Daily Archives: 30 January 2023

South Dakota’s Purity Caucus

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The State’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, is being taken to task for—supposedly—overstepping State constitutional bounds in the way her executive branch agencies propose legislation and introduce it into the legislature.

South Dakota’s very own Purity Freedom Caucus is claiming that those agencies

“overstepped their authority” by exploiting a loophole in the state lawmaking process that allows agencies to introduce bills without a legislative sponsor….

In the present case, South Dakota’s Department of Labor and Regulations submitted two bills to the State’s House Commerce and Energy Committee, and the committee’s chairman then sent the bills directly to the House floor rather than first having it processed by his committee—debate and vote.

Congresswoman Tina Mulally (R), treasurer of the legislature’s Freedom Caucus, complained that all of this circumvents the power of the legislature, and

The governor and the executive agencies seem to conveniently forget we have three branches of government, not one[.]

There are a number of things about this. One is that the Caucus beef in the particular case is with the Commerce and Energy Committee chairman, not any entity in the Executive Branch. It was the committee chairman’s decision to skip the committee process, not that of anyone in the DLR.

Another is that South Dakota, indeed, has three branches of government, and they’re coequal; the Executive is not subordinate (nor superior) to the Legislative. Furthermore, the State’s legislature still has to act on the proposed legislation—to shelve it or debate it, and if debating, then to shelve it or vote it up or down. Nothing in the State’s constitution says otherwise.

But the largest thing is the internally contradictory business about executive agencies overstepping their authority by exploiting a loophole. If there is a loophole, there are no related boundaries. That’s pretty tautological.

If members of the self-identified Freedom Caucus doesn’t like the loophole being used, they should move to close it rather than whine about its being used.

“Society’s” Needs

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Linn-Mar Community School Board (the district is on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, IA) member Rachel Wall thinks she knows more about what “society’s needs” are and what should be taught “society’s” children than those children’s parents do. She posted—and she was deadly serious—on Facebook

The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community[.]

That got her enough public pushback, including calls for her resignation, that Wall added a post that she actually insisted was clarifying:

This post has garnered much ire and although I thought the sentiment was clear, it is obvious that’s not the case. Please allow me to clarify. This post doesn’t say that parents don’t matter or that students don’t matter. It doesn’t say that parents shouldn’t be involved or that students shouldn’t be our focus. What it says is that public education is an ecosystem.

Public education is an ecosystem. And she gets to define who the members of her ecosystem are. They plainly do not include the parents. Parents are not, in her exalted view, part of society. Notice, too, that while Wall doesn’t say that parents and students don’t matter, she also doesn’t say that they do matter.

She’ll hear politely what parents say, and then she’ll proceed without further regard. Children are not to be educated, they’re merely tools with which Wall and her cronies intend to mold their version of community. That status as mere tool, of course, makes the children her focus. Who uses a tool without focusing on it?

Please allow me to clarify. Parents are society. Their children are tomorrow’s society. No one is better suited to determine the needs of society today and tomorrow than society’s members: parents today and tomorrow and today’s children grown into tomorrow.

All teachers are qualified to teach is the mechanics of how to operate in society—STEM materials—how we got here—the facts of history—and how we’ll interact with each other—political history and current civics.

Sadly, dangerously, teachers of Wall’s ilk are unqualified even for that, and district managers like Wall are unqualified for anything related to our children.