Showing posts with label GOP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GOP. Show all posts
Friday, November 03, 2023
Today's Beau
Has has to know there's little chance for it, so it makes me wonder if Hawley is signaling his intention to directly challenge McConnell.
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Dumb & Dumber
The hollowing-out of public education in USAmerica Inc has to be getting close to where the whole thing implodes.
Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.
The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.
Examination of the data reveals:
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.
“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”
In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.
Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
‘Such a long way’
If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.
The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.
There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.
Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.
Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.
Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.
As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.
From Harlem to Kentucky
Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.
Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.
In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.
Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.
She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.
“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”
In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.
The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.
When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.
“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.
There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.
But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.
“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.
Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.
Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.
In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.
But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.
“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”
Leaving ‘excellent’ schools
After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.
“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.
Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.
In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.
But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.
“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”
Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.
There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)
Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.
Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”
But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.
Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.
“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”
‘The heart of the community’
Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?
It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.
Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.
Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.
Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.
Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.
It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.
“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”
Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.
And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.
But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.
Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.
Standard Operating Proceedure for 'conservatives' has been to cut school budgets and attack the Dept of Education, and then crow about what a mess the schools are -"See? Government schools are bad. We need to privatize the system - put it in the hands of a few noble entrepreneurs and let them raise us back to the heights of blah blah blah..."
- Fuck something up
- Wait a bit
- Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up. Vote for me and I'll fix it for ya."
Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.
The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.
Examination of the data reveals:
- In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
- Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
- In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
- Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.
“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”
In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.
Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.
Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.
“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”
‘Such a long way’
If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.
The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.
There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.
Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.
Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.
Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.
“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.
“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”
Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.
As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.
From Harlem to Kentucky
Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.
Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.
In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.
Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.
She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.
“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”
In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.
The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.
When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.
“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.
There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.
But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.
“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.
Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.
Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.
In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.
But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.
“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”
Leaving ‘excellent’ schools
After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.
“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.
Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.
In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.
But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.
“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”
Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.
There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)
Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.
Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”
But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.
Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.
“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”
‘The heart of the community’
Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?
It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.
Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.
Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.
Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.
Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.
It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.
“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”
Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.
And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.
But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.
Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Friday, October 27, 2023
Today's GOP Fuckery
And maybe the same can be said for breast cancer.
So AIDS is god's punishment for being gay.
And I guess that means testicular cancer is god's punishment for being a total dick about everything.
Apparently, Republicans just can't stand anything that ends up helping women and minorities and queer folk and poor people.
Republicans delay more than $1 billion in HIV program funding
Life-saving PEPFAR program has been ensnared for months in a broader political fight around abortion
Republicans have delayed more than $1 billion in funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR, the latest complication facing a lifesaving HIV program that has been ensnared in a broader political fight around abortion.
Created by President George W. Bush in 2003, PEPFAR has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives around the world. The nearly $7 billion annual initiative, which is managed by the State Department, has distributed millions of courses of medicine to treat HIV, funded testing and prevention services, and supported an array of other interventions. Dozens of foreign governments rely on PEPFAR as a key partner.
The program has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress, which has reauthorized it every five years. But lawmakers this fall failed to reauthorize PEPFAR by a Sept. 30 deadline amid claims from conservative advocacy groups that the program is inadvertently funding abortions overseas — allegations that Biden officials, PEPFAR staff and public health leaders say are unfounded and threaten the program’s mission.
The GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee in August began objecting to language in PEPFAR’s country and regional operational plan, which offers guidance to partners around the globe about how to administer the aid program, according to the people with knowledge of the dispute.
The Republicans’ funding delays and objections, which have not been previously reported, center on PEPFAR’s use of terms relating to abortion, transgender people, sex workers and other areas, with the committee repeatedly demanding rewrites from the State Department. The negotiations have delayed the State Department from releasing more than $1 billion in funding for PEPFAR — funding that the program is planning to use to buy medicines, pay for staff and support other essential PEPFAR functions, several of the people said. PEPFAR officials have pushed back on some of the requested changes, including an attempt by House Republicans to change how terms such as “human rights” appear in the document.
Keifer Buckingham, advocacy director for the Open Society Foundations and a former Democratic congressional aide who worked on PEPFAR’s last reauthorization in 2018, said that prior PEPFAR documents used similar language and addressed the same issues.
“None of that phrasing is new … and it’s not like policy has dramatically changed,” Buckingham said, adding that House Republicans’ complaints about PEPFAR language are “ideological” and parallel their domestic political priorities around abortion and transgender issues.
The State Department confirmed that the House Foreign Affairs Committee has delayed approving the notifications that are required for allocating funds to PEPFAR.
“The delays in approval are straining PEPFAR country operations and threatening PEPFAR’s ability to continue implementation,” the State Department said in a statement. “If the [notifications] are not approved very soon, PEPFAR’s lifesaving work and gains will be threatened.” The department did not specify the amount of funding at stake.
Lawmakers have placed holds on PEPFAR funding in prior years in hopes of securing changes or getting answers about the program. But experts noted that the climate around the program has shifted in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively overturned the national right to abortion.
“If the current [funding] delay is based on these larger issues that have also stymied reauthorization, it would be a potentially serious situation,” said Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the health policy nonprofit KFF.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee referred questions to the State Department.
Stuck in a stalemate
Republicans’ hold on PEPFAR funding comes as lawmakers continue to debate whether to reauthorize the program for one year, five years or not at all. In the wake of the Dobbs ruling, Republicans have alleged the Biden administration is using PEPFAR and other programs to support abortion access, a claim that public health experts roundly deny.
