Austin Congressman Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX District 25) recently sponsored an amendment to H.R. 1586 that is grossly unconstitutional, and his friend Rep. Chet Edwards (D-TX District 17) of Waco supported it enthusiastically. It just goes to show how any good cause these days, particularly if it is a winner politically, will trump adherence to the U.S. Constitution or the intent of the Founding Fathers. Doggett’s amendment essentially places an education spending mandate on the State of Texas alone of all the fifty states.
H.R. 1586 refers to The FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act. The bill like so many others is a veritable grab-bag of bailouts and legislation pertaining to unrelated topics such as education, Medicaid, and nutrition—not to mention a massive bailout for state governments. The total cost is $26 billion, which costs every American family approximately $126 per year. The bill also allocates $10 billion for jobs in education nation-wide, of which $831 million would go to Texas, in order to pay for 14,500 teacher jobs. The bill’s controversial amendment introduced by Rep. Doggett and voted for by Congressional Democrats including Edwards, requires Texas to maintain the same level of funding in education for the next three years.
Never mind the Governor has no such authority to guarantee or to direct the State Legislature to spend a certain amount of money, or to possibly bind future Legislatures. As U.S. Congressmen from Texas, Doggett and Edwards should know that. Beyond that, one would hope that they appreciate the U.S. Constitution too and the understand the fact that Court precedent precludes federal legislation from treating States unequally. The idea being that all States, old and new, do and should share an equality of constitutional right and power as a condition of belonging to the Union in the first place. States are equal in power, dignity and authority, each competent to exert that residuum of sovereignty not delegated to the United States by the Constitution itself. To maintain otherwise would be to say that the Union, through the power of Congress might come to be a union of States unequal in power, including States whose powers were restricted only by the Constitution and others whose powers had been further restricted by acts of Congress!
It is clear from the legislation that Texas has some Democrat congressmen, who are either unaware of constitutional limits to their authority, or else they are outright traitors to the State. Doggett’s Amendment would require the Governor to offer some sort of presumably written assurance to the feds to receive the funds earmarked for Texas. Even if that assurance amounts to a prediction and there are no claw-back or enforcement provisions in the legislation, the Governor does not work for, or report to, the Federal Government. Hence the language of the Amendment is an attempt to extort certain behavior quid quo pro for the funds, and it amounts at least to implicit infringement on State sovereignty.
Doggett sponsored his amendment essentially to pick a bone: he was unhappy that Governor Perry used part of the money Texas received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a. the federal stimulus package) to offset regularly scheduled spending. Hence Doggett is trying to ensure Texas uses federal money to supplement rather than supplant funds for education with money it receives. Clearly it is a continuation at federal level of partisan wrangling over Texas legislative priorities and Texas State budget. If taken on its face, the Amendment doesn’t even satisfy Federal legislative priorities or U.S. Congressional intent. The federal stimulus package was, well, for economic stimulus—not all about education. Likewise, this current polyglot bill is for stimulus too. Education spending clearly has merit, even in the area of stimulus, but there are many other things money can be spent on to foster recovery and economic growth: to put people back to work and take economic pressure off families; to keep students in school and to enable the workforce to pursue education and wellbeing.
Both Representatives Lloyd Doggett and Chet Edwards are myopic at best and, quite frankly, they lack a larger vision—conservative, progressive or otherwise. In hindsight, Doggett apparently begrudges the fact the Texas economy is doing so well, or that state government is in a far better position than virtually any other state. Now that Texas faces an $18 billion shortfall next year, he wants to limit flexibility and virtually assure that Texas follows the path of a California or a New York to bankruptcy. Texans simply cannot know today whether or not they will be able to afford exactly the same percentage of the budget going towards public education. No one doubts the Governor’s commitment to education, but limiting his and the Legislature’s flexibility in bad economic times is particularly imprudent, even foolhardy. Not only that, the offset using federal dollars for “scheduled spending” actually includes things like textbooks and other costs which support education. Indeed, there really is no quantifiable harm for the offset using federal funds that Doggett complains about. Education is far more complex than that, and benefits do not accrue dollar for dollar.
Doggett’s approach would literally preclude the realization of cost savings ever (so much for improving efficiency or trying innovation to get a better return on investment, or better results in the classroom either). The Amendment is really a stunt designed to embarrass the Governor, given that economic imperatives are likely to drive him and the Legislature to make hard choices, in order to balance the budget next year. Doggett was elected in 1994, and if doesn’t know this then he has been in Washington, D.C. too long, having forgotten that unlike the U.S. Congress, States are required to balance their budgets! In the bigger scheme of things, education is important but economic opportunity for high school and college graduates, as well as the solvency of state government is more important. Typically there is not a wide trade-off and certainly it isn’t zero-sum, but during the Great Recession and for the next couple of years it could be. Only Doggett and other liberal Democrats in Congress would attempt to play ostrich with the situation and put their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the reality of high unemployment, the slowness of the recovery, the uncertainty of business environment. For Chet Edwards’s part, he was first elected in 1990 and was considered for President Obama’s Vice-Presidential pick in 2008—largely for his adept record at looking and acting conservative while supporting liberal politics, such as the anti-Texan and unconstitutional Doggett Amendment to score points for supporting education while empowering the federal government even more.
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