EdChoice Fight Pure Politics
AG Yost and Speaker Huffman confirm: Their side is playing politics with our tax dollars and private school parents and kids.
Today, I was planning on taking apart Speaker Matt Huffman and Attorney General David Yost’s legal arguments opposing Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Jaiza Page’s 47-page ruling last month that found Ohio’s $1 billion EdChoice private school tuition subsidy program unconstitutional. After all, they called a huge news conference yesterday, complete with all these legal experts and everything. So surely, they planned on explaining how flawed Page’s reasoning was.
Instead, they made political arguments.
As I fully expected. Because their legal arguments suck. Period.
To prove my prescience, I’ve attached an email I composed a full hour and 12 minutes before their news conference:
Why is it so easy to predict these guys’ moves? Because this is the new reality in Ohio. As I’ve written before, if these guys were working in good faith, after the ruling, they would have called a special session (as Republicans did after the DeRolph ruling 30 years ago) and try to address the court’s concerns. While it wouldn’t be easy, they could do that and potentially help their case.
Instead, they’re trotting out people to try to sway public opinion1.
And it ain’t working.
The thing that I think is most damaging to EdChoice is this: The revelation that no single parent or child receives a single, solitary EdChoice voucher. That nearly $1 billion of taxpayer-funded tuition subsidy goes straight into the pockets of religious private schools.
And that, my friends, is strictly forbidden in the Ohio Constitution, which reads: “…no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”2
Pile onto that revelatory piece of evidence the fact that the money the state sends to these private religious schools comes out of the same state budget line item as the money for public schools, which keeps the state from fully funding the educations of the 1.5 million public school students, according to the state’s own calculations (at an almost dollar-for-dollar ratio).
Then pile onto that the fact that the money sent to private religious schools is more than what 75-85 percent of kids in Ohio’s public schools receive.
Then pile onto that the fact that nearly every Ohio school district loses at lease some funding to EdChoice, not a single penny of which, by the way, has ever been audited since 1997. By the time this budget is done, that amount will be $8.5 billion in unaudited public expenditures spent subsidizing private school tuition at mostly religious schools.
See why EdChoice is really, really unconstitutional?
It’s really, really obvious to anyone who can read.
Which is why Huffman is making threats to school districts that join — calling it a “fool’s errand” to join the suit. He knows that if 600+ school districts sign on, even the robed politicians on the Ohio Supreme Court would find it difficult to overturn Page’s ruling.
I also found it sad and revealing that in the Columbus Dispatch article about the state’s decision to appeal the ruling, the writers mentioned the political affiliation of Page, the 10th District Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court. Page and the 10th District are Democrats. And the Supreme Court is Republican. The implication is that the only reason that Page and the 10th District might rule against EdChoice is because of their politics. While the only reason the Supreme Court could rule against them is because they are Republican.
I wish I could chastise the Dispatch for their cynicism. I wish these things didn’t matter. After all, in the 1990s when the Ohio Supreme Court found the state’s school funding system unconstitutional, the court was majority Republican.
However, I can’t.
Because this has been the long game that state Republicans have played for years — to really politicize the Courts. Make it about which Party is on the court so that the public doesn’t trust the legal system anymore. All that matters is what party the Judge is and what the politics of the person in front of them is.
If it is going to be the case that the reason the Ohio Supreme Court would overturn the lower court rulings on EdChoice is pure politics, then let’s run a massive, 3-year political campaign to pressure the Court to do the right thing.
See, I think the tell is not who is on each bench; the tell is what are the arguments each side is making. Because one side on this matter is making legal arguments based on the Ohio Constitution. The other is threatening public school districts.
I side with the Constitution on this one, folks.
And it’s up to us to ensure that the Robed Politicians on Front Street do as well. This isn’t the system I would draw up in a lab. But it’s the one we have today. It needs changed (the Missouri system would be a nice start), but that’s for another day.
Today, we need to make it politically untenable for the Ohio Supreme Court to do anything except follow the Ohio Constitution.
What a sad sentence to compose. But there it is.
Huffman, who’s a lawyer, tried to disingenuously claim that the state is compelled by the constitution to fund private religious schools, forgetting to explain why if that was so, Ohio didn’t actually do that for 110 of the last 150 years — as my friend Dan Heintz put it.
https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-constitution/section-6.2