Arizona Supreme Court allows school choice program to stand

Arizona Supreme Court allows school choice program to stand
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By Mary Tillotson | Watchdog.org

Arizona’s highest court has effectively ruled in favor of the state’s innovative education savings account program, allowing hundreds of students access to a flexible, tailored education.

“This is really exciting news for families in Arizona,” said Jonathan Butcher, education director for the Goldwater Institute, which had intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of Arizona families.

Last fall, the state’s appeals court ruled in favor of the program, distinguishing it from a voucher program that was ruled unconstitutional in 2009. Opponents of the ESA program appealed, and the Supreme Court on Friday denied the appeal, allowing the lower court’s decision — and the program — to stand.

“What’s tremendous is that the appeals ruling was so strong,” Butcher said. “The language in there really confirmed everything that we said about education savings accounts from the beginning. We’ve made the case that they are distinct from vouchers and the provision in the law makes them unique, and parents are not compelled to spend their money on any one thing.”

When the state Supreme Court struck down the voucher program in 2009, it found legal footing in the state’s Blaine Amendment, which prohibits public funds from aiding private schools, whether or not they’re faith-based. Families using vouchers were required to spend voucher money on private schools.

Families using ESAs receive a limited-use debit card and permission to spend that money on private school tuition, textbooks, tutoring, education therapy and other educational expenses. The money rolls over year to year and can be saved for college.

When the appeals court upheld the ESA program, it noted that parents don’t have to spend the money on private school tuition — and therefore, the program doesn’t violate the state’s constitution.

“The specified object of the ESA is the beneficiary families, not private or sectarian schools,” the appeals court’s opinion stated. “Depending on how the parents choose to educate their children, this may or may not include paying tuition at a private school.”

Butcher said he hopes other states will take the court’s decision as a cue to enact their own ESA programs.

“The life cycle of school choice programs is almost predictable,” he said. “It gets passed in the law, the union sues, the court decides, and if they decide favorably, other states start doing it.”

About 700 students are currently using Arizona’s ESA program, and state lawmakers are considering several bills that would expand the program to allow more students to participate. Currently, students with special needs, children adopted from the state foster system, children assigned to failing schools and children of active-duty military families are eligible.

Several states have considered enacting ESA programs, but so far none has passed.

1. Arizona mom won’t give up on special needs kids, no matter what state says


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3. Relocating sexually abusive teachers would be more difficult under Pennsylvania bill


4. DOJ backpedals on Louisiana voucher lawsuit


5. Court says charter schools won’t pay for Atlanta’s pension debts


6. Biggest education impact from shutdown? Furloughed bureaucrats


7. Appeals court upholds Arizona school choice program


8. Indiana’s voucher program expands; diversity a factor in one family’s choice of school


9. ‘Vouchers don’t do much good for students’ claim is false


10. NYC mayor’s race could affect school choice


11. Vermont public school goes independent, raises ire from state bureaucracy


12. Arizona education savings accounts aren’t vouchers, study says


13. Legal institute fights Alabama union’s attempt to repeal school tax credit


14. Experts: School choice improves education in public schools


15. SC school-choice program helps special needs kids, could expand


16. DOJ wants Louisiana parents out of voucher lawsuit


17. U.S. House passes bill to prevent ‘passing the trash’


18. ‘Non-traditional’ journalists barred from viewing tax-funded test results early


