It didn’t take long for the bickering to start after the Senate Education Committee on Feb. 3 unanimously killed House Bill 2, thewide-ranging school choice proposal, with only two minutes of consideration.Gov. Tate Reeves said he’s never been more disappointed in elected officials than he was in Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, the chairman of the Education Committee. The governor claimed the two worked closely with Democrats to kill the school choice bill, and accused them of hiding their efforts from conservatives.
If Reeves and other school choice advocates are upset with Hosemann and DeBar about school choice, they should broaden their horizons a bit. The House bill, championed by Speaker Jason White, passed his chamber on Jan. 15 by a slim 61-59 vote. That means about 15 of the 78 Republicans in the House voted against the bill.
School choice advocates are right to complain that the bill didn’t get a fair hearing in the Senate. But all 10 Republicans on the Education Committee voted to kill the legislation. Combined, that means at least 25 GOP lawmakers voted against the bill.
A couple of senators told the Magnolia Tribune website why. They said Republicans had concerns about using state money to help students switch to private schools. They also noted that there was no detailed estimate of what House Bill 2 would cost.
Finally, Senate Republicans said they got a lot of calls from constituents who opposed the school choice bill. Presumably that was true for some House Republicans as well.
All this analysis sounds logical, but everyone seems to be overlooking what might have been another significant factor in the Senate’s disdainful treatment of House Bill 2: payback.
Remember last year, when somebody on the Senate side made a math error on the bill to eliminate income taxes? The Senate wanted to move more slowly on the tax cuts, but sent the House a revised bill that by mistake all but cut the taxes to zero over the next decade or so. The House noticed the error but approved the bill without a heads-up to the Senate. Reeves signed it.
Does anybody think Hosemann and Senate leaders forgot that slight? It would have been fun to be in the room last year when senators groused about the income tax cut mistake, and about the House’s eagerness to take advantage of the Senate error. But human nature being what it is, you can be sure if there was such a conversation, it also included an oath to get even one day.
That day was Feb. 3, when the Senate Education Committee and its 10-member Republican majority shot down school choice and sent Reeves, White and other conservatives into a conniption fit.
Further, White may have made a strategic error by putting together a bill of more than 500 pages. If his thinking was that a bigger bill stood a better chance of becoming law, he apparently guessed wrong. The Senate’s action on its school choice proposals indicates it wants to handle the issues individually. Even the House vote indicated Republican concerns.
DeBar, the Education Committee chairman, noted that the Senate has passed its own school choice legislation. The Senate’s proposal does not go as far as House Bill 2 did, restricting choice to giving parents the freedom to switch from one public school to another, as long as the receiving school agrees. But it’s a start. After all, if the House bill was that immaculate, why did so many Republicans vote against it?
