Daily Archives: May 24, 2023

1. Ron DeSantis: 10 things to know about the Republican White House hopeful  The Guardian US
2. Ron DeSantis 2024: Can he really beat Donald Trump in Republican race?  BBC
3. US elections 2024: Who is the Republican contender Ron DeSantis?  Al Jazeera English

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Ron DeSantis: 10 things to know about the Republican White House hopeful - The Guardian US

Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.

Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of stand your ground laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.

If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life, said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national stand your ground bill this month. Its time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans, he added. We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.

It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.

What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. Famously, those freedoms were the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

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Opinion | The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans - The New York Times

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) dismissed the threat of the government defaulting on its debt saying “no one is freaking out” in the House Republican conference about the deadline.

Her remarks come even amid Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s repeated warnings of the severe economic consequences if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by June 1.

“Here’s what’s happening in our conference,” Greene told conservative podcast host Steve Bannon on Wednesday. “We’re not sweating this at all. No one is freaking out, no one is concerned about this mystery date that Janet Yellen has thrown out, like it’s going to actually crash America.”

“The only people worked up about the mystery date is probably the New York Stock Exchange,” she said. “I mean, let’s be real about exactly what it is. Regular Americans living their lives, day in and day out, don’t worry about the government shutting down.”

The comments come as House Republican negotiators head to the White House and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has signaled optimism about the prospects of striking a deal. 

“I think we can make progress today,” he told reporters Wednesday.

But some Republicans in his conference still signal they won’t support a deal that has fewer spending cuts than the GOP-led bill that already passed the House. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Tuesday that he and his conservative colleagues “don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage” on a debt-limit compromise.

McCarthy dismissed concerns when asked Wednesday to respond to those who question whether he can actually strike a deal, in light of positions held by Gaetz and others in his conference. 

“They’re wrong,” McCarthy said when asked about his skeptics. “You underestimated me the whole time.”

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Greene says no one is concerned about debt default in Republican conference - The Hill

Expanded Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 60,000 Granite Staters, may have hit a roadblock to becoming permanent, despite its unanimous support in the Senate and passage last week in the House.

The program, Granite Advantage, is set to expire this year; it was implemented in 2014.

Concerns from House Republicans prompted a division of the House Finance Committee to vote 5-4 along party lines Tuesday to recommend the full committee hold onto Senate Bill 263, which continues the program permanently, for further work.

House Republicans who are unwilling to make the program permanent said they would consider an extension of two to seven years. As of now, lawmakers have only a two-year extension before them, in the Houses budget.

State House Democrats, state officials, and advocates whose communities rely on Granite Advantage have argued that two years is too little time to sign and implement such a huge contract.

Senate President Jeb Bradley, a Wolfeboro Republican, said on the New Hampshire Today radio show Wednesday morning that an extension of at least eight years is necessary.

Hopefully that happens and happens quickly, he told host Chris Ryan. Its vitally important. The program has worked and worked well.

Granite Advantage has been credited with lowering the number of uninsured Granite Staters, improving health outcomes by allowing beneficiaries to afford preventative care, and lowering uncompensated medical care costs for hospitals.

Like traditional Medicaid recipients, those on Granite Advantage are low-income. But they dont meet Medicaids other eligibility rules, which require they be younger than 19, pregnant, or have a physical or developmental disability, or are caring for children or other family members.

Bradleys bill passed the Senate unanimously in March. It passed in the House last week, 193-166, over the objections of some Republicans who want to add a work requirement and drug testing to the program, among other things. The House rejected bill amendments that would have added those provisions.

Republicans have also expressed concern that the federal government will reduce its 90 percent contribution or increase income eligibility, making benefits available to more people; without a sunset date, they warn the state would not be able to end or modify the program should it become unaffordable.

Current state law includes a provision that would allow the state to end the program if the federal government reduced its contribution.

The program has always had a sunset date, requiring the Legislature to renew it. Advocates said its worked so well that its time to make it permanent.

If the House Finance Committee, which took a second look at the bill because it involves state spending, retains it, it will not come back before lawmakers prior to next year, at the earliest.

