General Assembly Post-Game Wrap-Up/Pre-Game Show: Weds., March 6, 2024
Governor Carney gave a speech. Said we needed to live within our means. Same governor who fought legalized pot and the revenues it would bring. Same governor who opposed adding tax brackets for Delaware’s wealthiest. Same governor who arranged for tens of million of taxpayers’ dollars to go to businesses that didn’t need them while ensuring that the prying eyes of said taxpayers were excluded from seeing what was going on. Same governor who pissed away millions on bullshit port deals, also free from the prying eyes of the public. Budget-smoothing will be his legacy. A failure of a governor. Knowing nothing about working a real job, he will take his ‘talents’ to the City of Wilmington. Let’s see what he exempts from FOIA first.
You just gotta love those Rethugs. After having unanimously voted against a constitutional amendment memorializing the legality of early voting, thus killing it, they’ve now introduced a constitutional amendment that would do the exact same thing. Kids, sidle up close to your screens and/or phones. The first vote is a freebee, just as it was back in the 2019/2020 legislative session. The second vote, the one that would ratify the amendment, is the key vote. Every single House Rethug voted against the amendment during the 2021/2022 session, ensuring its defeat, and sending it back to the drawing boards. They then went to court to stop any early voting and/or ‘no excuse’ absentee voting. Got themselves a Rethuglican judge from Suxco and prevailed. In the wake of public anger, they are now claiming that, gee, they were only concerned with the technicalities and that they reallyreally want early voting. They, um, don’t. They’d all happily vote for this ‘freebee’ bill so that they can get reelected, and kill the second leg next session. They know that when enough people vote, they lose. Reps. Ramone, Smith and Yearick have great opponents this year and don’t want to lose. Connect the dots.
Here’s yesterday’s Session Activity Report. One note: The Senate defeated a resolution creating a task force on school discipline sponsored by stentorian Senator Buckson. There’s a story there, but I don’t have time to pursue it today. Can anyone fill me in?
There are no Agendas in either the House or Senate today, but it’s gonna be a busy, and perhaps contentious, committee day, especially in the House.
The House Administration Committee will consider both HB 281 and HB 282. Both sponsored by Rep. Baumbach, and strongly endorsed by state retirees. There is now no doubt that the bills will pass as Our PAL Val, who was not originally a sponsor on the bills, has added her name as a co-sponsor. The question remains: Will Carney veto them–especially HB 281, since the bill ‘repeals the option of providing health care insurance to state pensioners under Medicare part C, known as a Medicare Advantage Plan’? Great bill. Shitty governor.
Other bills of interest:
HB 264 (K. Williams) ‘makes the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” a class E felony rather than a misdemeanor where the person from whom prostitution is sought is a minor’. Giving Kim Williams the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the bill is well-intended. Having said that, are johns gonna demand proof-of-age now? Because ‘I didn’t know’ isn’t listed as a defense. Judiciary.
HB 270 (K. Williams) ‘creates a civil penalty for any sale or display of ammunition that allows the ammunition to be accessible to a purchaser or transferee without the assistance of the vendor or an employee of the vendor’. We all know the origin of this bill. Raising the questions, at least for me–a ‘civil penalty’? No suspension of license? No felony charges if/when the ammo that was just sitting out there is used in a crime? Guess Kim doesn’t want to cross Cebela’s. Weak. Judiciary.
HB 125 (S. Moore) ‘would require all schools to offer all students free breakfast and lunch every school day’. This is a key legislative priority of Network Delaware, Working Families Party, and a host of progressive organizations. Yes, it’s expensive, although it is not clear how much of the projected cost would be paid by the State as opposed to the Federal government. How expensive? About $40 mill a year. But I think it’s also essential. Keep in mind that, even if it is released from the Education Committee today, it will still need to be funded in the budget. Did John Carney say anything about school meals yesterday? No, he wouldn’t.
Today’s Senate Committee highlights:
Like Senate Bill No. 169, this act does all of the following: This Act creates a process for compensating individuals who have been wrongfully convicted in the State. To obtain compensation, a petitioner must show (i) that the petitioner was pardoned, or, after the conviction was overturned, the charges were dismissed, or the petitioner was acquitted on retrial; or (ii) that the petitioner entered a Robinson plea after the conviction was overturned and that the petitioner was innocent of the crimes for which the petitioner was convicted. The prosecuting agency can prevent compensation by showing that petitioners were accomplices to the crimes at issue, or that petitioners intentionally “took the fall” for the true perpetrators.
I have to say, beyond annoyed with anyone bemoaning the decline of Delaware’s public school system…especially the Republican response to Carney’s half-assed acknowledgment of the problem.
You made a problem that money can’t fix with the aggressive expansion of Charter schools. We’re watching philanthropic mega gifts funnel into these “public” schools, draining our traditional schools of a balance of students & resources.
It’s heartbreaking for me to see my Alma Maters decline as major money & resources funnel to a school a few miles away. How can students rise to the top without peers to help take them there? Maddening.
When will we recognize we gutted our own public schools in northern NCCo to damn near irrelevancy?
Charter schools are just publicly funded, white flight, private schools for the chosen few. Close them all down and put the programs that work and the money back into traditional public schools.
BIG like to this post. Hated the charter schools from day one, when they started just as I was entering high schools. Fuck ’em.
Delaware, (northern new castle county, really) is especially unique because of our disproportionate catholic population (parochial schools) old money (tatnall, Sanford, tower) and concentrated professional class (CSW) These factors create a natural death spiral for traditional public schools, as the highest quality students are drawn away to alternative educational arrangements. Since they have to accept even the most socially and academically unfit kids, traditional public schools have become little more than day care for disengaged and disruptive kids. If you are a working-class person who values education, the charter school may be your only hope of ensuring that your child has a safe, stable learning environment in a space that promotes a shared set cultural values.