19. New center hopes to help charter schools help kids with special needs


20. Charter school advocate to Philadelphia schools: Listen to parents


21. $ 45 million not enough for Philadelphia teachers’ union


22. Study: Rhode Islanders support school choice


23. Study: Choice would help failing Chicago schools


24. Scholarships could lift SC school dedicated to real-life, hands-on learning


25. Parents make good school choices, study says


26. Divisive charter school reform bill headed toward vote in PA


27. In Louisiana school voucher lawsuit, DOJ changes gears


28. Opponents sue Washington to overturn charter school law


29. School choice proponents’ challenge? Educating parents


30. Judge: Federal oversight may not hamper school voucher program


31. PA lawmakers push to amend tight teacher furlough policies


32. College ready: A Milwaukee inner-city school success story


33. Proposed economic furloughs could slay sacred cow of seniority in Pennsylvania schools


34. What is Massachusetts doing right?


35. Goldwater to appeal Louisiana school voucher decision


36. Want to end poverty? Educate the kids


37. Breakdown in Philly schools not only about the money


38. North Carolina scholarship program on firm legal footing, attorney argues


39. Philadelphia school district threatens charters


40. Belief in student ability key to success at Milwaukee charter school


41. Three things to know about Philadelphia’s school budget: Debt, pensions and safety


42. Choosing to sue: Here’s a look at some 2013 lawsuits involving school choice


43. Philly charter schools outperform district counterparts


44. California students sue state over ineffective teachers


45. Study: Public supports parent choice in education


46. Under new management, Philly Renaissance Schools show growth


47. New Orleans tops school choice index


48. AZ to consider four school-choice expansion bills


49. Florida family ‘blessed’ to be apart of scholarship program


50. PA lawmakers put education at top of agenda in election year


51. Louisiana: Feds ‘more interested in skin color than … education’


52. Charter school for Philadelphia foster children will not be renewed


53. Governor ties proposed PA education funding to targeted grants


54. Vermont attempts to take independence from independent schools


55. WA’s first charter school serves children, families of ‘extreme poverty’


56. Philly stumbles on way to simplifying enrollment system


57. Plan for Philly schools keeps charters in check


58. Missouri ballot initiative would increase funding for public, private schools


59. New York charter school focuses on family, community


60. NC school vouchers on hold


61. WI voucher bill would help special needs students denied open enrollment


62. Philadelphia schools will end another year in red


63. PA universities expect state, students to pick up tab on rising tuition


64. Two ESA bills get House support in AZ


65. Thousands rally to support New York charter schools


66. California’s defense begins in Vergara trial


67. Accountability or overregulation? Charter supporters split over Minnesota bill


68. PA considers empowering universities to authorize charter schools


69. Bill would make Florida students eligible for scholarships


70. To test or not to test? Florida school choice proponents split


71. Philly school district broke, but the pay is good


72. Philadelphia charter school sues public school district


73. Colorado Supreme Court to hear school voucher case


74. Vermont to reconsider education funding formula


75. Arizona Supreme Court allows school choice program to stand

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Florida Sheriff: Stand Your Ground Law a "Recipe for Disaster"

A Florida sheriff says he bucked his fellow officers in not supporting the state’s controversial Stand Your Ground law because it’s a “recipe for disaster.”

“An individual certainly has the right to defend his life or anyone else’s life in his or her house and . . . in public as well,” Boward County Sheriff Scott Israel told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“I don’t believe that an individual should participate in the conflict or escalate the conflict if he or she can safely escape or safely get out of that controversial situation and not have a violent encounter,” he said Wednesday.

Last week, the Sunshine State’s law, which gives persons the right to use deadly force to defend themselves without needing to retreat, received unanimous support from the Florida Sheriffs Association.

While Israel was unable to attend the meeting where the vote was taken, he says he would have voted it down.

“If a prudent person would come to the conclusion that you can safely escape … then I believe it is incumbent upon you not to engage.

“We have accidental shootings, deputies and police officers throughout our nation get killed each year by their own handgun . . . It’s just a recipe for disaster,” he said.

“This is not the days of Tombstone, Arizona, the OK Corral. If you can’t safely escape and you’ve got to fight the fight, then I support that, but when we can safely escape . . . we need to do that.”

Israel says the case of George Zimmerman, in which the Neighborhood Watch volunteer was acquitted of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, does not fall under Stand Your Ground.

“I don’t think Stand Your Ground was an issue there,” Israel said. “I believe it was more about race and was more about poor judgment.”

See “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV each weekday live by clicking here now.

