Blue Mass Group

Thanks to a 4% decrease in state aid, and tight restrictions on raising local revenue, thousands of much-needed teachers were laid off across Massachusetts at the end of June.  

The recession had a major impact on state and local revenues across the nation, so legislation began to move through Congress to direct money back to local districts to bring back laid-off teachers.  Here’s a stimulus bill that has a direct impact on unemployment AND provides a better education for our nation’s children.  Unfortunately, the teacher funds were stripped out of the bill in the senate.

Here’s the sad news from Kathleen Branch, Director, National Advocacy Services for the National School Boards Association:

The House is scheduled to vote on a stripped-down version of the FY2010 Supplemental Appropriations bill (H.R 4899) this afternoon that does not include the provision for the Education Jobs Fund.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) objected to the removal, stating that the Education Jobs Fund  ”had fallen by the wayside”. Obey said he didn’t understand why funding for Pell grants for college students and funding to prevent losing 100,000 teachers were not critical needs.

NSBA will continue to urge Congressional passage of the Education Jobs Fund to help our school districts prevent laying off teachers who provide education services that are vital to student achievement.

Please continue raising this issue with your Members of Congress, and note the severity of school district budgets and teacher/personnel layoffs in your states.  Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s school districts are facing budget crises that include teacher layoffs.

There was one very active Massachusetts education lobbyist pushing hard to kill the funding, and was celebrating the defeat all over the Internet. Guess who, then find the answer after the fold.

A quick constitutional law check, since this confusing issue understandably perplexes, and vexes, many. A majority of Senators can end the filibuster at the start of each new Senate session (Congressional sessions last two years). Ezra Klein offered a timely, and I believe accurate, review yesterday: The constitutional option gets its name from Article I, Section V of the Constitution, which states that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” In order to fulfill this constitutional order, the Senate must be able to, well, determine its rules. A filibuster, technically, is a way to stop the Senate from determining something by refusing to allow it to move to a vote. Because stopping the Senate from considering its own rules would be unconstitutional, the chair can rule against the filibuster, and the Senate could then move to change its rules on a majority vote. One caveat: Many people, including Udall himself, believe this has to happen at the beginning of a new Congress. If it doesn’t happen at the beginning of a new Congress, then Congress is considered to have acquiesced to the previous Congress’s rules, and a filibuster against further rule changes wouldn’t interrupt the constitutional right to [...]

Friends-

I wanted to share with you some of the national media attention Congressman McGovern has been getting over the past few days.

Once again, he has been providing inspired leadership in Congress, giving voice to concerns about money being spent and lives being lost in Afghanistan.

Here are just several examples of the attention Jim has received:

A bedrock principle of the civil rights movement has been that America should bring greater equality to the education of its students.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan likes to say that education is the civil rights issue of our time, and he has motivated state legislatures to make big changes to get “Race To The Top” money that is supposed to bring the less-fortunate a better education.  However, a number of civil rights groups including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund have pointed out a logical inconsistency in President Obama’s Race To The Top plan:

“If education is a civil right, children in ‘winning’ states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn in high-quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.”

This is an extremely important point.  For decades, American children who had the bad luck to be born in the wrong state or with the wrong skin color were forced into underfunded schools.  Much was sacrificed to change our government so that those segregated and impoverished schools could integrate and improve.  But only a few states are going to get this federal education money under Duncan’s competition.  It’s not the belief of Americans that a fraction of the people have a First Amendment right to free speech.  So why should only a fraction of the children get the the right to higher quality schools?

Our leaders have made an error in Race To The Top, and the sooner they change it, the better.

While teachers are being laid off in Brockton, storefronts are empty from Needham to Dorchester, and so many people are still struggling to find work, I am disappointed that Stephen Lynch yet again voted with Republicans to commit another $37 billion to the war in Afghanistan.  This money would have been better invested here at home, in communities like those in the 9th district.  Our troops in Afghanistan – and Iraq – have performed admirably and done all we have asked of them.  We must honor them now by bringing them home as safely and as quickly as possible. I emphatically echo the sentiments of Congressman Jim McGovern: Representative James P. McGovern, a leading antiwar Democrat, has been strongly critical of the additional funding and spent much of yesterday lobbying colleagues to block the funding. Much of the debate was stoked by the discussion of newly disclosed documents that reveal previously unreported challenges facing US troops in Afghanistan, with divisions developing even among top Democrats. “All of us are dedicated to defeating Al Qaeda wherever they are, but our current policy in Afghanistan is deeply flawed,” the Worcester Democrat said yesterday. “It is a mistake to give this administration yet [...]

Just when you thought the U.S. Senate couldn't do any less for clean energy and the environment than it's (not) done so far, we now face the real possibility of what would amount to a “stop-work order” on the 40-year-old, wildly successful (e.g., studies finding benefits outweighing costs at a 40:1 ratio), Clean Air Act.

From CNN.com A federal judge has granted an injunction blocking enforcement of parts of a controversial immigration law in Arizona that is scheduled to go into effect Thursday. So is a 21st Century Fort Sumter coming down the pike? UPDATE: I took a quick read-through of the decision to find out the specific parts of the law which are blocked. The judge’s ruling preliminarily enjoins Arizona from enforcing four provisions of the law: • A.R.S. § 11-1051(B) – Law enforcement determining immigration status of persons stopped, detained, or under arrest; • A.R.S. § 13-1509-  ”creating a crime for the failure to apply for or carry alien registration papers”; • A.R.S. § 13-2928(C)- “creating a crime for an unauthorized alien to solicit, apply for, or perform work”; • A.R.S. § 13-3883(A)(5) “authorizing the warrantless arrest of a person where there is probable cause to believe the person has committed a public offense that makes the person removable from the United States”.  

It’s a fair assumption that much of the public and especially readers of this blog are frustrated that the amount of progress made this year in enacting legislation has been severely hampered by the use of the filibuster. Effectively, it now takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. The opposition party can block legislation and then run against the majority party by stating that nothing got done. The filibuster effectively incentivizes the minority party to grind government to a halt, which is good politics, but against the interests of the American people and their decisions in the previous election. This is not a partisan issue. Both parties complain about the filibuster when in the majority, and then defend it while in the minority. This makes sense- they are acting in the interests of their political parties. However, it introduces a Catch-22. Since it takes 67 votes to change a Senate rule, and a 67 vote majority has been unseen since the Watergate Era, it would take the support of the minority party to change the rule. The minority party will never agree to remove the filibuster while in the minority, as it would be self-defeating. I propose, therefore, [...]

By Johnk from JohnD’s diary “What will happen to the Bush tax cuts?” More on the Tax Foundation (founded 1937) here.

Question. How much money would you want in exchange for intentionally giving your child an education inferior to the one he/she is currently receiving? Answer Why $250 million of course. Answer Explained Democratic Socialism cannot work unless the masses are uneducated and unmotivated. Fat, lazy, stupid, and cared for; is there any better way to go through life?