By Chris Powell
Having told the country last year that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever mentally and deserved another four years as president and that a new law with gaping holes in it was needed to control the border, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy now is aspiring to the Democratic Party’s national leadership. He wants his party to start by obstructing President Trump at every turn — including Trump’s having nearly halted illegal immigration just by threatening mass deportations.
Political correctness flusters response to assault in school
Plenty of ideas for taxes but few for economizing
A sanctimony city and a sanctimony state milk politics for patronage
Murphy would have liked to thwart Trump this month by preventing passage of another temporary federal budget, thereby closing much of the federal government — ironically, closing far more of the government than Trump and his chainsaw-wielding aide Elon Musk have undertaken to close, thereby outraging Murphy and most other Democrats.
Trump’s slashing away is reckless, making little attempt to distinguish the necessary from the unnecessary, but at least it has shown that most of the work of the federal government has become the distribution of money, much of it borrowed and distributed to Democrats and their allies. This is what most of the Democratic shrieking is about — their loss of government patronage, not any threat to the country.
Most telling may be the Democratic hysteria over Trump’s desire to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
The department was created in 1979 during the Carter administration as a reward to the teacher unions for their long support of the Democratic Party. The department lately has been spending $268 billion annually, most being distributed as grants to states and municipal governments. Trump says the money will continue to flow via other agencies, but whether it flows or not is not the important question. The important question is: What has the Education Department accomplished?
Judging by student proficiency tests, the department has presided over the utter collapse of public education. Somehow schools produced far more educated students before the department was created, the teacher unions took charge, and federal money began to deluge the schools.
Mainly the department has sustained a massive bureaucracy of federal, state, and municipal employees who call themselves educators even as there is ever less education to go around.
Senator Murphy would not have to travel far to evaluate the department’s results. He could stick to Hartford, where Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said the other day the city’s schools get $28 million a year from the department and would be ruined without the money. But despite all that money, most Hartford students never master the basics.
Last September a recent Hartford Public High School graduate sensationally confessed her inability to read and write. It should have been a much bigger scandal. Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner said they would investigate but have reported nothing, and despite its heavy investment in Hartford’s schools, the U.S. Education Department took no notice at all.
Nor did Senator Murphy.
That’s because Hartford and all the other cities with educational results that should be horrifying are Democratic fiefdoms. That they are fiefdoms of failure doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Democrats own them and collect the rent.
So what should the Democrats stand for besides rage over Trump’s taking their patronage away? The Democrats remain the party of open borders, transgenderism, racial preferences, manufacturing and coddling poverty, poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep, censorship, cancel culture, and indifference to the results of their policies.
Recent polls show the party with its lowest approval ever — lower even than the approval for the Republican Party and Trump himself.
Connecticut is so heavily Democratic that the party’s leaders here can survive without caring about results and without appreciating contrary opinion in the rest of the country. But any Democrats who aspire to national leadership must take broader opinion into account.
Such Democrats might start by asking: How could someone of Donald Trump’s character and recklessness be elected president a second time? As they ask that question, Democrats should be standing in front of a mirror.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
Nice graph from NCES appeared recently in Fordham’s Education Gadfly. The graph shows the student population increasing 8% since the year 2000. At the same time administrators increased by 33% and administrative support increased by 88%. It is conceivable that the U.S. Education Department creates grants, local schools create programs for them, programs create staff, grants expire, progams fail and are abandoned, and everyone applies for the next big thing. Other explanations are possible, of course, but the graph is worth a peek.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/lolcats-real-efficiency-effort-our-schools
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