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Est. April 5, 2002
 
           
Sept 30, 2021 - Issue 881
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Democratic centrists and progressives remain in a tizzy over how they should approach the passage of President Biden’s infrastructure and reconciliation bills. The centrists want the infrastructure to move first while the progressives want them to move as an all-or-nothing package deal. After an earlier commitment to move them together and call a vote for the former, Speaker Pelosi has decided to decouple the two.

All eyes are on Speaker Pelosi as she works her magic to get infrastructure through with a promissory note that the reconciliation bill will immediately follow. Simultaneously, Sen. Mitch McConnell has thrown down the gauntlet, telling the Democrats that no Republican Senator will vote with them to raise the debt ceiling, and therefore, leaving them to pass it alone or allow the nation to go into insolvency.

Thus, with their slim majorities in the House and Senate, and faced with internal and external distractions in their effort to pass legislation, Democrats seem to be unaware as to how they are being ‘played.’ The reality of these contretemps is that it demonstrates that the Democrats’ focus on their alleged mission of equity has presently been derailed.

Republicans are hanging together politically while their Democratic opponents are, perplexingly, engaged in hand-to-hand, political combat among themselves - to the GOP’s delight. While all of this occurs, Republicans are upscaling ongoing school-choice initiatives via virtual schools, vouchers, and corporate-owned charter schools.

Michigan, the home state of former Trump Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is on a tear in its expansion of corporate-owned charter schools and the movement of White students to all-White schools and nearly all-White school districts. Betsy DeVos is back funding these programs and schemes with her multi-billion dollar fortune through her American Federation for Children (AFC), which she founded and primarily funds.

She has also targeted North Carolina, Texas Tennessee, Georgia, Arizona, and a mass of red and blue states to expand the reach of the privatization of public schools. Her endeavors are largely being ignored while Americans’ and Democrats’ concentrate on eradicating COVID-19 and personal squabbles. Republicans are running free with a school-choice agenda as their corporate donors fill their campaign coffers.

Along with the aforementioned moves, Republicans are being helped by Democrats ignoring the escalating gun violence among youth of color during the pandemic. Chicago, Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and other large and small urban centers are awash in school-related and neighborhood shootings causing communities of color to question Democratic priorities.

It got so bad in Durham, North Carolina that the Chancellor of the local Historically Black University, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), held a news conference on September 20th to inform the community that the September 18th murders of two men in an NCCU parking lot during a home football game caused the local police department to lock down the stadium.

Murders and shootings have increased dramatically in Chicago; Mayor Lori Lightfoot has “…pledged more funding to “Choose to Change,” which provides students at a higher risk of gun violence involvement in positive mentoring, therapy, enrichment activities and more.” These incidents of violence are sweeping urban communities across the nation, according to federal data, are pandemic-related, and are disproportionately occurring among low-income families and youth of color.

These issues are major challenges facing communities of color who were the base voters of the 2020 Democratic victories and will be essential to holding the Democratic majorities in the 2022 midterms and keeping the presidency in 2024. The Democrats are, perhaps unintentionally, ceding their political advantage to Republicans by the negligence of their base.

The Republican strategy is to cause dissension and loss of morale within the ranks of Democratic voters as the politicians to whom they delivered the reins of political power are not delivering on their promises of voting rights, climate change, health and child care, and police reform.

The two voting rights bills, the ‘For the People Act’ and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act’ have basically been sidelined from discussion and debate. Irrespective of the ravages wrought by Hurricane Ida, in an odd kind of unity, Republicans and Democrats have stalled climate change. Health and child care, and social infrastructure legislation, have been paused with no clear path to implementation. Despite the year-long protests following George Floyd’s murder, the naive efforts of the only two Black U.S. Senators, Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) have scuttled police reform.

To quote former World Heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Here, Republicans have repeatedly hit Democrats in the mouth with jabs, political left and right hooks, and uppercuts, and despite their eyes being politically blackened and bleeding from their mouths, Democrats have yet to respond.

The Republicans have Democrats chasing their tails and running in place. Their aim is to have a drop-off in the turnout of the Democratic base as it becomes disillusioned with its leaders as it reaps limited returns on the political investment it made in 2020, flipping several purple and red states to blue. Along with Republicans’ continuing success with voter suppression laws, Democrats are headed for political annihilation in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election unless they attend to the needs of their voters.


BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools, and public school privatization. He has served as Professor of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as Professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Contact Dr. Farrell and BC.

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Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA
Publisher:
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