Theres no question at all that Medicaid (expansion) will be renewed, said Rep. Maureen Mooney, a Merrimack Republican, during the committee discussion Tuesday. We have thousands in our state that rely and depend on it. To me, a contract this big that is so large, no matter what the content, should be renewed after a period of time.

Advocates said they are concerned about the committees recommendation to hold onto the bill but still optimistic the program will be extended.

Medicaid expansion is a lifeline for Granite Staters in need, said Michele Merritt, president and CEO of New Futures, a state health policy and advocacy organization, in a statement Wednesday. Without the Granite Advantage Health Care Program, many individuals and families would simply not be able to access the health care, mental health, and substance use treatment they rely upon.

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Republican concerns may halt permanent extension of expanded ... - New Hampshire Bulletin

The Ever-Growing 2024 Republican Primary Field : The NPR Politics Podcast Tim Scott, the junior senator from South Carolina, kicked off his presidential campaign in North Charleston on Monday, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis is expected to follow suit this week, according to multiple media reports. As the field of Republican candidates takes shape, what will contenders need to do to challenge former president Donald Trump successfully as well as current president Biden?

This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Don Gonyea, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.

The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.

Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

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U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) announces his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event on May 22, 2023 in North Charleston, South Carolina. Scott, who is the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, joins 5 other Republicans currently running in the 2024 Presidential race. Allison Joyce/Getty Images hide caption

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) announces his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event on May 22, 2023 in North Charleston, South Carolina. Scott, who is the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, joins 5 other Republicans currently running in the 2024 Presidential race.

Tim Scott, the junior senator from South Carolina, kicked off his presidential campaign in North Charleston on Monday, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis is expected to follow suit this week, according to multiple media reports. As the field of Republican candidates takes shape, what will contenders need to do to challenge former president Donald Trump successfully as well as current president Biden?

This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Don Gonyea, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.

The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.

Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Connect: Email the show at nprpolitics@npr.org Join the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group. Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.

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The Ever-Growing 2024 Republican Primary Field : The NPR ... - NPR

As the debt ceiling crisis looms, negotiations are increasingly likely to include Republican demands to tighten work requirements in state Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs, which provide cash assistance to families in poverty.

Each state runs its own TANF program with considerable discretion over who is eligible and how exactly states spend the funds they receive from a federal block grant. To hold states accountable and ensure they meet the goal of moving families from welfare to work, the federal government mandates that states meet certain work participation goals among TANF beneficiaries. Republican proposals for restoring work requirements are aimed at states rather than directly at families.

The TANF provisions in Speaker McCarthys Limit, Save, and Grow Act would change how states calculate what is called their work participation rate (WPR) for beneficiaries. As part of the 1996 welfare reforms under President Bill Clinton, the federal government began requiring states to meet a target where 50 percent of single parents and 90 percent of married parents receiving cash assistance were engaged in at least 30 hours of work activities each week (the target is only 20 hours for parents with young children). Eligible work activities include subsidized or unsubsidized employment, community service, vocational training, and job readiness programs.

Work activities sound fine on paper. Still, case workers and beneficiaries alike often complain that they end up spending more time tracking countable hours to comply with these requirements filling out paperwork and checking boxes than engaging in the sort of integrated casework focused on ensuring access to family services, intensive job-search assistance, and job training reflecting local employer demands that has proved to be more helpful in getting families back on their feet. It is unclear whether chasing countable hours leads to permanent employment that allows families to leave welfare for good.

The 1996 reforms also included a caseload reduction credit (CRC) that allowed states to reduce their WPR target if they could show they were reducing caseloads over time. The idea was that states should not be penalized for making progress on reducing welfare rolls a core goal of the reforms. In 2021, only six states were held to a 50 percent WPR standard. The majority use CRCs to get a lower standard, including those with 0 percent standards.

Republicans are targeting what they see as three loopholes that allow states to dodge the full 50 percent standard. The first would update the baseline year for which states can receive credit for declining caseloads to 2022. It was initially set at 1995 levels, but because caseloads declined quickly after 1996, few states were held to the 50 percent standard. Congress reset it in 2005, but states quickly found other ways to reduce their WPR standards.