© 2014 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Newsmax – America

Florida Sheriff: Stand Your Ground Law a "Recipe for Disaster"

Veterans Take the Stand in NYC Free Speech Trial

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Veterans Take the Stand in NYC Free Speech Trial

Ted Cruz: Tyrants Notice When America Doesn’t Stand for Freedom

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Ted Cruz: Tyrants Notice When America Doesn’t Stand for Freedom

Austria should stand by Hypo creditors: Nowotny

By Georgina Prodhan

VIENNA Sat Feb 22, 2014 8:29am EST

Austria’s nationalised lender Hypo Alpe Adria headquarters is pictured in Klagenfurt February 12, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria should not demand creditors of struggling state bank Hypo Alpe Adria HAABI.UL take a “haircut” on the debt, central bank head Ewald Nowotny said, contradicting the country’s finance minister.

Nowotny, who was on Friday put in charge of a task force set up to advise the government on how to wind down Hypo after its previous chief quit, said Austria’s reputation was at stake if it did not stand by its obligations.

“I believe our model of how a state should behave should be, if you like, more like Germany, should be more like Holland, and not so much Greece or Cyprus,” Nowotny told Austria’s ORF radio in an interview broadcast on Saturday.

Finance Minister Michael Spindelegger had on Friday questioned whether investors who snapped up discounted Hypo debt “to try to make a quick buck” were worthy of protection.

Nowotny said: “When one has reached this decision in principle that a state honors its obligations, then one must recognize that this means also making payments to creditors that one personally does not agree with.”

The resignation of Klaus Liebscher on Friday as head of both the Hypo task force and the bank’s supervisory board piled more uncertainty on how Austria would deal with the problem of how to wind down Hypo, which it nationalized in 2009.

Nowotny said a state-owned “bad bank” was his preferred solution and one that should be put into practice as quickly as possible, but Spindelegger had said he had no favored option and again refused rule to out allowing an insolvency.

The split has highlighted market worries posed by Hypo, which Austria had to take over after a period of breakneck expansion in the Balkans pushed the bank to the brink of bankruptcy and threatened financial stability in the region.

TOP RATING

The expansion was fueled by guarantees from Hypo’s home province of Carinthia, of which 12.5 billion euros ($ 17.2 billion) remain, posing the danger that the province would be bankrupted if Hypo were allowed to become insolvent.

Ratings agency Fitch maintained its top rating and stable outlook for Austria on Friday but said Vienna’s failure to lay out a clear strategy for Hypo raised “concerns about policy coherence and credibility in the near term”.

Nowotny said he estimated the winding-down of Hypo would cost Austria around 4 billion euros on top of 4.8 billion it has already provided in aid and guarantees.

And he said it would be a “sensible arrangement” if Austria’s other provinces, which are nervously eyeing Carinthia’s position, would contribute to the federal government some 250 million euros they collect in bank taxes.

Nowotny denied that he personally, or the central bank, which was responsible for overseeing Hypo, were to blame for what he called the “real catastrophe” of the current situation, and reiterated that he believed the auditors had failed.

“I believe the main problem was simply that many of the balance sheets weren’t right and the valuations weren’t right,” he said. “That is a process where the central role lies with the auditors.”

Deloitte DLTE.UL, Hypo’s former auditors, had rejected the accusation in an email to Reuters saying: “Deloitte is surprised by the statement of Governor Nowotny. We are convinced that we have performed the audit of Hypo Group state of the art and therefore we completely reject these allegations.”

($ 1 = 0.7275 euros)

(Additional reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by David Holmes)

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Austria should stand by Hypo creditors: Nowotny

‘Stand your ground’ may apply in shooting death of Georgia man with Alzheimer’s

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‘Stand your ground’ may apply in shooting death of Georgia man with Alzheimer’s

Sandy Hook Police Ordered to Stand Down?

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Sandy Hook Police Ordered to Stand Down?

JFK Conspiracy: Did Secret Service Stand Down?

Bodyguards ordered to back off moments before shots rang out?

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 22, 2013

Was a pre-planned Secret Service stand down part of the JFK assassination conspiracy?

RELATED: The Video That Proves a Conspiracy to Kill JFK?

RELATED: Gerald Blaine and the Kennedy Detail – Was the Secret Service ‘Stood Down’ in Dallas?