“PEPFAR’s never been an abortion program,” John Nkengasong, the program’s director, said in remarks Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington. “It is not and will never be because there’s a law, the 1973 Helms amendment,” which restricts U.S. foreign assistance programs from funding abortion abroad, he added.
Public health experts have clamored for lawmakers to swiftly reauthorize PEPFAR for five years through what is known as a “clean reauthorization” — effectively rolling over the current structure. Current and former PEPFAR officials said that a five-year reauthorization would protect the program from political pressures and help global partners plan their strategies.
Asking Congress to vote every year to reauthorize PEPFAR “is basically asking for the appropriations over time to dwindle down and [in] an irrevocable way,” Mark Dybul, a former head of the program, said at the CSIS event.
The Biden administration has also warned that Congress’s delay to reauthorize the program is “damaging the United States’ image globally, particularly in Africa,” and threatening plans to acquire supplies, roll out innovations and take other steps that require certainty about PEPFAR’s long-term viability.
But some Republicans want to reauthorize the program for just one year — arguing that it would allow a future GOP president to make changes to it. Conservative advocacy groups also have warned lawmakers that a vote to reauthorize PEPFAR in its current form will be viewed as a vote to support abortion abroad.
House Republicans last month advanced a measure that would extend PEPFAR funding for one year while reinstating a Trump-era policy, Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, that explicitly bars global assistance funds from being used for abortion.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he had “high hopes” that lawmakers could reach a compromise to reauthorize PEPFAR.
“Time is running out and it’s critical to find a path forward and get PEPFAR reauthorized. I know all parties involved in this discussion care about PEPFAR’s success,” McCaul said in a statement. “But that means they also all need to be willing to come to the negotiating table — and everyone needs to be prepared to give a little.”
Having failed to sway holdout Republicans by focusing on PEPFAR’s public health accomplishments, advocates are increasingly touting the program’s national security implications. The George W. Bush Institute sent a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, signed by more than 30 organizations and leaders in global health, foreign relations and faith communities, saying that a five-year “clean” reauthorization would help fend off strategic rivals seeking influence in regions that rely on PEPFAR support.
“As authoritarian China and Russia seek to increase their influence in Africa by any means possible, PEPFAR has been a shining example of compassion, transparency and accountability, as well as a massive strategic success story for the United States,” the letter reads. “Abandoning it abruptly now would send a bleak message, suggesting we are no longer able to set aside our politics for the betterment of democracies and the world.”
Deborah Birx of the Bush Institute, who led PEPFAR during the Obama and Trump administrations and helped organize Wednesday’s letter, said the congressional debate over the program “is bigger than PEPFAR,” citing the growing political divides over foreign aid, funding the Defense Department and other areas that were traditionally bipartisan.
“There are places where this country has compromised across the aisle for issues that transcend any specific party,” Birx added. “That’s what PEPFAR was about — translating the best of America.”
PEPFAR’s fate has been further clouded by uncertainty in Congress, as House Republicans spent most of October without a speaker, paralyzing legislative efforts in the chamber. Lawmakers and staffers told The Washington Post that it was unclear whether newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who is staunchly antiabortion and a longtime ally of conservative advocacy groups that allege PEPFAR is funding abortions abroad, would favor swiftly reauthorizing the program.
Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Senate’s PEPFAR efforts have also been disrupted. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who was steering Democrats’ efforts and working with Republicans to find a deal, stepped down last month as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair after he was indicted over allegations he accepted bribes in exchange for exerting political influence. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who had not been closely involved in the PEPFAR negotiations, is now serving as committee chair.
Lawmakers in both parties have discussed attempting to attach PEPFAR’s reauthorization to a larger bill to fund the government at the end of this year, but congressional staffers and experts have said they remain cautious about its prospects.
“If the only conversation is abortion, we’re not going to have a reauthorized bill,” Dybul said this week, calling on public health experts “to stand up, to speak, and not allow the misinformation to win.”
PEPFAR partner organizations across the globe said they are nervously watching the congressional negotiations, which have raised international questions about whether the United States remains committed to its long-running HIV program.
“The anxiety we are causing to patients and health workers is unfair,” Nkatha Njeru, the coordinator and CEO of Nairobi-based African Christian Health Associations Platform, wrote in an email.
It is unclear what will end the logjam. Bush appealed to Congress to reauthorize the program for five years in an op-ed in The Post published last month, and senior officials from both parties have increasingly issued their own pleas.
“I can’t think of another thing like PEPFAR until I go back to the Marshall Plan,” said Bob McDonald, who served as secretary of Veterans Affairs during the Obama administration and who co-signed the letter sent by the Bush Institute on Wednesday. “Imagine if we had been against the Marshall Plan.”
Asked how to break the political stalemate, Nkengasong called for a “dialogue” with the program’s critics. “We have to have a forum where we have an honest conversation … and lead with facts and not misinformation and disinformation,” the PEPFAR chief said.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Monday, October 23, 2023
Saturday, October 21, 2023
Today's Crooked Republican
I really am trying to stay away from the sweeping generalization that all Republicans are crooked.
Former Florida lawmaker who penned "Don't Say Gay" bill sentenced to prison over COVID loan fraud
A former Florida lawmaker who penned the state's controversial "Don't Say Gay" law has been sentenced to prison for wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements in connection with obtaining $150,000 in COVID-19 relief loans.