These are the other two loopholes Republicans want to close. One of these is provisions allowing states to buy down their WPR standard by increasing state spending beyond federal requirements. The other is so-called small check schemes where states increase the number of TANF beneficiaries meeting work requirements by sending $10 or $20 monthly checks to already working parents receiving other benefits.

If Republicans are successful, states might finally be subject to WPR much closer to 50 percent. Still, there are reasons to doubt that these changes will lead to any meaningful increase in employment among families in poverty. First of all, states are surprisingly creative in finding new loopholes. The small check and buy down schemes that emerged after the 2005 reforms are a case in point. States will likely find new ways to reduce their WPR standard or inflate the portion of families meeting work activities requirements. Moving some families to solely state-funded programs not subject to federal requirements, for example, would help states reduce TANF caseloads and receive credit for it.

Why are states so keen to take evasive maneuvers? Are they trying to avoid accountability or stymie efforts to make TANF beneficiaries self-sufficient? Hardly. The vast majority of caseworkers and families are both invested in moving from stigmatized welfare to dignified work. The reality is that the changes would recreate impossible federal standards that states simply cant meet at current funding levels. So instead theyd have to get creative.

Even the much-touted welfare-to-work pilot programs that led to the 1996 reforms could not achieve the rates of work participation that states would be held to under the current Republican proposal. The Congressional Budget Office recently identified several programs and supports that can meaningfully increase employment, but the best options are costly.

Increasing childcare subsidies, for example, would increase employment among single parents but comes with an annual $3 billion price tag. We also know integrated casework that goes beyond the checking boxes casework incentivized by federal standards increases employment if properly funded. Meeting federal standards would be an uphill struggle under the best of circumstances. It becomes impossible after nearly three decades of declining federal support for TANF supports and services.

The $16.5 billion TANF block introduced in 1996 was not designed to keep up with inflation or population growth. As a result, the real value of federal funding has declined by almost 50 percent over time. Republicans are asking states to do more than ever with less than ever. Until Congress begins matching tighter federal mandates with additional financial support for states, expect them to continue evading WPR standards and make little headway on Republicans goal of moving more families from welfare to work.

Instead, states will respond to this unfunded mandate by creatively finding new ways to reduce caseloads on paper so they can claim that caseload reduction credit. Whether they do it by moving some families off TANF into other solely state-funded programs or deterring and disqualifying families by burying them under onerous new paperwork requirements, the results will be the same: work requirements done this way will fail to work.

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Why the Republican Job Requirements Push Won't Actually Get ... - TIME

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) sent a memo to House Republican colleagues Wednesday urging them to “hold the line” with continued support for the conference’s sweeping debt limit bill in the face of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden aiming to negotiate a compromise that would likely strip out many conservative priorities.

In the memo, Roy listed major policies from the bill passed in April, dubbed the Limit, Save, Grow Act, which paired a $1.5 trillion debt limit increase with around $4.8 trillion in deficit reductions over a decade and many conservative policy reforms.

“Each are critical and none should be abandoned solely for the quest of a ‘deal,'” Roy wrote.

Some Republicans saw the bill as a starting point for negotiations and a way to drag Biden to the negotiating table on the debt limit, with the expectation that not everything in the bill would be in a final deal. But Roy’s letter represents growing vocal resistance among the House GOP’s right flank to McCarthy striking a compromise deal with Biden that includes fewer cuts and policies than what was in the House GOP bill.

Some of the measures Roy cited in his letter are now at the forefront of debt limit negotiations, like reverting spending to fiscal 2022 levels, rescinding unused funds authorized to combat the effects of COVID-19, and beefing up work requirements for public assistance programs.

But Roy brought up a number of other measures that were in the bill, too.

The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act would give Congress increased ability to regulate or reject regulations and rules from federal agencies and was included in the GOP debt bill.

The GOP package would also rescind funds from an $80 billion boost to IRS funding for tax enforcement that Democrats passed last year, overturn Biden’s action to forgive student loans, and repeal clean energy tax credits passed by Democrats last year.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said the Republican debt bill was dead on arrival in the Senate, but that has not stopped the House GOP’s right flank from insisting that the Senate pass or modify it rather than willingly strip out measures from the bill in negotiations.