This article was posted: Friday, November 22, 2013 at 12:02 pm

Tags: domestic news

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Infowars

JFK Conspiracy: Did Secret Service Stand Down?

Wasserman Schultz: Dems Will Stand "In Unity" On Obamacare

“Tomorrow when that legislation comes on the floor, I’m confident the Democrats are going to stand, as we have, in unity to continue to support fully implementing the Affordable Care Act,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said Thursday on CNN.

RealClearPolitics Video Log

Wasserman Schultz: Dems Will Stand "In Unity" On Obamacare

I don’t stand with Russell Brand, and neither should you

I felt an immense amount of affinity with comedian and would-be revolutionary vanguardist Russell Brand as I watched his BBC Newsnight interview with dismissive interlocutor Jeremy Paxman. In a highly public forum, Brand ran the frustrating gauntlet of explaining the very basic tenets of radical politics to a defender of the status quo. It’s a maddening position to occupy — as Brand’s intensifying eyes and harried stares at Paxman evidenced — and it’s a position all too familiar for those of us who have ever identified with anarchism or a radical politics that refuses a predefined program.

Like Brand, I don’t vote (I’m British, but even if I were American, I wouldn’t). Like Brand, I will not give my mandate to this festering quagmire of a corporate political system (anymore than living in it already demands, that is). A thorough anti-voting argument is beyond the remit of these paragraphs; suffice to say there are other ways and hows to enact politics. And, like Brand, I refuse to say what I propose instead when badgered by staunch defenders of capitalism. Brand patiently explained to his pompous interviewer that, no, we can’t offer you a pragmatic alternative program — we’re too entrenched in the ideology of the current one. We have to live, act, think differently, dissentfully, for new politics to emerge. I’m simplifying, of course. But the point is, I’ve learned to leave conversations when the “what do you propose instead?” question is posed to me qua anti-capitalist. If you had a blood-sucking monster on your face, I wouldn’t ask you what I should put there instead. I’d vanquish the blood sucking monster. And it seems Brand is committed to do the same.

I have no interest in a detailed discourse analysis on the comedian’s radical politics as expounded in his editorial essay this week in British left-leaning news magazine the New Statesman. He’s not a theorist, he’s a well-intentioned, wildly famous performer with a “fuck this” attitude and some really nice thoughts; he’s self-aware and self-depricating. He’d probably even be there on the barricades pushing off riot cops. And that means something to me and a number of my comrades (yes, comrades, deal with it). But, no, I’m not jumping wholeheartedly on this Brand-wagon. The reasons are two-fold:

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Firstly, if we want to challenge an inherently hierarchical political framework, we probably don’t want to start by jumping on the (likely purple velvet) coattails of a mega-celeb with fountains of charisma and something all too messianic in his swagger. “No gods, No masters”, after all. Brand is navigating the well-worn conflict facing those with a public platform in the current epoch (myself among them): We have to be willing to obliterate our own elevated platforms, our own spaces of celebrity; this grotesque politico-socio-economic situation that vagariously elevates a few voices and silences many millions is what Brand is posturing against. Would he be willing to destroy himself — as celebrity, as leader, as “Russell Brand”? I think he’d struggle, but I don’t really know the guy.

But beyond this — the general furore and excitement around famous-person Russell Brand saying not-dumb political things on TV should give us pause for thought. If we’re so damn excited to hear these ideas in (in their slightly haphazard form) from a boisterous celebrity, then clearly we have some idolatry and “Great Man” hangups to address (lest we reinstate a monarchy with Brand as sovereign, Kanye as chief advisor). Everything Brand has said, I’ve heard before, especially since Occupy’s 2011 heyday; the radical suggestion that, yes “Shit is fucked up, and bullshit,” was not first uttered by Brand and should not be more exciting nor appealing by virtue of emerging from his cheeky smile. As has often been pointed out, there is a constant conflict at play when radical or militant ideas or images enter the popular imaginary under capitalism (I’ve noted the example here before of a riot scene in a Jay-Z/Kanye music video): At the same time radical ideas might spread and resonate across mainstream and pop media platforms (and thus provide the potential for rupture), these ideas and images are recuperated immediately into capital. Brand calls for revolution, and online media traffic bounces, magazines sell, bloggers like me respond, advertisers smile, Brand’s popularity/notoriety surges, the rich, as ever, get richer.

