Just how low is the Manchester Union Leader willing to go in its monomaniacal quest to browbeat Senate Republicans into supporting that putrid excuse for a constitutional amendment known as CACR 19? As low as you can go, judging by the Union Leader’s June 19th editorial page, which features an op-ed by none other than State Democrat Party Chairman, Ray Buckley, who is only arguably the dirtiest player in the history of New Hampshire politics. Yes, the Union Leader is in such a pique that a majority of Senate Republicans have chosen to follow Republican principles, instead of bowing to the Union Leader’s jejune bullying, that the Union Leader has enlisted the poster child for political hate speech, Ray Buckley, in its jihad against Republicans who won’t follow the Union Leader’s lead and march us off an educational cliff.
But it’s not only judgment that has deserted the Manchester Union Leader; it is intellectual honesty and logic as well. The Union Leader claims that the Senate Republicans opposing CACR 19 believe that the State Constitution mandated local control of public education prior to the Claremont decisions. While I don’t claim to have the Union Leader’s power to read the minds of all these State Senators, I do know many of the folks opposing CACR 19 and I know that they are not the benighted idiots that the Union Leader claims they are. Indeed, it is they, not the Manchester Union Leader, who understand the Constitution.
The State Constitution has always allowed local control of public education. It still does because, despite what the Manchester Union Leader asserts, the Supreme Court’s Claremont decisions are not amendments of the Constitution. It is the Union Leader, then, that doesn’t know what it is talking about when it claims that CACR 19 would restore the relationship between State and local governments that existed prior to the Claremont decisions. To the contrary, it would fundamentally alter the relationship by making local control of public education unlawful. That is why the Democrats and ersatz Republicans like Mike all-I-really-care-about-is-becoming-Speaker Whalley are so hot to trot for it.
The Manchester Union Leader is correct when it points out that there are some problems with the wording of CACR 20. But the solution is to fix the wording, not pillory Senate Republicans for supporting CACR 20. The intent of CACR 20, which is to assure local control of schools, is far superior to the intent of CACR 19, which is to require the type of centralized, bureaucratic, top-down system of education based on the misbegotten premise that the quality of public education is determined by the amount of spending that has been an abject failure in other states.
Indeed, aside form wisecracks about CACR 20’s wording, the best that the Manchester Union Leader can come up with to promote CACR 19 relative to CACR 20 is that CACR 20 “is a complete reversal of historic practice in New Hampshire.” The Union Leader is quite wrong on that count. While it is true that there has been a State Board of Education and State standards since 1919, they were and are not mandated by the State Constitution, and it has been local decision-makers that have decided how to implement those standards and how much to spend to do so.
But even if the Manchester Union Leader were right that the “historic practice in New Hampshire” has been plenary State control of public schools, why do we want to write that practice into the State Constitution, when we have the choice of a far better policy prescription? If the goal is to improve our children’s education, then we should be amending the Constitution to decrease State control over education. Indeed, even the Union Leader, albeit grudgingly, concedes this point: “We agree that more local control of public education is desirable.”
Senate Republicans acted responsibly and wisely in not being browbeaten and panicked into voting for CACR 19. CACR 19 writes an antiquated and failed model of public education into the State Constitution. And its is unclear how the Supreme Court would construe CACR 19 as the Democrats are saying it means one thing and ersatz Republican Whalley and his crack legal team is saying it means something different.
The Manchester Union Leader and Ray Buckley competing in a political limbo dance to trash conservative Republicans: did you think you’d ever see the day?
BY ED