Roy’s memo follows the House Freedom Caucus last week urging McCarthy and Senate Republicans “to use every leverage and tool at their disposal to ensure the Limit, Save, Grow Act is signed into law.”

Roy also noted in his memo that he hopes talking points in it will “help as Speaker McCarthy continues to pressure President Biden to do what is right for the American people.”

“While House Republicans are fighting for hard-working American families facing a woke, weaponized government at odds with our way of life, President Biden and Democrats have been dragging their feet for weeks to fight for rich liberal elitists who want more spending, more government, more corporate subsidies, and less freedom,” Roy said.

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Key Republican urges McCarthy, GOP to hold the line in debt ceiling talks - The Hill

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If you think Democracy Now!s reporting is a critical line of defense against war, climate catastrophe and fascism, please make your donation of $10 or more right now. Today a generous donor will DOUBLE your donation, which means itll go twice as far to support our independent journalism. When Democracy Now! covers war or gun violence, were not brought to you by the weapons manufacturers. When we cover the climate emergency, our reporting isnt sponsored by the oil, gas, coal or nuclear companies. Democracy Now! is funded by you, and thats why were counting on your donation to keep us going. Please give today. Every dollar makes a differencein fact, gets doubled! Thank you so much. -Amy Goodman

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South Carolina GOP Passes 6-Week Abortion Ban, Sends Bill to ... - Democracy Now!

GOOSE LAKE, Iowa Were like a bunch of blind bats. We human beings are, we millennials are, we Americans are, Vivek Ramaswamy riffed. We cant see where we are.

Bats send sonar signals, which bounce off objects and allow the mammals to navigate. So we do that, we send out our signals, and it bounces off something that is true, something that is real, like family. The two parents who brought me into this world, my mother and father. The two children who I brought into this world, he went on. That is real. That is true. That means something to me.

In person, his presentation is a lot more intense; it is also about a bleaker landscape of American life than the bright version of Trumpism hes trying to project.

Were hungry for a cause, Mr. Ramaswamy, who is 37, said of millennials when he spoke on a recent Friday night in Iowa, in a navy suit and white dress shirt, walking the stage and not pausing too often for applause. Were hungry for purpose and meaning. And identity. At a point in our national history when the things that used to fill that void things like faith, patriotism, hard work, family these things have disappeared. Instead, he said, poison and secular cults had taken their place.

All of this the bats and the void and the disappearance of our families from the collective American identity was delivered to a county committee dinner in a friendly ballroom with an open bar, a buffet, patriotic decorations and a fun local musician playing country hits from the past.

This is what a pro-capitalism candidate looks like in post-Trump Republican politics, in which the emphasis is on the creation of a national identity in the face of spiritual emptiness and the idea that big business and the customer arent always right.

The next morning, at campaign events held at one of those cool digital driving ranges and at a pizza place with a beautiful old tin ceiling, the American identity crisis talk continued. Theres more to life than just the aimless passage of time, going through the motions, he said standing in front of what looked like a floor-to-ceiling image of a Pebble Beach fairway. Youre more than the genetic attributes you inherited on the day you were born, he went on to say. You are you.

He is technically the business candidate, but not really. This is the elite corporate executive as culture warrior. Mr. Ramaswamys pitch in Iowa was not about the application of free-market principles to the federal government, at least not in the way you might expect from a pre-Trump Republican business candidate. Nor was it economic populism, either, not really, because his idea isnt so much that corporations are ripping you off; its that theyre in bad-faith league with one another to advance liberal pieties.

Theoretically, he could be doing a business pitch. Mr. Ramaswamy started a pharmaceutical investment and drug development company that picked up pharmaceutical projects abandoned by other companies and aimed to bring the drugs to market. In 2020, as chief executive, he refused to support Black Lives Matter and in 2021 was an author of a Wall Street Journal opinion essay arguing that online platforms were censoring people when they blocked accounts in the chaotic aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021. He has published three books critiquing the environmental, social and governance practices of BlackRock and other fund managers and started an anti-E.S.G. asset management firm.

As Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review pointed out, Mr. Ramaswamy has chosen to download and internalize MAGA moods shutting down the F.B.I., replacing the A.T.F., raising the voting age to 25 unless you pass a civics test or serve in the military or as an emergency worker. These are the kinds of proposals that are drafted to please and anger the right people and never happen. Hes given $10,000 to the defense fund of Daniel Penny, the man accused of second-degree manslaughter in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, and his campaign is selling a coffee mug that reads truth, with the words wokeism, climatism and transgenderism crossed out above. He has repeatedly portrayed trans people as mentally ill.

As a Ramaswamy campaign memo recently said, The mistake every other campaign is making is that they see their path to the nomination through Trump, when our path is alongside Trump. In reality, many Republican politicians have seen their path alongside Donald Trump as they wait for someone else to break him like a big piata.

Mr. Ramaswamy wants to restore an American identity that, in speeches, involves a lot of concepts but rarely anecdotes. That identity would involve the pursuit of excellence, which he described in an interview along vague, traditional lines people achieving their maximal potential, free of societal hindrance. He contended this ethic is absent from corporate life. I think that part of this is psychological, that in the moment people feel compelled to apologize for excellence, he told me. To be accepted as cool, the most successful have to apologize for the system that got them there by sticking the word stakeholder in front of it, he said and called the racial equity agenda an example of prioritizing a different value.

Mr. Ramaswamy came up in an elite world where some people employ the idea of charity or progressive impulses to get ahead, first in admissions, then in business, and they sometimes become deluded or self-interested ethical consumers. Whatever justice is, surely it cant be attained so incidentally, by just picking the right shirts, the right burgers and the right bankers, he writes in the book Woke, Inc. Hes bothered by that thing many also dislike, which is a hedge fund putting in place a superficial diversity effort intended to disrupt as little as possible to prevent a lawsuit or make money, or a corporation with an aspirational brand made of cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.

This is the world summarized by Sam Bankman-Fried last year in a D.M. he later claimed he thought was off the record: this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.

In Woke, Inc., Mr. Ramaswamys solution is to separate politics and business. He argues that both stakeholder capitalists and Milton Friedman devotees miss something in the corporate system we have: A sole focus on fiduciary duty and profit maximization keeps corporations from becoming extragovernmental bodies like Dutch colonial trading companies.

But its also not as if the only time anyone cares about racism in America is to sell Pepsi or to get into Columbia. The practical implications of keeping business and politics separate become complicated quickly for this reason; the economy is made up of millions of individuals who live in the larger world. This is a business, as Dolly Parton said of her decision to remove Dixie, the nickname for the South often associated with the Confederacy, from the Stampede, two dinner show attractions she owns. She didnt want to offend prospective customers. What if Chick-fil-A wants to stay closed on Sundays? What if a company wants to market fratty beer to trans people and supporters as customers in and of themselves? What counts as maximizing profit or respecting the employees, and what counts as politics? What is politics?

Over the past decade, many presidential candidates especially the long-shot, unconventional kinds in both parties have talked in secular-spiritual ways about voids in American life and the corruption among elites. There are different theories of the case (technological change, inequality, institutional decline, loneliness), including the omnipresence of corporations and the emptiness of material goods for justice. The vision that markets and capitalism would liberalize the world and accelerate the realization of a pluralistic America, full of choice and privacy and respect, has begun to dim.

Mr. Ramaswamy has isolated a problem in that vision (the hollowness of so much of corporate social policy). His national-identity-based explanation for the void is winning with some post-Trump conservative politicians who see the power, dominion, control and punishment that Mr. Ramaswamy said he believes are behind climate activism in much of American elite life. Its a lean time for the sunnier version of a capitalist pitch in which climate change is a problem but also a business opportunity, just like the valued employees and customers in a pluralistic, ever-changing American society.

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Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamys Long Shot Run at the Republican ... - The New York Times

Bad news, Buckeyes. Ohio has officially gone down the Florida rabbit hole on Ohio State University and every other public college and university in the state. The new abnormal of legislative extremism in Columbus hit a whole new level of atrocious last week with passage of a bill to rescue higher education in Ohio from itself with compelled censorship and illiberalism.

