Politics is Petty
Nancy Willing at Delaware Way has been all over this and I’m sure El Som will be into the nitty gritty of how and why Kowalko was bounced from the Chairmanship of Energy and from the Education Committee. All I can really add is that Jack Markell seems to really hate John Kowalko on a personal level.
I had heard stories from early in Jack’s tenure and I chalked it up to hyperbole, but it gets hard to ignore stories when confirming evidence starts to pile up.
Schwarzkopf don’t play. In the words of Omar from the Wire “You come at the King, best not miss”
Let’s not let Pete and Val off the hook here. I’m no fan of Kowalko, but have to agree this is petty toward him and Helene.
Bane, He has made waves, but I don’t see Kowalko as the poster boy for some play to take on Pete. What am I missing?
We’ll be talking about it tom’w on the Al Show. Pete & Val govern through fear.
Helene and John are the two who kiss their not insubstantial asses the least.
Kowalko IS on a lot of key committees, however, including the House Energy Committee. He’s just not the chair.
While I’ve only just gotten home from work and haven’t had a chance to go into depth on the assignments, it’s clear that the clueless buffoon Lumpy Carson is a Pete proxy. He’s even on JFC, which he can’t even spell.
Hey, it’s just a different leadership style than the House had been used to under Spence and Gilligan. I think it pretty much sucks.
@Bane: At least Omar was a good guy.
Markell’s petty vindictive politics got us a Republican treasurer.
Lumpy has dreams of running for State Senate in 2016. Somebody smack his head and wake him up. Smyrna stupid should stay in Smyrna.
There is a campaign forming to do a massive phone and email protest of this. We didn’t elect Kowalko to play nice with the Governor. Separation.Of.Powers – Check.And.Balance.
I don’t see how this is the Governor’s fault. House leadership had choices here.
AQC,
It’s pretty simple.
Jack or somebody on his team calls Pete and says, “I’m fed up with Kowalko running his mouth about priority schools, so get him off the Education Committee.”
Or … Pete has figured out that Jack is fed up with Kowalko criticizing priority schools, so he knows that Jack would be happier if Kowalko wasn’t on the Education Committee.
The only way one can’t figure out that the governor’s hand is in this is if you haven’t noticed over the last two years that Pete does what Jack wants him to do.
When you’re a leftist radical who has pushed away the party, what did he think was gonna happen?
Mr. Markell has always been a petty person. This is not a surprising move at all. He is all about retribution and revenge over perceived and real slights.
The tragedy here though, is the willingness of legislators to play this game of subservience to the executive branch. It is dangerous and should be resisted by any legislator who values independence. With the next 2 years being a lame duck term for Mr. Markell, the caucus has the most power it has had in 6 years.
How will they use it: 1) bouncing their own people to please their don, 2) protecting the responsibilities incumbent upon their BRANCH of government.
I won’t be holding my breath with this feckless bunch.
I’m surprised nobody thinks Pistol Pete is capable of thinking this up all by himself. It’s not as if Democrats have lined up behind Markell for everything he wants. Remember the gas tax?
Bad example, Geez. Opposing tax increases is part of the legislative DNA, and that goes double in election years.
Yeah, I’ll grant that Pete could have thought this up by himself — but if he did, you can bet that part of his calculus was that it would merit a few hearty attaboys from Jack.
Has anyone stopped to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this move was not ordered by the Governor, nor an act of retribution by the Speaker, but rather a rational and necessary response given the decorum observed during House Ed meetings last year?
So now disagreement is poor decorum? Please.
No John, disagreement is fine- constructive even. Embarrassing colleagues without a discernible gain, disrespecting the committee chairman, and interrogating cabinet secretaries- that is poor decorum. There is a right and wrong way to do things.
The right way to do things has led us to where we are now: In Delaware, Democrats, not Republicans, are the greatest barrier to progressive legislation.
@MW: That’s not the only example and you know it. The legislature has never done the bidding of the Markell administration. That’s a canard that has allowed Schwartzkopf, who has his own designs on Woodburn, to escape responsibility.
For further evidence that Markell is not involved, what would he have against Helene Keeley?
I think Pete did this on his own, and that it certainly wasn’t an ‘abuse of power’. Puh-leeze.
Like it or not, he had every right to do this, it’s not as if people with appointive power have not used it in the past. Far from it.
He has not stacked the Education Committee with Markell ‘yes’ people. In fact, Sean Matthews, who has publicly taken positions largely in line w/Kowalko, in essence replaces Kowalko.
Petty and vindictive? Yes. But John chose the path of public confrontation, he should not be surprised at the result.
Even though I started this as a Markell thread, I’m not convinced Markell had a hand in it. That is not to say that Markell doesn’t hate Kowalko out of proportion to his hate-ability.
AAuen is supposed to be the leading Progressive organizer in Kent County, and yet he condemns Kowalko as a leftist radical. Boy are you changeable, Austin.
AAuen is supposed to be a leading progressive? Is that a joke, DD? I don’t know the first thing about him, other than his comments on this site, and I never got the feeling he was progressive.
Well, let’s just say that he wanted to start a progressive organization similar to the PDD and the PDSC in Kent County. That is how I was introduced to him.
DD & Pandora: If AAuen lived in the 41st RD, he might be considered progressive. Elsewhere in DE, not.
Geez: I’ve made no judgment concerning Pete’s treatment of Keeley, and the only definitive links between removing Keeley and Kowalko from committees are that they occurred at the same time and were reported in the same news story. I’m confident that different factors were involved in each decision and that, as far as the Kowalko move is concerned, whether Markell intervened or not, Pete most certainly knew that the course he was taking would please the governor.
