RALEIGH – Call me naïve, call me an idealist, but I expected better of Sen. Teddy Kennedy.
The Massachusetts Democrat has a well-earned reputation for leftism, rhetorical irresponsibility, personal self-indulgence, and just plain incoherence. But I never expected him to go as far as he did the other day when he attacked the Bush administration for wanting to include funds for displaced schoolchildren in the federal rebuilding effort in New Orleans.
I’d have welcomed an objection from Kennedy, or any other senator of either party, to Bush’s plans to use federal tax dollars for schools on the grounds that the federal government has no legitimate, constitutional role in this area. Such a clear stand for principle and federalism would have prompted a fond remembrance of a similar action taken more than a century ago by one of my favorite presidents, Democrat Grover Cleveland, who famously vetoed a drought-relief bill on constitutional grounds. (My favorite presidents tend to be those who don’t make government bigger through wars or welfare statism, but apparently the “experts” disagree.)
But Kennedy’s objection wasn’t based on principles of federalism or enumerated powers. Indeed, he wasn’t even objecting to the use of federal disaster funds to help New Orleans schoolchildren. What Kennedy didn’t like was that some of the money would end up assisting students who had attended the Catholic school system, which enrolled nearly half of all kids in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit.
The Bush plan is for federal funds to finance 90 percent of the state’s instructional cost for relocated students enrolling in other public schools, and 90 percent of tuition for relocated students enrolling in private or parochial schools. In both cases, the amount per student would be capped at $7,500 and limited to a single year. The estimated cost would be $1.9 billion for the public-school students and about $500 million for the private ones.
Kennedy and other advocates of government-monopoly schooling insist that the Bush administration is “politicizing” the relief effort by essentially creating a federally funded voucher system. But simple fairness requires that private-school students displaced by Katrina must be treated the same as public-school students. Both groups were affected similarly. In both cases, the federal government’s predominant role in financing education is unprecedented and time-limited. Indeed, what Kennedy is saying is that the federal government should take the opportunity afforded by a destructive storm to bait families in New Orleans to abandon their private schools and enroll in the public system, where big federal subsidy checks are available. That’s politicizing a tragedy.
Again, my preference would be for the federal government to forego subsidizing either category of local schools. Constitutionally, that is a state and local function. But this is one of those situations where you either have to be in for a pound or not at all. You can’t be in for a penny, because it would be worse than inaction. In this case, selective assistance would actively hurt a private-sector education sector that had previously flourished in New Orleans through the free choices of families and providers.
Even the perpetually petulant and thick-headed Teddy Kennedy ought to understand that. Or maybe I am just too much of a starry-eyed dreamer to give up on the hopeless cases of politics.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.