Joseph Harding, 36, of Ocala, Florida, will serve four months in federal prison, according to a statement on Thursday from the U.S. attorney's office in the Northern District of Florida. After his release, Harding will have two years of supervised release.
An attorney for Harding, John Lauro, told CBS MoneyWatch that the $150,000 in loans were repaid to the government prior to the litigation.
"Joe cooperated completely and did everything he could to make things right," Lauro said. "These events were, needless to say unfortunate, but Joe is focused on rebuilding his life and his career, and moving forward."
Harding defrauded the Small Business Administration to obtain COVID relief funds including an Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL), which he submitted in the name of a business he owned that wasn't active, the U.S. attorney's office said. After receiving the money, he used the funds to pay off his credit card and transferred money to his joint bank account, as well as to the account of a third-party business.
"Instead of using thousands of dollars in federal funds to help keep struggling businesses afloat and honest workers employed, he selfishly diverted it for his own personal gain," said Sherri E. Onks, special agent in charge of the FBI Jacksonville Division, in the statement.
The Small Business Administration earlier this year estimated that fraudsters may have received more than $200 billion in federal COVID aid intended for small businesses. Because the agency sought to quickly distribute $1.2 trillion in funds through the EIDL and Paycheck Protection programs, it weakened or removed certain requirements designed to ensure only eligible businesses received funds, the SBA Office of Inspector General found.
Harding drew national attention for penning the 2022 "Parental Rights in Education" bill, known by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which restricts teachers and school districts from discussing gender identity and topics surrounding sexuality in elementary school classrooms.
Asked about the bill in a 2022 interview, Harding defended it by saying the law was "empowering parents" and denied accusations that it was discriminatory. He also condemned protesters, some of whom he said were children, for "cussing at lawmakers" over the bill.
"That should wake us up as parents that that type of behavior ... is deemed acceptable for minors to use cuss words," he said.
Harding resigned from his lawmaker role in December, a day after he was indicted on charges for COVID loan fraud, according to USA Today.
Harding "egregiously betrayed the public trust by stealing from COVID relief funds meant to help the very people who elected him," said special agent in charge Brian J. Payne of the IRS Criminal Investigation, Tampa Field Office, in a statement.
And they seem to be going out of their way to make it damned near impossible for me.
Former Florida lawmaker who penned "Don't Say Gay" bill sentenced to prison over COVID loan fraud
A former Florida lawmaker who penned the state's controversial "Don't Say Gay" law has been sentenced to prison for wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements in connection with obtaining $150,000 in COVID-19 relief loans.
Joseph Harding, 36, of Ocala, Florida, will serve four months in federal prison, according to a statement on Thursday from the U.S. attorney's office in the Northern District of Florida. After his release, Harding will have two years of supervised release.
An attorney for Harding, John Lauro, told CBS MoneyWatch that the $150,000 in loans were repaid to the government prior to the litigation.
"Joe cooperated completely and did everything he could to make things right," Lauro said. "These events were, needless to say unfortunate, but Joe is focused on rebuilding his life and his career, and moving forward."
Harding defrauded the Small Business Administration to obtain COVID relief funds including an Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL), which he submitted in the name of a business he owned that wasn't active, the U.S. attorney's office said. After receiving the money, he used the funds to pay off his credit card and transferred money to his joint bank account, as well as to the account of a third-party business.
"Instead of using thousands of dollars in federal funds to help keep struggling businesses afloat and honest workers employed, he selfishly diverted it for his own personal gain," said Sherri E. Onks, special agent in charge of the FBI Jacksonville Division, in the statement.
The Small Business Administration earlier this year estimated that fraudsters may have received more than $200 billion in federal COVID aid intended for small businesses. Because the agency sought to quickly distribute $1.2 trillion in funds through the EIDL and Paycheck Protection programs, it weakened or removed certain requirements designed to ensure only eligible businesses received funds, the SBA Office of Inspector General found.
Harding drew national attention for penning the 2022 "Parental Rights in Education" bill, known by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which restricts teachers and school districts from discussing gender identity and topics surrounding sexuality in elementary school classrooms.
Asked about the bill in a 2022 interview, Harding defended it by saying the law was "empowering parents" and denied accusations that it was discriminatory. He also condemned protesters, some of whom he said were children, for "cussing at lawmakers" over the bill.
"That should wake us up as parents that that type of behavior ... is deemed acceptable for minors to use cuss words," he said.
Harding resigned from his lawmaker role in December, a day after he was indicted on charges for COVID loan fraud, according to USA Today.
Harding "egregiously betrayed the public trust by stealing from COVID relief funds meant to help the very people who elected him," said special agent in charge Brian J. Payne of the IRS Criminal Investigation, Tampa Field Office, in a statement.
Saturday, October 14, 2023
The Chaos Caucus
And the Press Poodles at WaPo are at it again - diligently ignoring the obvious.
But the Ohio congressman faces a steep hill in getting the 217 votes needed in the full House
By Amy B Wang, Marianna Sotomayor, Jacqueline Alemany and Leigh Ann Caldwell
House Republicans on Friday elected Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) as their new speaker-designate, yet he faces the same daunting mathematical conundrum that bedeviled the brief attempt of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (La.) to claim the gavel.
Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
In an hours-long closed-door session Friday, GOP lawmakers — many of them visibly frustrated after a week of infighting — heard pitches from Jordan and Rep. Austin Scott (Ga.), who launched a last-minute bid for the speakership Friday morning.
Jordan — who narrowly lost to Scalise in a GOP vote earlier this week before the Louisiana Republican withdrew from the race a day later — emerged this time as the conference’s nominee with 124 votes, while Scott received 81 votes. Jordan’s vote tally was marginally higher than Scalise’s 113 count, suggesting he has much work ahead of him in getting to the 217 votes required to get elected by the full chamber.
Jordan’s elevation would cement the Republican Party’s shift to the far right — especially in the House — and would install as speaker someone who was a key ally in former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and a leading defender against Trump’s impeachment for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
⬆︎⚠️ It's obvious that the GOP is sprinting (ie: not "shifting") to the far right. How does that little nugget get buried in the 4th paragraph - like it's an afterthought.
Going hard right is kinda the whole fucking point here.🚨
Jordan’s nomination was less a celebratory breakthrough and more of an unsteady mile marker for a Republican conference that has been plunged into chaos this week amid deep divisions. GOP lawmakers’ inability to unite around a single candidate has left the House without a permanent speaker for more than a week after Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) was removed from the job — paralyzing the chamber even with another government funding deadline looming and a war breaking out in the Middle East.
After Jordan was nominated Friday, Republicans immediately held another vote within the conference, also a secret ballot, on whether they would support him as the nominee on the floor. The aim was to see if Jordan would be able to win with at least 217 Republicans to avoid the debacle that befell Scalise. In that second vote, Jordan received 152 yes votes and 55 no votes, while one lawmaker voted present.
Afterward, lawmakers were told they would reconvene Monday. Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R-Ky.) said Jordan asked for the weekend to win over more support ahead of a Monday floor vote.
“Who the speaker ultimately ends up being is less important to me than a functioning majority. That’s what I want members to keep in mind,” Barr said. “Steve wasn’t able to get there, so I’m hoping Jim can.”
Minutes after the House convened Friday morning, Republicans went into a closed-door session to consider proposed conference rule changes aimed at ensuring future nominees would have the support necessary to win the speakership in a floor vote. However, all the proposals were eventually withdrawn, according to three lawmakers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private session.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) arrives for a House Republican gathering at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Complicating Jordan’s path, Scott announced Friday that he, too, would run for House speaker. The dean of the Georgia Republican delegation told reporters that he had “no intention” of launching a last-minute bid for speaker but said Republicans were not doing things “the right way.”
“We are in Washington to legislate, and I want to lead a House that functions in the best interest of the American people,” Scott wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Friday morning.
McCarthy — who supported Jordan for the speakership after he was ousted — said he was encouraging others to do the same, though he couched it with the fact that members needed to make their own decisions. In Friday’s conference meeting, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) again raised his proposal to vote to condemn last week’s motion to vacate McCarthy and renominate him for the speakership.
Many Republicans were cheering, according to people in the room, but McCarthy then approached the microphones and told the conference to support Jordan.
Someone tried to “make a motion to bring me back, and I just [said], ‘No, let’s not do that,’” McCarthy said after the meeting.
Jordan will spend the weekend calling allies to help him shore up support from 56 Republicans who did not vote for him in the conference.
Several Scalise supporters remain hesitant about voting for Jordan, particularly after Jordan did not give an immediate and full-throated endorsement of Scalise. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said Friday that he still had concerns about Jordan following his treatment of Scalise and didn’t want to “reward bad behavior.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a staunch Scalise ally, said no pressure would change his mind to support Jordan on the floor next week. If Jordan couldn’t persuade people to follow him on something as basic as a speaker vote, Diaz-Balart argued, then it did not bode well for more complicated matters down the line like negotiating appropriations bills, the debt limit or national security issues.
“This is, frankly, I hate to say this, the simplest thing we do, right? And if you can’t get your own people to follow you on a very simple thing like this, then I think you have an issue,” he said.
Some vulnerable Republicans who represent districts President Biden won in 2020 were also nervous about what a Jordan speakership could mean for them electorally. Jordan is known nationally as one of Trump’s strongest allies, and Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) admitted Thursday night that recognition could hurt him in his district. But he also echoed a position some governing moderates have taken, which is that he would support Jordan because Republicans need a speaker to get back to legislative business.
“I have absolutely no objection” to Jordan becoming speaker, Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said. “No one cares about how we get there. They just want us to get back to governing.”
What isn’t helping Jordan in terms of garnering support is how his allies have behaved: They have threatened some of those vulnerable Republicans, telling them that if they didn’t vote for Jordan behind closed doors, they would get primary challenges in their elections, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private conversations.
Another House Republican said those lawmakers who vote against Jordan on the second ballot may soon feel the wrath of “the Trump effect” unleashed on them to get them to bend toward Jordan. A Trump aide said the former president and his team are unlikely to be involved in whipping the vote — though they are tracking the status of the speaker’s race.
Asked about allegations that Jordan’s allies were threatening lawmakers who did not vote for Jordan, Russell Dye, a Jordan spokesman, said: “That is totally untrue.”
Concerns about Jordan’s past controversies also started to surface this week. The lawmaker has been accused by several Ohio State University wrestlers of knowing about sexual abuse allegations against the team’s doctor when he was a coach but doing nothing about it. An Ohio State independent investigation into the abuse did not make “conclusive determinations” about whether particular employees knew about the abuse by Richard Strauss, but a report issued later in 2019 said coaches did know.
