly Archives: March 2013
Send Money
I’m turning this morning’s post over to a government teacher at Cathedral High School, who is trying to raise money for her students to travel to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national We The People contest.
My name is Jill Baisinger; I am the coach of Cathedral High School’s We the People team. My class is trying to fund raise our trip to Washington D.C. for the We the People National Competition. Below is some information regarding the program and our school’s involvement.
We the People is a national civic education program that is taught in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade classrooms. Its purpose is to help prepare students to become more active citizens. Students specialize in an area of constitutional studies from founding philosophies, historical application, civil rights, civil liberties, or current applications. The culminating activity is a competition set up as a Congressional hearing where students take and defend their constitutional view as they have a conversation with attorneys, judges, historians, and other members of the community.
This is only Cathedral’s second year to have a We the People program, yet the team this year won their Congressional district competition and the Indiana State competition, which is one of the three hardest competitions in the country. Cathedral is now “Team Indiana” – and will represent Indiana at the National hearings at the end of April in Washington D.C.
In the past, when We the People was fully funded through a Congressional earmark, the Indiana Bar Foundation was able to pick up the cost of the team to travel to D.C. and compete. During these economic hard times, this is no longer the case; now the team must raise $33,000 to get to the national competition. Students, parents, and Cathedral High School are working hard to make this come true – and this is what the money would go toward – getting the team to D.C. to compete against the best We the People teams across the country.
The students and I would be more than happy to do a 15 minute demonstration for you, to introduce you to the program. Or I would be more than willing to meet you to chat about the benefits of the program myself – Just let me know! Here is the website for our group – that gives a little more information about the program, history at Cathedral, and the team’s achievements in a short period of time. www.gocathedral.com/wethepeople ;
If you are interested in more information on ways to make a tax-deductible contribution to Cathedral’s “We the People…” team, please contact Cathedral’s Development Officer, Michelle Rhodes at (317) 968 – 7311 ormrhodes@gocathedral.com.
The decision to de-fund We The People has to rank as one of the stupidest, “penny-wise, pound foolish” decisions by a Congress that seems to wallow in stupidity. The program is one of the very few that has consistently been demonstrated to be effective in imparting basic civic understanding. As someone who has been a judge for the state contest, I can personally attest to the depth of historical and constitutional knowledge the students display. And unlike contests like “brain game,” all of the students in a given class participate–the extent of that participation is one of the criteria for which points are awarded. A couple of bright kids can’t “carry” the others.
I know young people for whom participation in We The People was a turning point, an experience that engaged them in active citizenship for years afterward. Competing at the national level can only intensify that experience.
I’m going to send a contribution to Cathedral; I hope many of you reading this will choose to do likewise.
CommentsA Question of Professionalism
First there were the laws that allowed pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for legal medications that violated their religious beliefs.
Now, Tennessee and several other states are considering legislation that would protect social workers and mental health professionals who turn away suicidal clients when those clients’ “life styles” offend the provider’s religious beliefs. If the suffering client is gay, or divorced, or otherwise not up to the “moral standards” prescribed by the counselor’s religion, the proposed law protects the “professional” who refuses help against liability for the results of that refusal.
I’d be tempted to ask the sponsor of this measure if he really believes that Jesus would approve of turning away people in pain–especially those at risk of suicide– but that’s beside the point. The personal religious beliefs of a professional are also beside the point. We expect a “pro life” policeman to arrest arsonists, even if those arsonists are burning down an abortion clinic. We expect public school teachers to instruct all the children in their classrooms whether or not they approve of a particular child’s gay parents. Most of us would be appalled if an emergency room doctor refused to treat a badly beaten prostitute because his religion taught that she “had it coming.”
Professionalism requires adherence to the norms of that profession. People who are unwilling to accept those norms and act accordingly need to find different careers.