From reports, both Keeley and Kowalko were either directly or indirectly involved in challenges to Longhurst and Schwartzkopf last month. That is the first level of ‘revenge’ politics. And Kowalko does love the idea of squelching Schwartzkopf’s known ambitions (not that he’s publicly admitted any) to statewide Lt. Gov -> Gov. campaigns.
But putting this to JK’s behavior during Education Committee public hearings? I have to laugh if it weren’t so damn fucking WRONG.
I was in the room for the “debate” over the change in testing law.
It was our group of progressive DEMs UNITED in protest and query to Mark Murphy in asking for his justification of having come to the legislature a year earlier to make the case for a new test based on student growth as measured throughout the school year. He made his case and that 2013 legislation passed the House.
So, believe me, the skepticism and irony voiced by at least five House Democrats during the 2014 discussion about yet another test proposal NOT BASED ON GROWTH was exactly appropriate. Then chair Darryl Scott stood in rubberstamp defense of the Department and deserved any rebuke received (I don’t personally remember any but do remember how Scott treated Kim Williams during the HB 165 hearing in 2013).
Anyway, Murphy had no substantive response to the dry questions posed by even Earl Jaques on why he’d come to them with an end-all, be-all growth model test one year and then completely reversing this rational the next. It was an embarrassment of the first order for Markell and his team.
As for Kowalko stripped from the Energy Committee chair, do you all not remember the vindictive way Markell in concert with labor reps. pushed legislation around to punish Newarkers over the TDC / UD deal? The Alderman’s Court etc.? Sokola ran after one Town Hall meeting and Baumbach soon retreated into his shell when labor made their wishes KNOWN. How about the Kowalko image on the rat during the Labor Day Parade even after the deal was tanked.
BTW, the new 2014 test that passed through leg hall under the protest of half of the house eduction committee is expected to lead to failure numbers akin to those in NY state. House members from the City of Wilmington could see this coming. Potter and Bolden were some of those who questioned Murphy on WTF was going on.
https://exceptionaldelaware.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/smarter-balanced-field-test-scores-most-iep-students-will-fail/
With the accompanying legislation and regulation changes under DDOE, we can expect that the test-as-only-measure approach on performance evaluation for school, teacher and student will create massive havoc for parents and employees and real consequences for our students.
I am glad my teachers so often had the discretion to grade us on a curve. There is no curve for state testing, natch.
And federal mandate for testing level accountability is coming to us via the ESEA waiver (No Child Left behind 2015 100% proficiency deadline waiver). These meetings are scheduled this month to consider what next crazy compromises DDOE will ask for in exchange for federal dollars.
Consider going to some of these meetings.
The town halls are scheduled for:
4 to 5 p.m., Friday, January 9 online
6 to 7 p.m., Wednesday, January 14 at the Carvel Building 2nd Floor auditorium, 820 N. French St. in Wilmington
6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, January 15 at the William Henry Middle School auditorium, 65 Carver Road in Dover
6 to 7 p.m., Wednesday, January 21 online
6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, January 22 at the Woodbridge High School auditorium, 14712 Woodbridge Road in Greenwood
Information about how to join the online town halls and presentation materials will be available shortly at http://dedoe.schoolwires.net/Page/1801.
The explosion that’s coming once these Smarter Balanced test scores are released this year will be epic. Parents, of every socioeconomic level, are going to flip out when they see the scores.
Pandora,
They are already planting the seeds of poor performance well in advance. We have seen their reporters checking in with the Administration for talking points in FOIA documents. The NJ will smooth it all over and the DOE will, just as they did with Opt-Out, gin up talking points for schools to disseminate.
All of which is to say, how very sad the situation is in public ed. The Governor will be taking 3-6 schools this month, blaming teachers and administrators, and there will be GA members who will snicker and say: they had it coming, it’s about time.
John won’t be one, and Pete doesn’t care about Wilmington schools. Not one bit.
“Pete doesn’t care about Wilmington schools. Not one bit.”
The number of state lawmakers who care about Wilmington schools — at least in the sense I think you mean “care” — can be counted on one hand.
@MW: We’ll never know for sure if Pete is following orders, currying favor or if he just agrees with the administration. My point was that if Pete was in serious disagreement with the governor, he wouldn’t follow the governor’s orders. Granted, I doubt he cares about the priority schools either way, so there’s no impetus for him to buck the administration. But we don’t know where the causality lies, and I’m not willing to let Schwartzkopf evade responsibility.
Delaware Dem – Agree with your assessment of Austin. Maybe he just hasn’t met/read/encountered any actual radical leftists to calibrate his politics yet. I mean hell, people call Obama a radical leftist. The term barely has any meaning anymore, but no sitting politician in Delaware could be reasonably described as “radical”.
I just wish Gov. Markell would have as much time on his hands looking for jobs as he does looking for test takers. Seems like the only jobs he’s offering around here is a school building administrator–until the next test season.
Whoever is behind it is not as important as the message of the act. It’s a clear announcement that in Delaware real progressives (which includes vocal) are not allowed in the Democratic Party.
I don’t happen to like Kowalko, but just being a normal Democrat, with the traditional concerns of a Democrat, has be redefined by party leadership as being a radical. That is not terribly surprising because it is a leadership that actively recruited a Republican to run as a Democrat in my district.
I’ll be surprised to find myself voting for any Democrats in the future. There will be a couple of oddballs, but I’ll be voting for the Green Party candidate in the future. Voting for the least noxious of two Republicans is getting us nowhere.