Dye said in a statement this week that “Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”
The earliest the House could vote for speaker is Monday evening. Several Republicans were not in attendance at their conference Friday — because they were either physically no longer in Washington or because they were so angered by their own colleagues that they are now viewing these gathering as pointless — and it is unlikely the GOP will hold a vote with several absences. All week, Republicans publicly described their unproductive gatherings as “therapy sessions” or Festivus, a fictional holiday from the show “Seinfeld” that requires an airing of grievances.
Minutes after Jordan was chosen as speaker-designate, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the House Freedom Caucus co-founder had now become the “chairman of the chaos caucus” and “an extremist extraordinaire.” Jeffries also pointed at Republicans who have back-channeling with Democrats about a bipartisan solution to electing a consensus speaker to step up and vote against Jordan on the floor.
“Republicans can continue to triple down on the chaos, the dysfunction and the extremism,” Jeffries said on the Capitol steps. “On the other hand, traditional Republicans can break away from the extremism, partner with Democrats on an enlightened, bipartisan path forward so we can end the recklessness.”
After Jordan was nominated Friday, Republicans immediately held another vote within the conference, also a secret ballot, on whether they would support him as the nominee on the floor. The aim was to see if Jordan would be able to win with at least 217 Republicans to avoid the debacle that befell Scalise. In that second vote, Jordan received 152 yes votes and 55 no votes, while one lawmaker voted present.
Afterward, lawmakers were told they would reconvene Monday. Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R-Ky.) said Jordan asked for the weekend to win over more support ahead of a Monday floor vote.
“Who the speaker ultimately ends up being is less important to me than a functioning majority. That’s what I want members to keep in mind,” Barr said. “Steve wasn’t able to get there, so I’m hoping Jim can.”
Minutes after the House convened Friday morning, Republicans went into a closed-door session to consider proposed conference rule changes aimed at ensuring future nominees would have the support necessary to win the speakership in a floor vote. However, all the proposals were eventually withdrawn, according to three lawmakers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private session.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) arrives for a House Republican gathering at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Complicating Jordan’s path, Scott announced Friday that he, too, would run for House speaker. The dean of the Georgia Republican delegation told reporters that he had “no intention” of launching a last-minute bid for speaker but said Republicans were not doing things “the right way.”
“We are in Washington to legislate, and I want to lead a House that functions in the best interest of the American people,” Scott wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Friday morning.
McCarthy — who supported Jordan for the speakership after he was ousted — said he was encouraging others to do the same, though he couched it with the fact that members needed to make their own decisions. In Friday’s conference meeting, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) again raised his proposal to vote to condemn last week’s motion to vacate McCarthy and renominate him for the speakership.
Many Republicans were cheering, according to people in the room, but McCarthy then approached the microphones and told the conference to support Jordan.
Someone tried to “make a motion to bring me back, and I just [said], ‘No, let’s not do that,’” McCarthy said after the meeting.
Jordan will spend the weekend calling allies to help him shore up support from 56 Republicans who did not vote for him in the conference.
Several Scalise supporters remain hesitant about voting for Jordan, particularly after Jordan did not give an immediate and full-throated endorsement of Scalise. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said Friday that he still had concerns about Jordan following his treatment of Scalise and didn’t want to “reward bad behavior.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a staunch Scalise ally, said no pressure would change his mind to support Jordan on the floor next week. If Jordan couldn’t persuade people to follow him on something as basic as a speaker vote, Diaz-Balart argued, then it did not bode well for more complicated matters down the line like negotiating appropriations bills, the debt limit or national security issues.
“This is, frankly, I hate to say this, the simplest thing we do, right? And if you can’t get your own people to follow you on a very simple thing like this, then I think you have an issue,” he said.
Some vulnerable Republicans who represent districts President Biden won in 2020 were also nervous about what a Jordan speakership could mean for them electorally. Jordan is known nationally as one of Trump’s strongest allies, and Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) admitted Thursday night that recognition could hurt him in his district. But he also echoed a position some governing moderates have taken, which is that he would support Jordan because Republicans need a speaker to get back to legislative business.
“I have absolutely no objection” to Jordan becoming speaker, Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said. “No one cares about how we get there. They just want us to get back to governing.”
What isn’t helping Jordan in terms of garnering support is how his allies have behaved: They have threatened some of those vulnerable Republicans, telling them that if they didn’t vote for Jordan behind closed doors, they would get primary challenges in their elections, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private conversations.
Another House Republican said those lawmakers who vote against Jordan on the second ballot may soon feel the wrath of “the Trump effect” unleashed on them to get them to bend toward Jordan. A Trump aide said the former president and his team are unlikely to be involved in whipping the vote — though they are tracking the status of the speaker’s race.
Asked about allegations that Jordan’s allies were threatening lawmakers who did not vote for Jordan, Russell Dye, a Jordan spokesman, said: “That is totally untrue.”
Concerns about Jordan’s past controversies also started to surface this week. The lawmaker has been accused by several Ohio State University wrestlers of knowing about sexual abuse allegations against the team’s doctor when he was a coach but doing nothing about it. An Ohio State independent investigation into the abuse did not make “conclusive determinations” about whether particular employees knew about the abuse by Richard Strauss, but a report issued later in 2019 said coaches did know.
