Inexplicable Endorsement

I’m stunned.

The Indiana State Teachers’ Association has had an uncomfortable relationship with efforts to reform education. ISTA’s purpose, after all, is to represent the interests of public school teachers, and in a time when many public schools are not performing, even teachers disagree about what their interests are and where the Association’s efforts should be directed. So I understand why ISTA might decide not to endorse State Representative Mary Ann Sullivan, who is running for the State Senate this year, even though it endorsed her in earlier campaigns. Mary Ann has been a passionate and articulate advocate for education reform, and some of those reforms aren’t consistent with ISTA positions.

But rather than staying out of the race entirely–which would have been understandable–ISTA has endorsed Brent Waltz, the incumbent. And that makes no sense at all.

Waltz is a far-right Republican who defeated Larry Borst–the long-time “Dean” of the Senate and moderate Republican whose budgetary expertise was legendary–in a culture-war primary campaign. Waltz came at Borst from the Right and emphasized his anti-abortion and anti-gay positions–positions antithetical to ISTA’s.

When I heard about the endorsement, I thought perhaps Waltz’s tenure had modified or educated him, or that he had taken some position that would explain an otherwise inexplicable decision to support him, so I did some research.

Here’s what I found:

  • TV 6 reported that Waltz was the director of a company called Indianapolis Diversified Machinery; when it closed, employees discovered that the company had failed to pay into the state’s unemployment insurance fund. Terminated employes who needed unemployment were just out of luck–and were also unable to collect several weeks of back pay. (Interestingly, as TV 6 pointed out, Waltz had voted against measures to “fix” problems in Indiana’s Unemployment Insurance program. Guess he didn’t see the point of fixing something he was ignoring anyway.)
  • Waltz co-authored Indiana’s version of “stand your ground” legislation. The bill authorized the use of force against public servants.
  • Waltz supported a constitutional amendment to entirely repeal residential property taxes. Aside from the fact that tax measures do not belong in the state’s constitution (as we are already seeing with the disaster that is the tax caps), and aside from the equal protection and economic issues involved in shifting the entire tax burden to businesses, residential property tax payers are the largest source of funding for our public schools.
  • Unlike Sullivan, Waltz supports vouchers–not just charter schools, which are public schools, but the use of tax dollars to send “children of all income brackets” to private schools.

I can understand why ISTA might disagree with some of the reforms championed by Mary Ann Sullivan. I can understand why parochial considerations might lead them to stay out of this race.

I don’t understand why ISTA would endorse a culture warrior who supports measures that would be disastrous to public education if enacted. That one is beyond my comprehension.

Comments

Back Home Again in Indiana…

As we walked into the passenger lounge in Chicago’s Union Station on our way home, the TVs were all on “breaking news”–the Supreme Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” by a 5-4 vote.

There’s much that could be said about the Court’s decision–and virtually all of it has now been said. Initially, most legal scholars had predicted this result, which was dictated by relevant precedent; however, recently, Scalia had gone out of his way to reject those precedents, including his own prior rulings, stirring speculation that the Court might overturn the Act. (Scalia’s behavior, in several recent cases, has been so bizarre as to generate a cottage industry in armchair psychology…with one notable Court observer suggesting that he has “jumped the shark.”)

Lawyers and legal scholars will be in hog heaven dissecting the decision, the dissent, and what many attribute to Chief Justice Roberts’ concern that a contrary ruling would further damage the legitimacy of a politicized Court. I’ll leave those arcane arguments to them. What I have found utterly amazing–and ludicrous–is the public reaction from the right.

It is perfectly acceptable to disagree with the Supreme Court. I do it all the time myself. It is perfectly acceptable to dispute the wisdom of the ACA as policy. I’d have preferred a “Medicare for All” approach myself (although I recognize the political constraints that made such a solution to our health care crisis impossible). But the hysteria that greeted the Court’s ruling is quite simply astonishing. People are threatening to move to Canada (which has truly socialized medicine), comparing Obama’s effort to extend access to health care to Hitler’s Germany…this is the stuff of mass psychosis.

And then there is Mike Pence.

The man who has been blanketing our airwaves with soft-focus, “just a Hoosier like you” thirty-second ads, the man who is skillfully rewriting his own history to obscure his radical persona, just couldn’t stay in (his newly assumed) character. Pence compared the Supreme Court’s ruling to 9/11.

Think about that for a moment. A President and a majority of the legislature recognized that America had a healthcare crisis. Fifty million people could not afford health insurance, while spiraling costs posed a huge threat to the economy. Half of all personal bankruptcies were due to medical emergencies…I could go on, but you know the drill. The President and Congress addressed the problem with a complex piece of legislation.

And this–in Mike Pence’s strange reality–was equivalent to a terrorist attack. Trying to provide universal access to medical care is just like killing 3000 innocent people.

Pence immediately tried to walk this obscene reaction back, by calling it a “thoughtless” remark. As a friend of mine observed, thoughtless is when you forget your anniversary.

In what reality is an effort to fix a national problem, an effort to provide health care to children with pre-existing conditions, an effort to reign in abuses by insurance companies, a national calamity? What accounts for such a bizarre and disproportionate response to a measure that was first proposed by Republicans like Bob Dole, and first instituted at the state level by none other than Mitt Romney?