Your alarm sensor should be off the charts. Ohio Republicans are following the dystopian playbook on education written by the Florida fascist in Tallahassee. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is honing his authoritarian skills set to try to become president, has led the hostile political takeover of freedom of speech, freedom to learn, and to freedom to thrive in schools and universities across his state.

The dour despot has used curricula, textbooks, and woke litmus tests to weed out educators who value diversity, equity, and inclusion, or who stray into restricted topics with students. WhatDeSantis is doing to academic independence and autonomy in Florida is a jarring throwback to 1930s Germany.

His diktats on higher education mandate conformity to his ideology. They are designed to tighten state control over acceptable and intolerable views of on campuses. His campaign to crush thinking on race, gender, culture, and history that doesnt comport with his is truly the stuff of totalitarian nightmares.

But Ohio Senate Republicans cant wait to go there. They just passed a sweeping higher education measure (Ohio Senate Bill 83) to control thought in state colleges and universities. A companion bill is making its way through the Ohio House. So brace yourself. This could end badly for free thinkers at any of the states 14 four-year public universities.

SB 83 is a no holds barred crackdown of academic freedom in higher ed to rein in woke institutions positively biased against conspiracy-addled right-wingers. It is that insane and that scary. In their hard-right bubble of imaginings, Republican lawmakers have decided to wage war against runaway liberal bias in Ohios (widely regarded) higher education system that has decidedly gone way too far to the left.

Now if youre a graduate of one of these heretofore vaunted institutions suddenly under attack with SB 83 and have no idea what the heck these wingnuts are talking about youve got plenty of company. This bill to create true academic freedom is nothing more than a manufactured imperative to present a tough-guy, own-the-libs MAGA front.

Imposing educational gag orders on what people can say or do in state universities (government overreach on steroids) satisfies abstract conservative grievances and scores political points. MAGA Republicans forcing drastic changes, course correction, on college campuses as an urgently needed remedy (to enforce their ideological demands) are playing to their base.

Never mind that their Orwellian SB 83, filled with prohibitions and restrictions on behavior and speech in higher education, drew hundreds of outraged students, teachers and defenders of academic freedom to the Statehouse. Protestors gathered on campuses across the state to fight for the free exchange of diverse ideas in pursuit of knowledge and truth. But SB 83 sailed through the Senate nonetheless. Why? Gerrymandered legislators turning Ohio into Florida are under no threat of losing their jobs by approving wildly unpopular legislation.

Thats why they drew lopsided partisan districts (rejected five times by the Ohio Supreme Court) to rig elections with predictable outcomes. Republican legislators effectively gave themselves power for life to control every aspect of ours. Despite overwhelming opposition to the toxic assault on academic instruction in SB 83, it is on track to become law in Ohio.

The right-wing beat-down on woke workplace training, (that recognizes a plurality of perspectives and acceptance of all) on critical thinking, (God forbid students become independent thinkers) on what state university professors can say in their teaching, on course requirements and content, on resistance (prohibiting employee strikes) and more is madness.

The damage such a repressive measure could inflict on state colleges and universities would be irreparable. Why would renown scholars want to teach in Ohio when they can be penalized for perceived bias or for holding classroom conversations on controversial beliefs or policies or for being the political enemy-of-the moment?

Why would professors stay in a state where it is politically fashionable to attack faculty expertise, autonomy, and governance? Why would students invest their time, money and futures in a higher education system where the freedom to think, question and share ideas is restricted but mandated American history classes posit unchallenged patriotism?

Why would members of minority communities feel welcomed or supported in state universities prohibited from spending state or federal funds on diversity, equity and inclusion programs that could be crucial in combatting implicit bigotry? They wouldnt.

So why would Senate Republicans endorse unfettered state authority to muzzle freedom of expression in education and force blind allegiance over independence to chill and disrupt academic freedom in higher education? Same reason DeSantis stokes his war on woke with Floridas university system.

Its a winning strategy. Getting rid of woke educators, programs, curriculum, books, (anything that hints at progressivism in public education) appeals to MAGA voters. Ohio Senate Bill 83 goes down the Florida rabbit hole not to enhance higher education in the state but to win elections.

Even if it destroys what makes Ohio great.

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Ohio Republican attack on higher ed will devastate our widely ... - Ohio Capital Journal