Dye said in a statement this week that “Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”
The earliest the House could vote for speaker is Monday evening. Several Republicans were not in attendance at their conference Friday — because they were either physically no longer in Washington or because they were so angered by their own colleagues that they are now viewing these gathering as pointless — and it is unlikely the GOP will hold a vote with several absences. All week, Republicans publicly described their unproductive gatherings as “therapy sessions” or Festivus, a fictional holiday from the show “Seinfeld” that requires an airing of grievances.
Minutes after Jordan was chosen as speaker-designate, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the House Freedom Caucus co-founder had now become the “chairman of the chaos caucus” and “an extremist extraordinaire.” Jeffries also pointed at Republicans who have back-channeling with Democrats about a bipartisan solution to electing a consensus speaker to step up and vote against Jordan on the floor.
“Republicans can continue to triple down on the chaos, the dysfunction and the extremism,” Jeffries said on the Capitol steps. “On the other hand, traditional Republicans can break away from the extremism, partner with Democrats on an enlightened, bipartisan path forward so we can end the recklessness.”
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
No Punches Pulled
You might wanna put on the headphones for this one. It's not quite NSFW, but it's close. And there're some great subliminals in the voiceover that are worth the effort.
Wednesday, October 04, 2023
Face-Eating Leopards
... will always eat our face.
Here's Rick Wilson with a few predictions. Let's make a note and see if any of this actually happens.
Thursday, August 17, 2023
Steve Schmidt
The party of personal responsibility is scrambling mightily to avoid taking any responsibility for their cowardice in the face of real threats to democracy.
That's true enough in perhaps most cases, but I'll diverge slightly from Schmidt's assessment, and say that a lot of Republicans aren't being cowardly at all. They aren't "standing up to Trump" precisely because they think he's getting them closer to their goal of toppling our system of democratic self-government.
Wednesday, August 09, 2023
More Comin'
Way too many of us still don't quite understand how close we came to losing it all.
And way too many of use are still way too complacent about the ongoing efforts to fuck us over.
Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win
The House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation did not uncover the memo, whose existence first came to light in last week’s indictment.
A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.
The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end.
But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Mr. Biden.
While that basic plan itself was already known, the document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo,” provides new details about how it originated and was discussed behind the scenes. Among those details is Mr. Chesebro’s proposed “messaging” strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Mr. Biden was declared the winner. The campaign would present that step as “a routine measure that is necessary to ensure” that the correct electoral slate could be counted by Congress if courts or legislatures later concluded that Mr. Trump had actually won the states.
It was not the first time Mr. Chesebro had raised the notion of creating alternate electors. In November, he had suggested doing so in Wisconsin, although for a different reason: to safeguard Mr. Trump’s rights in case he later won a court battle and was declared that state’s certified winner by Jan. 6, as had happened with Hawaii in 1960.
But the indictment portrayed the Dec. 6 memo as a “sharp departure” from that proposal, becoming what prosecutors say was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”
“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6,” Mr. Chesebro wrote. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.”
Three days later, Mr. Chesebro drew up specific instructions to create fraudulent electors in multiple states — in another memo whose existence, along with the one in November, was first reported by The Times last year. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot also cited them in its December report, but it apparently did not learn of the Dec. 6 memo.
“I believe that what can be achieved on Jan. 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the newly disclosed memo. “It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count unless and until Biden can obtain a favorable decision from the Supreme Court upholding the Electoral Count Act as constitutional, or otherwise recognizing the power of Congress (and not the president of the Senate) to count the votes.”
Mr. Chesebro and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. A Trump spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The false electors scheme was perhaps the most sprawling of Mr. Trump’s various efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved lawyers working on his campaign’s behalf across seven states, dozens of electors willing to claim that Mr. Trump — not Mr. Biden — had won their states, and open resistance from some of those potential electors that the plan could be illegal or even “appear treasonous.” In the end, it became the cornerstone of the indictment against Mr. Trump.
If you've been shit-talking AG Garland because you think he's been slow on the uptake, just know that he had an awful lot of pest control and varmint removal to do before he could even put the machinery in gear.
How long would it take you to root out the authoritarian assholes who've spent their whole careers militating for a Unitary Executive, and doing everything possible to torpedo any effort to unfuck a major department that's been increasingly fucked up by a Daddy State-leaning cadre happily scheming and hacking away at the government from the inside?
While another lawyer — John Eastman, described as Co-Conspirator 2 in the indictment — became a key figure who championed the plan and worked more directly with Mr. Trump on it, Mr. Chesebro was an architect of it. He was first enlisted by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin to help with a legal challenge to the results there.
Prosecutors are still hearing evidence related to the investigation, even after charges were leveled against Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The House committee last year released emails its investigators obtained showing that Mr. Chesebro had sent copies of the two previously reported memos, one from Nov. 18 and another from Dec. 9, to allies in the states working on the fake electors plan.
But he did not attach his Dec. 6 memo to those messages, which laid out a more audacious idea: having Mr. Pence take “the position that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as president of the Senate, to both open and count the votes.” That is, he could resolve the dispute over which slate was valid by counting the alternate electors for Mr. Trump even if Mr. Biden remained the certified winner of their states.
Mr. Chesebro, who is described as Co-Conspirator 5 in the indictment but has not been charged by the special counsel, addressed the second memo to James R. Troupis, a lawyer who was assisting the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory in Wisconsin.