If public schools want to regain relevance they need to raise their standards. That means giving bad kids the boot and replacing a grievance-based social studies curriculum with traditional history and civics classes.
They can’t just “give bad kids the boot,” as you well know. And the history and civics classes bit has nothing to do with it.
Says a lot about you, though.
I disagree. Catholic Schools have also faced a severe decline in usage & the impact of Sanford, Tatnall, etc. is a drop in the bucket – and have always been around. The people who can afford those schools always have – and always will. I don’t bemoan private schools funding private education.
My issue is publicly funding the destruction of public schools to create segregated public schools.
Boot the bad kids to Charters & see how much it balances the system out.
IMO: The bottomline is this: prior to the aggressive expansion of Charters in NCCo – including their expansive fundraising tactics, public schools had the funding necessary to help inspire the “bad kids” to find their interests & talents to stay inspired to achieve academic success.
Before the “good kids” exodus to Charters, you also had a tier of students that their peers were around that naturally lifted other students up.
Segregation always minimizes the ability of students to learning how the world works by limiting our exposure to each others struggles. While it used to be more driven solely on race, I now believe its also driven by ability.
And we wonder why our public schools are “failing.”
Our legislators & Governors for the past 25 years have sucked the life out of our public schools, and if they want to turn it around, it’s time to get back to providing a public school system that can shape a whole human & open their eyes to the world.
I agree with most of this. Charter schools have hurt Catholic schools because the strict-discipline parents can now send the kids to a free charter (actually magnet) school like the military academy or the first-responders school.
I think it’s about the strict classroom discipline at such schools more than anything else, just as the elite schools are mostly about the small class sizes (that’s why they cost so much).
In the aggregate, Northern ncco has a much higher proportion of non-traditional/non charter schools. Missing a few thousand high performing learners and their engaged parents make a difference across the four traditional districts.
I think the job of a school and teachers is teaching only. For the past 25 years traditional public schools have become state service centers, where the actual business of learning is sidelined. I don’t believe the schools need to “inspire” anyone.
The idea that “a public school system that can shape a whole human & open their eyes to the world” is ridiculous. Everyone talks about trauma these days; how the students need be coddled throughout the day. I have seen classrooms in the third world, for war orphans who have known real trauma, where the kids go to school every day in buildings with dirt floors and no power and still can follow direction and stay on task.
It’s not a money issue, it’s all about attitude. I’ve been to the public meetings where “community advocates” will have it out over funding. Like many in those communities, they treat school as a black box, assuming that the lazy, disruptive kid they send to class everyday will somehow come out a bright, well adjusted adult at 18. When those results don’t pan out, it’s clearly a case of underfunding!
By the way, those kids do grow up, leave school, and typically end up on the economic margins. Their political enablers talk constantly about the need for “job and skills training.” As someone who has offered that training in the past, the conditions and attitude to education are no different.
TL;DR. Don’t force working people and their kids to participate in a hyper-ideological system to satisfy some quaint notion of how schooling should work. Public schools were never intended to be a social services agency or a jobs program for teachers. Until structural changes are made to the public school model, people with real aspirations and motivation deserve an exit strategy.
It’s not just the engaged parents who are missing, it’s the money per child that comes from state funding. You don’t seem to understand how the funding follows the student. That’s how charters have screwed up the public system.
What you’re talking about is a separate issue.
Statutory rape doesn’t include a mistake of age defense, so why would patronizing an underage prostitute?
The bill doesn’t absolve the john of a crime, just makes them liable for a harsher sentence.
Yeah. My point is, there’s already no defense of mistake in age for statutory rape. A 50-year-old who has sex with a 15-year old doesn’t get to say “I thought she was 18!” and escape criminal liability if she’s not a prostitute, so that defense shouldn’t exist if the 15-year-old is a prostitute. (At least, that’s a policy judgment. Some might disagree but I imagine they’d be in the minority.)
The bill definitely expands criminal liability. If I understand this bill correctly, it would felonize conduct that might not be felony conduct under existing law. There’s no factoring given for the age of the john- a 16-year-old john would be treated the same as a 60-year-old john (at least, if one ignores the nuances of the juvenile delinquency system in Family Court- maybe an 18-year-old john is the better comparator).
It’s a policy judgment as to whether we should punish the teenage john as harshly as the older john. Probably most people would say that you shouldn’t. This seems like an easy fix with an amendment to the bill that requires the age of the john be taken into consideration for this felony (just like it’s taken into consideration for statutory rape).
My point is that I doubt that prostitutes walk around with a proof of age.
Certainly w/o their real name on any ID they might show.
Of course, if prostitution was legalized and regulated, issues like this would rarely arise.
> One note: The Senate defeated a resolution creating a task force on school discipline sponsored by stentorian Senator Buckson. There’s a story there, but I don’t have time to pursue it today. Can anyone fill me in?
Looks like all Senate Dems just Not Voting’d it to death. They then proceeded to pass a very similar CR (https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail?LegislationId=140982), sponsored by Townsend and Moore. If you read the CRs, the WHEREAS sections… take very different approaches and give away the authors’ intent and framing. So either they were reacting to that, or they just think Buckson’s a bozo and don’t want to vote for his stuff.
Thanks, I’m guessing the former instead of the latter.
Although Buckson is a bloviating bozo.
Seems Hocker is big mad about how things went down: https://baytobaynews.com/stories/hocker-disgusting-behavior-took-place-at-legislative-hall,129777
More disgusting than Jan. 6 no doubt.
Betcha Hocker didn’t write about that one.