Secondly, and more immediately worthy of attention given current Brand fever: His framing of women is nothing short of the most archetypal misogyny. I’m not asking Brand to be perfect, but I am asking we temper celebrations of him according to his very pronounced flaws. Writer Musa Okwonga, responding to Brand and possibly coining the term “Brandwagon” was swift to elevate feminist concerns, too often ignored in the excitement around a celebrity appearing to have good politics. Okwonga noted:

… what the writer Sarah Ditum has identified as [Brand"s] “lazy sexism”, evident both in his celebrated MSNBC appearance and in the opening line of his New Statesman guest editorial. Right there, beneath a sub-heading which states that “before the world, we need to change the way we think”, Brand writes that “When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me.”

See, here’s the thing. I and others will run the risk of sounding like killjoys for pointing this out, but if you’re advocating a revolution of the way that things are being done, then it’s best not to risk alienating your feminist allies with a piece of flippant objectification in your opening sentence. It’s just not a good look.

Brand, admirably, is not proposing a program. But Okwonga is right: In our excitement for even a hint of revolutionary fervor ostensibly permeating mainstream debate, we’ve enabled misogyny and Great Man narratives to go unchecked. This is troubling ground to build if we want to fight from it. And, of course, it’s not only through this week’s Brand hagiographies that “lazy sexism” has been troublingly permitted in the name of radical politics — it’s pervasive. Take, for well-worn example, the ongoing yet baffling difficulty many supporters of WikiLeaks and pro-transparency projects seem to have with any criticism of Julian Assange; the willingness with which thousands of Assange acolytes outright rejected sexual assault claims against him. To avoid another maelstrom myself, I simply posit: It is at least logically possible for a man to both be a sexist creepbag and espouse some good political ideas and projects. I don’t mean to draw any strict equivalences between Brand and Assange. I could list a whole host of examples: Recall the viral spread of the “Stand with Rand” sentiment, when Sen. Rand Paul mounted an epic filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination to CIA director. I too stood with Rand’s critique of the Obama administration’s unchecked executive power when it comes to drone kill lists. But I don’t stand in any solidarity with the racist Kentucky Republican.

But the point of rethinking new political and social spaces together — as was felt profoundly by many of us engaged in Occupy’s headiest, fiercest days — was that we don’t need to align with, elevate, celebrate (nor indeed wholly reject or detest) any one person. Yes, we will continue struggle against vanguardism and sexism and so many co-constitutive problems within ourselves and each other. We will fail and fail better and fail. We will struggle to know and reconstitute what “we” even really means. And I take Russell Brand at his word that he wants to fight too. This is no referendum on the comedian or his intentions. But this is no time to forgo feminism in the celebration of that which we truly don’t need — another god, or another master.

Salon.com

Reprinted with Permission in whole or part from Salon.comPost id = does not exist.

I don’t stand with Russell Brand, and neither should you

Boehner: "It is time for us to stand and fight"

M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

House Speaker John Boehner says he wasn’t pulled into demanding concessions from Democrats to keep funding the government – he willingly joined with fellow Republicans.

“I and my members decided that the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand,” the Ohio Republican said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

That’s even though he had offered a clean government funding bill to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over the summer. “There was a conversation about doing this … several,” Boehner said, but he ultimately decided against it.

(Also on POLITICO: Boehner: Not enough votes in House to pass ‘clean’ CR)

“I, working with my members, decided to do this in a unified way,” the speaker said — with demands to defund, delay or otherwise alter the Affordable Care Act.

Boehner had expected that the Obamacare fight would come during the next vote to raise the debt ceiling, “but, you know, working with my members, they decided, let’s do it now,” he said. “And the fact is, this fight was going to come, one way or another. We’re in the fight. We don’t want to shut the government down. We’ve passed bills to pay the troops. We passed bills to make sure the federal employees know that they’re going to be paid throughout this.”

