The Richmond Free Press in March 2019 ran a pair of articles touching on education, one of them a wire service report on the College Blues scandal, the other a story by Jeremy M. Lazarus on the mayor of Richmond’s resolve to improve the funding of the city’s public schools. The maladies assailing education from preschool to graduate programs are manifold and my ideas about the sources of the illness are well formed; perhaps there will be more about that later. Suffice it to say that it’s impossible to disentangle the issue from the country’s politics.
“Fallout Continues from College Admissions Scandal,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A5 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/fallout-continues-college-admissions-scandal/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Stand By Your Plan,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/stand-your-plan/).
“Gaming the College Admissions System and Defunding K-12 Public Education,” The Richmond Free Press, 21-23 March 2019, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/22/gaming-college-admissions-system-and-defunding-k-1/).
There were good tidings in Virginia in the late spring of 2018. The US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the redistricting done by the GOP in 2011 for the Commonwealth’s House of Delegates was racially motivated and ordered a redrawing of the lines. Jeremy M. Lazarus of The Richmond Free Press reported the story and I sent a letter to underscore that this was happy news but that the battle to ensure proper access to the ballot was not over. Rereading the thing, I would amend it. I, like some others, made too much of the decline in Black participation in presidential voting from the high level of 2012 to a lower one in 2016. The larger problem is the appallingly low participation by voters of all backgrounds, an apathy that paves the way for the minority rule conservatives covet.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Federal Court Orders Redrawing of State House Districts by Oct. 30,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 June 2018 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2018/jul/01/federal-court-orders-redrawing-state-house-distric/).
The order by the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to redraw districts for the Virginia House of Delegates is welcome news. The unsubtle gerrymandering perpetrated by the GOP-controlled General Assembly in 2011 contributed to Democrats remaining in the minority (49-51) in the House of Delegates despite having won the statewide vote by a near landslide last November.
No one, however, should assume that the matter is settled beyond contestation. The state GOP may choose to appeal the decision. Should the US Supreme Court intervene, the omens are not promising for advocates of voting rights. The court’s refusal last week to act in cases involving gerrymandered US House districts in Wisconsin and Maryland, coupled with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, President Trump’s vow of a speedy nomination, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise of a lightspeed confirmation, will likely produce a Supreme Court less inclined to rule against cynical efforts to abridge the right to vote and to intimidate and discourage qualified voters.
The Supreme Court’s changing complexion jeopardizes the hard-won gains made by African Americans and potentially will undermine LGBTQ rights, women’s control of their own bodies, collective bargaining by workers, curbing of corporate misconduct, and a host of other priorities. The most effective defense against the unraveling of a sensible progressive agenda remains the ballot box. Regaining control of the House and, if possible, the Senate by Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections is crucial and no voting demographic is more important than African Americans. Colbert King noted recently (“Decades of Progress Are Threatened,” The Washington Post, 30 June 2018, A15 [www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/decades-of-progress-are-in-peril/2018/06/29/b93edcaa-7bbb-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html]) that African-American participation dropped to 59.6 percent in 2016 from 66.6 percent in 2012, a decline that contributed materially to Donald Trump’s ascent. The president has crowed about this very fact to his adoring crowds. Erosion of rights, especially the right to vote, is best warded off by their continuous and informed exercise at every level of government.
Virginia’s off-off-year elections in 2017 were in the news as a barometer of popular sentiment after nearly a year of Trumpian rule. The Commonwealth was especially suited for this test. It had voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential contests, had two Democratic senators as well as a Democratic governor; however, its statehouse remained in Republican hands. A wave-category outcome sufficient to fracture GOP control of the House of Delegates would signal disenchantment with Queens’ Gift to the World, especially as a result from south of the Mason-Dixon line, the lone jewel of the old Confederacy a chagrined Sun President had been unable to duct tape onto his diadem.
The Democrats had a good night. Ralph Northam became governor, Justin Fairfax lieutenant governor, and Mark Herring attorney general; the Great Embarrassment lay in the future. The Democrats made substantial gains in the House of Delegates. The Republican advantage shrank from twenty-two to a single seat, then jumped to two seats when drawing of lots determined the winner of a putatively tied district. Had fortune smiled on the Democrat, the party would have wrested away control of the chamber. Nevertheless, there were encouraging changes. The incoming class of Democratic delegates boasted the nation’s first transgender state legislator (Danica Roem), a Democratic Socialist (Lee Carter), and much diversity beyond that. A friend from Manhattan, she of the senior women’s book club, expressed it best: “Thank you, Virginia!”
The letter below comments on The Richmond Free Press’s election coverage. The pleasing outcome did not bestow laurels on which to rest. The GOP would mobilize to pad its bare majority and deploy every tool available, including underhanded ones. Margins are fragile in a state gradually shifting its party allegiance. When the letter was composed, control of the House of Delegates remained uncertain. To satisfy my curiosity, I fed raw numbers from the House of Delegates races into Excel and discovered that the Democratic candidates in aggregate had taken nearly ten percent more votes than the Republicans statewide but could still conceivably fall short of a majority of seats. That’s what happened and that’s the crux of the matter.
Nonetheless, the hope engendered in Virginia in 2017 would be realized in 2019.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Virginia Elects Democrats to Top Posts, Other Offices,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/its-sweep/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “House of Delegates to Become More Diverse,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/house-delegates-become-more-diverse/).
“‘There Is No Space for Complacency,’” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 November 2017, A9 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/17/there-no-space-complacency/).
