Restoring local control over education

Neo-Neocon writes about the issue of local control of education. She links to this article by J. Christian Adams and Hans Von Spakovsky in PJ Media revealing that every single one of the 113 lawyers hired in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice since 2009 is a leftist. Why does that matter?

Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life. Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school…

...Could a Republican president reverse this trend?

Not easily. But if that Republican president were determined and knowledgeable, the following approach might help:

Many may have…assumed a new president can just snap his or her fingers in January 2017 and make it all go away. But alas, no. Most of the lawyers we featured in 2011 are embedded career civil servants and cannot be removed because of the restrictions of a merit protection system 100 years out of date.

…[But an] incoming president can also reassign Senior Executive Service staff to other areas of the Justice Department (or other executive agencies), and even far outside of Washington, D.C., where they can no longer engage in the political mischief and obstructionism that is their raison d’etre.

Importantly, many of the most recent hires we will name are still within their probationary periods as federal employees. When a new president takes the oath of office in January 2017, some of these lawyers will still not have vested.

Ted Cruz would have been just the person to accomplish this sort of thing, but that’s not going to happen (unless Trump is elected and appoints him AG). I have no idea whether Trump would have DOJ reform as a priority, and if so whether he would be able to appoint people knowledgeable enough to implement it. But one reason I have been reluctantly considering voting for him (despite my mammoth reservations about other aspects of his character and plans) is this issue, as well as others connected with SCOTUS appointments and of course illegal immigration. I have very little doubt that Hillary Clinton would either continue the Obama leftist hires (most likely), or at the very least would do nothing to disturb the agenda of the people who are now in place.

As I said in my post yesterday, I think that this directive of the Obama administration on transgender students in public school bathrooms is likely to anger a lot of people (even many liberal Democrats) about federal government intrusion into local control of education. The GOP has the opportunity to exploit that anger and emphasize that they favor localities regaining the upper hand in decisions involving the education of children. Whether it be Trump or other down-ticket GOP candidates, this is an issue that I think could resonate, and it is not tied to specific things such as what bathrooms transgender students will use or the curriculum of Common Core. It has to do with whether the federal government will further take over an important societal function—the education of children—that has traditionally been something over which parents and communities have wanted to exercise a great deal of control.

Read more here.