Someone recently said that if Obama endorsed oxygen, Republicans would suffocate themselves. This irrational response to a piece of well-intentioned legislation would seem to prove the point.

Comments

Res Ipsa Loquitor

There is a legal term, “res ipsa loquitor,” meaning “the thing speaks for itself.” Today’s example? The Texas Republican Party Platform. 

Texas Republicans call for abolishing the 16th Amendment, which authorized the Income Tax. It calls for repeal of the tax on capital gains, and the abolition of the state’s property tax. It opposes the imposition of ANY tax other than a (regressive) sales tax. And it demands a return to the gold standard. (There was no call for abolition of public services, and the document appears silent on how, exactly, those services are to be paid for.) The platform also supports privatization of Social Security.

By far the most telling provisions of the GOP platform, however, are those addressing education.

The party goes on record opposing “multicultural” education, and supporting the use of corporal punishment by school officials. It demands that “both sides” be taught when “controversial” theories like evolution and climate change are addressed.

Given these positions, it should come as no surprise that the platform also opposes the teaching of critical thinking skills–since those “undermine parental authority.” Such skills probably DO undermine the parental authority of the authors of this platform–which speaks for itself.

I don’t know what happened, exactly, to turn the Republican Party I used to belong to into whatever it is today–but I am pretty  sure it wasn’t critical thinking.

Comments

Circular Politics

We took our grandchildren to the Newseum today, and I would recommend it to anyone contemplating a trip to DC. It is a fabulous museum–not at all a dusty repository of newsprint, but an interactive, living testament to the practice of journalism. For our 8 and 10 year olds, there were numerous “games” and short films that buried instruction in entertainment–snapshots of the past as seen through the eyes of those who covered the events.

One of the short films focused on the Freedom Riders, the Birmingham boycott and Selma. Our grandchildren were shocked and uncomprehending, and we had a long talk about the treatment of African-Americans, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan.

The film clip also showed President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. The voice-over explained that in many Southern states, ways had been found to keep black people from voting, necessitating a federal law securing their right to cast their ballots.

All I could think of was how contemporary this sounded.

Indiana passed one of the first so-called “Voter ID” laws, justified by a need to reduce a non-existent “voter fraud,” but actually intended to suppress the vote of the poor and minority citizens who vote disproportionately for Democrats. Other states have followed suit. Most recently–and most brazenly–Governor Rick Scott of Florida ordered a draconian “purge” of that swing state’s voter rolls–so draconian, and so indiscriminate (hundreds of eligible voters found themselves summarily removed from the rolls), that the state’s county election officials–Republican and Democrat alike–refused to implement it, and the U.S. Justice Department has sued to halt it.

States may not be able to employ the Poll Tax any more, but these measures have proved to be very serviceable substitutes.

I thought about that while I was assuring my grandchildren that the law signed by President Johnson secured the right to vote for all our citizens. What I didn’t have the heart to tell them was that when you close a door that is being used by dishonorable people, they’re likely to find an open window to wriggle through.

Jefferson was sure right about one thing: eternal vigilance really is the price of liberty.

Comments

Politics at the Bed and Breakfast

We took our grandchildren to Williamsburg and Jamestown (where they were fascinated by the muskets), then came to Washington, D.C. so that they could experience the nation’s capital. Yesterday was the Museum of the American Indian (pricey buffalo-burgers in the cafeteria!) and the Air and Space Museum with a planetarium show narrated by Whoopie Goldberg.

We are staying in a Bed and Breakfast, the Aaron Shipman house, located in the Logan Circle area. It’s a lovely residential neighborhood,with excellent public transportation. (I’ve been VERY  jealous of the transportation on this trip! It makes any place more livable and civilized. Too bad the Indiana legislature doesn’t consider livability important…)

There are seven bedrooms rooms in this house, and we met the other travelers at breakfast yesterday. We went around the table making introductions. Five were traveling together from Alabama, and after the (wonderful!) breakfast, we were making small talk. One woman, a retired second-grade teacher, said “You teach law. How can Roy Moore be considered eligible to run again for the Alabama Supreme Court? Didn’t his previous behavior and contempt for Separation of Church and State disqualify him?” Roy Moore, you may recall, was the zealot who had the Ten Commandments carved on a five-ton stone and placed at the entrance to the Alabama Supreme Court. Apparently, his opponent is genuinely mentally ill, so voters have no reasonable choice in this election, and she was agitated.

“Everyone will look at Alabama and think we actually wanted this creep! We don’t!”

That led to a more general discussion of the political environment and the extremism of today’s GOP. The owner of the B and B opined that Republican Senators and Representatives who had opted to put politics before the national interest and simply say NO to anything and everything that might make Obama look good should be expelled from office. The rest of the short discussion was similar. (And for the record, I didn’t start it!)

I’m hesitant to draw large conclusions from this anecdote: I remember a friend from law school who was absolutely certain McGovern was going to win the election that year because everyone in his neighborhood was a McGovern supporter. He lived in Greenwich Village. But it was interesting to see a group from Huntsville, Alabama–hardly a “blue” location–so utterly disgusted with the radicalism that characterizes today’s GOP.

I believe the acronym young people use these days is FWIW–for what it’s worth.

Comments