Nearly a year after the 2016 election, it emerged that Virginia was among a score of states whose voting systems had been assailed by Russian hackers. The Commonwealth emerged from this unscathed. That was the good news. The bad news in my view was that the Russians represented the least of the concerns about voting going forward. This letter to The Richmond Free Press responds to this news and briefly catalogues the GOP’s efforts not just to discourage eligible voters from pulling the lever but also to excise segments from the electorate with surgical position. Some of the news from that time now seems prophetic, especially the poll suggesting that half of GOP voters would accept suspension of the 2020 election if The Fabulist in Chief falsely declared that fraudulent voting would make a fair election impossible.
Ronald E. Carrington, “Voting Systems in Va., 20 Other States Targeted Hackers in 2016,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 September 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/29/voting-systems-va-20-other-states-targeted-hackers/).
The good news reported by Mr. Carrington – failure by probable Russian hackers to affect Virginia’s 2016 election results – should not blind the Commonwealth’s voters to the perhaps more insidious threat to the ballot box from within, conservative efforts to disenfranchise segments of the electorate.
President Trump’s narcissistic, delusional assertion that millions of “illegal” voters deprived him victory in the popular vote last November spurred his empanelment of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its very name a paragon of Orwellian doublespeak. Mr. Trump placed at its head Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a man whose name is synonymous with voter suppression and who in 2016, in dogged pursuit of the voter-fraud unicorn, tossed triple the number of ballots in Kansas as in demographically similar states (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 September 2017). Mr. Kobach, moreover, champions the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a project ostensibly aimed to improve accuracy of voter rolls but believed to target minority voters disproportionately.
Fear that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s electoral “vision” will spread nationwide is not unfounded as the notion of carving demographic slices from the electorate gains traction in conservative circles. The loathsome Ann Coulter’s call to rescind the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and raise the voting age to thirty seems less like fringe lunacy when considered in the context of an August poll in which more than half of GOP voters would support, at Mr. Trump’s behest, suspension of the 2020 election because of his false claim of widespread illegal voting (Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” The Washington Post, 10 August 2017 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/]).
The backdrop to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s undercutting of confidence in elections is the effort in many GOP-controlled states to discourage participation by traditionally Democratic constituencies – minorities, the young, the poor – by restricting early voting, imposing needless voter-identification requirements, and providing inadequate voting equipment for urban precincts. The GOP, furthermore, strives to make Democratic votes worth less through partisan gerrymandering unprecedented in scope and efficacy, an abuse now under review by the US Supreme Court. These antidemocratic measures threaten to overwhelm commendable attempts to expand the electorate, such as Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the franchise to ex-felons, a restriction at its inception largely conceived to constrain minority voting.
The ballot box remains the best avenue toward social and economic justice. A vigilant and aggressive defense of voting is now especially urgent.
The Richmond Free Press enabled me to take a swipe at Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, and for that I am grateful. For better or worse, I’m a product of public schools and state university systems. The value of decent public schools is no abstraction for me. Living in Richmond has only reinforced this. Virginia’s twin legacies of “massive resistance” against integration of schools and of the white flight that accompanied desegregation are yet to be resolved. It, moreover, is a sad reality that many state-of-the-art liberals mouth support for public education but then epiphanously discover that it’s a poor fit for their own brood – elegant hypocrisy – while still deeming it fine for everyone else’s children. You people know who you are and you should be ashamed.
Neoliberal takeover and plutocratic meddling have made the terrain that public education must traverse yet more challenging. The right’s impulse to privatize all things manifests itself in propagandistic assaults on public education, especially demonization of teachers. And then there was Bill Gates, who aimed his money cannon at a regime of oversight and testing that unfortunately drew public resources in its wake and has yet to yield positive results, a plutocratic deformation of educational policy that squandered a decade and was foisted on the county by an individual with no discernible expertise in education.
Betsy DeVos is the high priestess of the neoliberal besieging of education. Her contempt for public schools was barely concealed, when concealed at all. In a just world, she would peddle Amway and Bibles door to door for her remaining span on this mortal coil.
Holly Rodriquez, “School Culture Change Needed with New Superintendent,” The Richmond Free Press, 25-27 May 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/may/26/school-culture-change-needed-new-superintendent/).
Associated Press, “School Choice To Be Expanded By Feds,” The Richmond Free Press, 25-27 May 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/may/26/school-choice-be-expanded-feds/).
“Beware of Some Education Solutions,” The Richmond Free Press, 1-3 June 2017, A9 (https://issuu.com/richmondfreepress/docs/june_1-3__2017_issue).
I am fond of The Richmond Free Press. Free weeklies give a city character and The Richmond Free Press is a quality weekly. Even better, it has a crusading spirit. It suffers no confusion about its mission or its readership. It doesn’t engage in journalistic triangulation. It also presents a vital counterpoint to Richmond’s daily print outlet. Now that the coronavirus is ebbing, I’m looking forward to pulling a pulp copy from the box every week. The paper has a good letters policy; it accepts more lengthy screeds.
In March 2017, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III slithered from the Potomac to the James to address a law-enforcement crowd. What is there to say about the man, other than that he’s a Trumpian sack of trash? Rarely has a cabinet official been more ill-suited for the position or for the moment. Integrity was evinced during his tenure by a lone, solitary act that was in fact a promise not to act; there will be more about that later. Mr. Sessions’ speech in Richmond was a signaling of nefarious intent, a probable expansion of the prison industrial complex by resurrecting practices likely to target Blacks and the poor disproportionately. Somehow it slipped his mind to invite The Richmond Free Press, the outlet most likely to speak to these communities. I do declare, how ever could that have happened?
Free Press Staff, wire reports, “Sessions Seeks to Revive Federal Anti-Crime Program that Targeted African-Americans,” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 March 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/17/sessions-seeks-revive-federal-anti-crime-program-t/).
“Exclusion ‘Appalling but Unsurprising,’” The Richmond Free Press, 23-25 March 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/24/exclusion-appalling-unsurprising/).