By the next day, the indictment said, Mr. Chesebro’s memo had reached Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
According to the indictment, Mr. Giuliani, who is referred to as Co-Conspirator 1, spoke with someone identified only as Co-Conspirator 6 about finding lawyers to help with the effort in seven states. An email reviewed by The Times suggests that particular conspirator could be Boris Epshteyn, a campaign strategic adviser for the Trump campaign who was paid for political consulting. That day, Mr. Epshteyn sent Mr. Giuliani an email recommending lawyers in those seven states.
As he had done in the earlier memo, Mr. Chesebro cited writings by a Harvard Law School professor, Laurence H. Tribe, to bolster his argument that the deadlines and procedures in the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional and that state electoral votes need not be finalized until Congress’s certification on Jan. 6. Mr. Chesebro had worked as Mr. Tribe’s research assistant as a law student and later helped him in his representation of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 election.
Calling his former mentor “a key Biden supporter and fervent Trump critic,” Mr. Chesebro cited what he described as Mr. Tribe’s legal views, along with writings by several other liberals as potential fodder for a messaging strategy. It would be “the height of hypocrisy for Democrats to resist Jan. 6 as the real deadline, or to suggest that Trump and Pence would be doing anything particularly controversial,” he wrote.
But in an essay published on Tuesday on the legal website Just Security, Mr. Tribe said Mr. Chesebro’s Nov. 18 memo “relied on a gross misrepresentation of my scholarship.”
For one, Mr. Chesebro quoted a clause from a law review article by Mr. Tribe about Bush v. Gore as support for the idea that the only real legal deadline is Jan. 6. That was taken out of context, Mr. Tribe wrote, saying he was only narrowly “discussing the specifics of Florida state law.” Mr. Chesebro, by contrast, made it sound as if he was putting forward “a general proposition about the power of states to do what they wish regardless of the Electoral Count Act and independent of the deadlines set by Congress,” he added.
For another, Mr. Chesebro cited a constitutional treatise in which Mr. Tribe wrote that a past Congress cannot bind the actions of a later Congress, which Mr. Chesebro used to buttress his proposal that parts of the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional. But Mr. Tribe wrote that what he meant was Congress can pass new legislation changing such a law.
The indictment also accuses Mr. Trump and his unindicted co-conspirators of acting with deception in recruiting some of the fraudulent electors. That included telling some of them that their votes for Mr. Trump would be used only if a court ruling handed victory in their state to Mr. Trump.
The Dec. 6 memo dovetails with that approach. Mr. Chesebro wrote that Mr. Pence could count purported Trump electors from a state as long as there was a lawsuit pending challenging Mr. Biden’s declared victory there. But he also proposed telling the public that the Trump electors were meeting on Dec. 14 merely as a precaution in case “the courts (or state legislatures) were to later conclude that Trump actually won the state.”
Mr. Chesebro also suggested he knew that even that part of the strategy would draw blowback.
“There is no requirement that they meet in public. It might be preferable for them to meet in private, to thwart the ability of protesters to disrupt the event,” he wrote, adding: “Even if held in private, perhaps print and even TV journalists would be invited to attend to cover the event.”
Way To Go Buckeyes
Ahead of a November vote on abortion rights, Republican lawmakers wanted voters to make it more difficult to amend the state constitution
Ohio voters rejected a measure Tuesday that would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution ahead of a November vote to ensure access to abortion.
For more than a century, Ohioans have been able to amend the state constitution with a simple majority. The failed measure would have changed that threshold to 60 percent.
With about 88 percent of votes counted Tuesday night, 56.5 percent voted against the proposal, while 43.5 percent supported it. The Associated Press projected the measure would fail.
Republican state lawmakers decided to try to make it tougher to amend the constitution as reproductive rights advocates gathered signatures of support this spring for a November measure that would guarantee access to abortion. Because of those stakes, Tuesday’s election became a proxy fight over abortion, which is expected to again be a defining issue in the 2024 election.
From the start, Republican leaders were clear that they wanted to make the abortion rights measure more difficult to pass, but they also embraced the proposal more broadly, arguing that modifications to the state constitution should have overwhelming support. Opponents of changing the rules called the measure anti-democratic, saying the nation is founded on the idea of majority rule.
“People showed up, they were fired up, and quite frankly they were fed up,” said Rep. Shontel M. Brown (D-Ohio), an opponent of the ballot measure. “I think this demonstrated that issues are still important, messaging still matters and the power still belongs to the people.”
When the race was called, cheers went up at the Northwood Cider Company in suburban Cincinnati, where Democrats gathered to watch results roll in. They clinked their glasses in celebration and said they would quickly turn their attention to passing the abortion rights measure in November.
“Tomorrow we sleep, and Thursday we get back to work,” Isaac Goff-Mitchell, the executive director of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, told the crowd of about 100.
The antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called the results “a warning for pro-life states across the nation,” arguing that Republicans had not done enough to persuade voters to change the rules for amending the constitution.
“So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again,” the group said in its statement.
The measure, known as Issue 1, was the only item on the ballot. Supporters and opponents spent millions of dollars on their campaigns, and early turnout was high for an election held during a normally sleepy political season. More than 600,000 people voted early, more than twice as many as voted early in the May 2022 primary for U.S. Senate.
