Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Hey, let’s catch up as we start today’s program. Got couple of special guests. In a few moments, we will catch up with Adam Andrzejewski of OpentheBooks.com, who has had the excitement of having Rand Paul take up Adam Andrzejewski and OpentheBooks.com, what they did with the NIH and the secret payments to Fauci and others. Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul took that up before the Congress late last week. Very cool.
We’ll talk with Adam about that, and we’ll catch up with Jack Posobiec. Jack Posobiec hasn’t been on the program for a long time. He’s now the editor of Human Events, a senior editor of Human Events, and also does a podcast over there, and is still doing journalism. We’ll talk with Jack Posobiec. He’s just back, I think, a few weeks ago, five or six weeks. I’ll check with him from a trip overseas, including Ukraine, so we’ll talk about that.
But first, I was over at the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning as we were awaiting cases to be handed down from the court, including the Dobbs case, which will hopefully, God willing, reverse Roe v. Wade. And how important that will be is hard to even discuss, hard to estimate, hard to describe. That’s a better way to say it because it’s a long time coming and there were protesters. It’s building.
I have to say, I’m past the point of thinking that I understand what the justices’ rationale is for waiting. I kind of feel like they should have put the word out by now and gotten over it, through it, because it still didn’t come out. It didn’t come out today. But let us talk about a different issue.
One of the cases that came down is a case out of Maine. Out of Maine. And the case out of Maine is about when the governments treat public schools differently than private schools. In particular about giving the money and allowing them to be in the system, some of the systems that the state put in play. And by a six to three decision, which is a big, big deal, the court said that you cannot focus on the you cannot focus and discriminate against the private schools.
This is a big deal.
And the reason it’s a big deal is because it’s been kind of a long time coming, and it is a case.
So let me tell you the history briefly. Maine actually was the home of Congressman Blaine. Blaine, James Blaine ran for president at least once, maybe twice, was very prominent, and he did not think that Catholic schools should be able to get any kind of aid from the government. He was actually somewhat well known as being anti-Catholic. Well, he put in place and proposed at the national level the Blaine amendment. It didn’t catch on at the constitutional level here, but in lots of states they passed it. And the Blaine amendment basically said you can’t give any money to private schools, separation of church and state and all that.
And it was passed as amendments. So that’s states doing what they want. Well, that has been never been completely tested at the federal level where you say, wait a second, you’re not allowed you’re supposed to treat everybody equally. You cannot actually especially target someone for their religious decisions. So what happened here is the Maine case says that Maine must allow parents who receive taxpayer funded tuition assistance payments to use them at religious schools. In other words, if you get from the state a chance to use money, tuition aid, you must be allowed to use it where you want to use it. You cannot be targeted because you want to use it at private school. The state pays tuition for certain students at private schools so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion. So meaning if you’re going to give it to students who go to private schools, secular schools, you can’t discriminate against private schools.
So the reason this is important is it’s more movement along the path towards what I would say is religious liberty and making sure if you’re going to have schools, mandatory taxes for schools, you should be allowed to choose where you go.
My argument would be more and more states must pass laws that allow parents to decide where their kids want to go to school. And okay, if we say we have a public good, a public safety requirement that parents send their kids to school, and that’s, by the way, new by about 120 years. Before that, you didn’t have to send your kids to school. We passed laws that said you must send your kids to school. I think that’s fair enough. I’m not sure why the government’s getting into that, but I think that is something we should do. And so there you have it.
Well, the next step is that there’s public schools with the government run monopoly, and they’re failing. Well, let me say it better. They’re doing okay. I think my opinion not great, but okay, in places where you have lots of prosperity, but in places where there’s poverty, the school districts have gone to the hell in a handbasket. St. Louis City School, Detroit City School, Baltimore City School, Washington D.C. City School, mostly black and brown, by the way. But my point here and then Covid exposed, even in suburban schools that have lots of tax base, that the choices that the teachers were making or how they were teaching, was not something parents wanted. So my point is just free the whole thing up.
Free the whole thing up so that people can pick where they go.
Parents should be able to pick where they go and should not be bound by the preference of bureaucrats, government bureaucrats.
And this Maine case is a step on that path. Along that way and it’s pretty exciting. You’re going to see people this is going to become an issue now because in conservative states, they can now pass laws and the laws can say, hey, you go to school where you want to go to school and you’re not going to have this spike because the Blaine amendments, these amendments and these decisions over the years have been used to say, hey, don’t even try.
And that’s an easy way out for politicians and elected officials, is don’t try when it looks like something willbe blocked because we only have so much time to take up our cases and we only have so much time to do what we’re doing. Don’t get caught up in something that’s not going to succeed.
So it’s a big deal, really big deal. And in the post Covid world, more school choice is going to lead to more opportunity for more kids and for more families and for a brighter future. So I’m all for it. Pretty exciting news.
All right, we’ll take a break. When I mentioned we’ll come back, we’ll talk with Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books and then Jack Posobiec, @JackPosobiec on Twitter.
Be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