CommentsIt Can Happen Here
One of the (multiple) controversies of the last election cycle concerned efforts in several states to make voting more difficult. Republicans in those states–perhaps most notably Florida–cut back early voting times, required government-issued IDs, “purged” voter rolls of thousands of eligible, properly registered voters, and took other measures designed to limit voting by poor and minority citizens, on the not-unreasonable assumption that most of those votes would go to Democrats.
Here in Indianapolis, the lone Republican member of the Marion County Election Board repeatedly blocked the efforts of Beth White, the County Clerk, to open satellite voting locations. The sites had been extremely popular in earlier elections; they made early voting much more convenient for people who work long hours or have difficulty getting downtown to cast a vote at the Clerk’s office. There was no legitimate reason to block satellite voting; the extra money had been raised from private sources.
Now, with a super-majority in the Indiana General Assembly and fewer impediments to wholly partisan measures, we are seeing additional efforts to limit voting. Two amendments are pending in the Indiana House today to SB 388. That bill was heard in committee last week. These amendments, sponsored by Rep. Thompson, would reduce in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office from the current legal requirement of 29 days.
Amendment 1 reduces early voting down to ONLY 15 DAYS. Amendment 2 reduces early voting down to ONLY 10 DAYS.
Tellingly, neither amendment has been heard in committee or has been reviewed by election officials–at least publicly. Passage of either amendment would greatly increase the numbers who turn out on Election Day; we could see long lines of the sort that discouraged an estimated 200,000+ voters in Florida last November. It would also make voting much more difficult for those who need to vote absentee in-person.
There is no policy justification for this proposal. Had there been, it would have been offered in committee and subjected to public discussion and debate. This is simply an effort to tilt the playing field, an effort to sneak in under the radar with a change in the rules that is intended to suppress Democratic votes.
This sort of behavior simply adds to the growing public disgust with government at all levels.
I don’t know how, but We the People need to figure out a way to send a message to our legislators, both here in Indiana and in Washington: we didn’t elect you to play partisan power games. We didn’t elect you to obstruct the operation of government, to refuse to confirm qualified nominees because the other guys nominated them, or to place the interests of your donors above the common good. We didn’t elect you so that you can rig the system to improve your chances of holding on to your job.
Evidently, Sen. Thompson and his cohorts would prefer we dispense with this democratic nonsense and not really elect our legislators at all–they’d undoubtedly prefer the system used in autocratic countries, where 99% of the “vote” turns out to ratify the election of a single nominee.
CommentsA Reform Worth Considering
I have long believed that America’s patchwork, complicated method of financing higher education makes no sense. I watch working students taking one more class than they can really manage in order to meet aid eligibility requirements; I see the university employing dozens of people to shuffle the paperwork; I see parents struggling to complete complex forms–and of course, we’ve all seen the reports of unmanageable student loan debt. The need to repay that debt constrains the choices of graduates who might go into lower-paying but more satisfying jobs, makes periods of unemployment more terrifying, and probably restrains the sort of consumer spending that would boost economic growth.
An article in the recent issue of the Atlantic suggests scrapping the whole system and replacing it with a far simpler, more transparent approach. I hope a couple of paragraphs from that article will tempt you to click through and read the whole thing.
With what the federal government spent on its various and sundry student aid initiatives last year, it could have covered the tuition bill of every student at every public college in the country. Doing so might have required cutting off financial aid at Yale, Amherst, the University of Phoenix, and every other private university. But at this point, that might be a trade worth considering.
….
The under-funding of public university systems and Washington’s attempts to compensate have also helped nourish a giant barnacle on the side of higher-ed: the for-profit college industry. As scarce classroom space at community and open-admission state colleges has filled up, students turned towards alternatives like Kaplan University and University of Phoenix, which charge tens of thousands of dollars for degrees with dubious job market value. They get away with it because of federal aid. I call it the 10, 25, 50 problem: They educate ten percent of students, who take out about a quarter of all student loans and are responsible for about half of all defaults. In the meantime, they suck up about $8.8 billion, or around 25 percent, of all Pell Grant money.
Comments