The special election drew national attention. Mike Pence, the former vice president seeking the GOP nomination for president, released a video Tuesday urging Ohioans to vote “yes” so they could block the November abortion rights amendment, “stop the radical left” and “save Ohio.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, in a Twitter post called on voters to cast “no” ballots because “voting rights and reproductive freedoms are on the line.”
Since the Supreme Court last year ended a nationwide right to abortion, voters in three states backed state constitutional amendments ensuring access to the procedure: Michigan, Vermont and California. In addition, voters in two conservative-leaning states, Kansas and Kentucky, rejected referendums that would have changed their constitutions to explicitly say they do not provide a right to abortion.
Tuesday’s vote could foreshadow the outcome of the abortion measure in November. According to a July poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, 58 percent of likely voters in Ohio supported the abortion rights ballot measure.
Voters had abortion on their minds as they went to the polls Tuesday.
Retired attorney Richard Russeth, 67, voted against the measure Tuesday at an elementary school in Middletown, a city of 50,000 between Cincinnati and Dayton.
“I am not against having a supermajority, but they are only doing this to defeat abortion,” he said. “They are changing the rules in the middle of the game and that doesn’t fly with me.”
Several miles away, in rural Wayne Township, Jim Gentry, 84, said he voted for the measure because of his opposition to abortion.
“I don’t want them fooling with the constitution,” said Gentry, a retired truck driver.
In recent years, Republicans in a handful of states have sought to make it more difficult to pass citizen-led initiatives after a string of liberal policies — from expanding Medicaid to raising the minimum wage — have been placed on the ballot.
Last year, such efforts to raise the voter threshold failed in South Dakota and Arkansas, and attempts to schedule a similar vote in Missouri were unsuccessful this spring. In Arizona, voters narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment requiring 60 percent of voters to greenlight measures enacting a new tax.
“Ohio is going to shape the contours of this conversation going forward,” said Sarah Walker, the policy and legal advocacy director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which helps with liberal ballot measures.
Speaking before the race was called, she said: “If it’s a resounding defeat, it will send a very strong message that it is not in the interest of policymakers to attempt to restrict the citizen-initiative process.”
In Ohio, millions of dollars flowed to both opponents and proponents of the measure, from within the state and outside it. Groups that support the November abortion rights effort and those opposing Tuesday’s ballot measure have raised about $25 million. Those on the other side have secured about $20 million, according to campaign finance filings.
Michael Gonidakis, the president of Ohio Right to Life, lobbied the state legislature for months to try to make it harder to pass constitutional amendments. Those efforts were successful in May, and since then, he has traveled across the state pitching the argument that powerful out-of-state groups want to wield outsize influence on Ohio.
“Bottom line is we’re going to have to work harder now — we know that,” Gonidakis said Tuesday night.
He added: “I think Ohioans are going to regret not taking this opportunity to protect our constitution because hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be poured in this state.”
Supporters of Tuesday’s measure argued that raising the threshold for constitutional amendments was about more than abortion. They pointed to an array of other liberal-leaning issues that could appear on future ballots, such as raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana. They contended that it is too easy to amend the state constitution and that there should be a high bar for modifying it like there is for the U.S. Constitution.
“A simple 50 percent-plus-one majority shouldn’t be able to change the rules that we use to govern our state,” said Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, who has launched a bid for U.S. Senate. “This is about protecting our state constitution.”
Abortion rights advocates banded with other groups to reject Tuesday’s measure, and they cheered the results.
“Seeing this Issue 1 go down in this crushing defeat just is proof that these extremists are out of touch with what the people of Ohio want,” said Lauren Beene, executive director of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights.
Her group and others are now turning their attention to November.
“This is the first step, but it was an important step,” said Kellie Copeland, the treasurer of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights. “We have our work cut out for us, and we’re confident that we’re going to win in November, but there’s a lot of miles to go before we get there.”
Other groups largely avoided discussion of abortion when they talked about Issue 1, and they argued that it is unfair to let a minority block the will of the voters.
“This ability to take something to the ballot and have a constitutional amendment is our last line of defense,” said Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “That’s the beauty of being in Ohio, is that we have the ability to go to the ballot and make a change. And we shouldn’t be sacrificing it.”
Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, said Issue 1 failed because of “massive overreach by the legislative backers.”
“They just disregarded the will of the people,” he said. “They overstepped and overplayed their hand in epic proportions.”
Translated: Republicans know they're losing so they're taking steps to make a majority not a majority. They want 57% of the votes not to count, so they can "win" with the other 43%.
The GOP has made it impossible for me to vote Republican ever again - on anything.
Ever.
The day the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, a ban went into effect in Ohio on abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected, often at six weeks of pregnancy. But nearly three months later, in September 2022, a Hamilton County judge blocked the abortion ban, and a lawsuit is wending its way through the courts.
More recently, abortion rights supporters gathered signatures at places like grocery stores, religious centers, large concerts and festivals in a quest to get a measure protecting access to abortion on the ballot this November. The secretary of state determined in July that their effort was successful. Two Republicans have sued to try to block the November election.
The focus of Tuesday’s vote was on the higher threshold it would set for passing future constitutional amendments. But the measure would also have made it tougher to place initiatives on the ballot in the first place by requiring signatures to be gathered in all 88 of Ohio’s counties instead of just 44.
Brenda Perkins, 66, voted against the measure at Rosa Parks Elementary School in Middletown. Perkins, a retired teacher, reflected on the national attention on the special election.
“The whole world,” she said, “is watching Ohio.
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