THE UNION LEADER TAX HIKE
In its lead editorial in the Sunday News of June 17, 2007, the Manchester Union Leader continued to pillory certain Republicans for acting like, well, Republicans by opposing the misbegotten constitutional amendment crafted by ersatz Republican Mike Whalley’s crack team of legal experts. They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. In this case, it appears that one can say that hubris also makes strange bedfellows.
The Manchester Union Leader has been calling for an amendment since Claremont II was issued in 1997. In a recent paroxysm of monomania that would put Captain Ahab to shame, New Hampshire’s ersatz conservative newspaper, in order to get its precious constitutional amendment passed, has taken a dive between the same political bed-sheets under which lie liberal Democrats like Martha Fuller Clark and Peter Burling The Union Leader’s June 17th editorial, like most of its recent editorials on education funding, simply parrots the gassy talking-points incessantly ventilated by liberal Democrats like Fuller Clark and Burling – if the Republicans don’t vote for this amendment, we’re going to have an income tax and it’s all the Republicans fault; if the Republicans don’t vote for this amendment, we’re going to have an income tax and it’s all the Republicans fault; if the Republicans don’t vote for this amendment, we’re going to have an income tax and it’s all the Republicans fault! What poppycock.
If we do end up with an income tax, the fault lies not with the Republicans who opposed the putrid Whalley amendment but with the Manchester Union Leader and its liberal Democrat political bedmates because they have been spewing misinformation about the role of the Supreme Court in our system of government at a pace akin to how the juiced-up Barry Bonds hit home runs. The Supreme Court is just that, a supreme court. It is not the supreme branch of government. It has no lawful authority to tell the other branches to impose any tax, never mind a broad-based tax. It has no lawful authority to tell the other branches to spend anything on public education, never mind an amount that the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom deems to be adequate. And it has no lawful authority to tell the other branches to define an adequate education, never mind set a deadline for the other branches to do so.
But one would never know this from reading the Manchester Union Leader lately. Rather, the Union Leader has adopted the notion of judicial supremacy supported only by the most liberal of liberal Democrats. In its June 13th editorial, the Union Leader actually claimed that the Supreme Court’s education funding decisions represent amendments of the State Constitution! Talk about either being clueless or being depraved! The Supreme Court does not have the power to amend the constitution. Only we the people have the power to amend the constitution. The Supreme Court’s education funding decisions are not amendments of the State Constitution; they are abuses of the judicial power.
What’s behind all the editorial nonsense being ventilated in the Manchester Union Leader is the fear that the Legislature will pass an income tax if the Supreme Court decrees that none of the cost of the bloated definition of an adequate education recently passed by the Democrat legislature can be paid for with local property taxes, and the voters will just acquiesce. The Democrats supporting the Whalley amendment are afraid of just the opposite. Their fear is that if the 2008 election is about the income tax, either enacting or repealing one, some Republican may emerge who will oppose the income tax, notwithstanding the big, bad Supreme Court, and be a big hit with the voters.
The Manchester Union Leader’s June 17th editorial repeats the canard that local control over public education is a myth. It is not. While it is true that there has been a State Board of Education and State standards since 1919, it has been local decision-makers that have decided how much to spend to implement these standards. This degree of local control is what has kept New Hampshire’s tax burden low relative to the other states. What we need to be doing, if the goal is to improve our children’s education, is decreasing State control over education.
By championing an amendment that would write an antiquated and demonstrably failed model of public education into the State Constitution, the Manchester Union Leader has exposed a real myth, however. That is that the Union Leader speaks for conservatives.
BY ED