“You’ve never seen a more dedicated group of people who are thoroughly concerned about the future of our country,” he said of House Republicans. “It is time for us to stand and fight.”

Read more about: John Boehner, Government Shutdown

POLITICO – TOP Stories

Boehner: "It is time for us to stand and fight"

Coburn"s stand hits importers

Coburn has proposed his own spending cuts to pay for the extension. | AP Photo

When WorldFinds, a small “fair trade” company based in Westmont, Ill., placed its fall holiday order in April for costume jewelry from India, the last thing company President Kelly Weinberger expected was a U.S. tax hike before the product arrived.

But a stand by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) against “Washington budget gimmicks” cost WorldFinds $ 6,000 in higher import duties in August and probably will again in September.

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“As a fair-trade business, we’re already pre-paying 50 percent for our shipments so the artisans don’t have to dip into their own money to get production going,” Weinberger told POLITICO. “When there’s an unexpected charge, like a new 11 percent duty, that’s really a huge hit.”

Coburn, a fiscal conservative, has allowed a tax hike on importers by blocking an effort to renew the nearly 40-year-old Generalized System of Preferences program before it expired on July 31.

In a letter sent July 25 to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a frustrated Coburn said he supported the GSP program but objected to how S. 1331, a bill introduced a week earlier by the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, would pay for the two-year extension.

“While I am aware that both of these offsets have been used in the past, I again submit to you that Washington budget gimmicks are precisely why our nation is in such a perilous fiscal position,” Coburn said in the letter, explaining why he blocked efforts to pass the legislation in the Senate by a unanimous voice vote.

GSP allows 127 developing countries and territories to exports thousands of goods to the United States without paying import duties. Originally intended as a development program for poor countries, supporters say it also helps U.S. companies and consumers by reducing costs.

Altogether, U.S. companies saved about $ 742 million in taxes on about $ 19.9 billion worth of imports under the program in 2012, according to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. A 2005 U.S. Chamber of Commerce study estimated more than 80,000 American jobs were tied to GSP. Precise U.S. duties vary by item.

India is the biggest foreign beneficiary, shipping $ 4.5 billion worth of goods to the U.S. under GSP in 2012, followed by Thailand with $ 3.7 billion, Brazil with $ 2.3 billion, Indonesia with $ 2.2 billion and South Africa with $ 1.3 billion.

What irritated Coburn about S. 1331, crafted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), was how it would pay for the $ 869 million cost of extending the program through September 2015.

Coburn complained in his letter to McConnell that the Baucus-Hatch bill fails to offset the “costs until 2022 — seven years after the GSP extension has expired” and does so by extending custom user fees for 90 days in that year.

The bill also would use another maneuver to make the extension “appear budget neutral”: increasing corporate taxes in the fifth year of the government scoring window and refunding them in year six, Coburn said.

“This provision forces companies to provide what is essentially an interest-free loan to the federal government,” he said.

While Coburn has proposed his own spending cuts to pay for the extension, congressional aides say those have run into objections from other senators, making it impossible to move the bill through the Senate by “unanimous consent,” the quickest route for legislation to be sent to the House.

A Coburn spokesman declined to say what cuts the senator has proposed, but he said the senator is willing to listen to other ideas for resolving the impasse.

Meanwhile, a group of 20 nations including Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines called the Alliance of GSP Countries, has asked to meet with Coburn to explain how these countries are being hurt by the program’s lapse and to hear firsthand his reasons for blocking the renewal.

While India is not part of the group, the country’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, also is likely to raise the concern when he meets with President Barack Obama at the White House later this month.

Although GSP has lapsed several times before, the current U.S. budget environment makes this occurrence more worrisome, said Marideth Sandler, a former U.S. trade official who advises the GSP alliance countries.

In the past, Congress has always directed the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to refund duties collected when the program was expired, but it’s unclear whether that will be the case this time, Sandler said.

While S. 1331 could end up attached to a larger piece of trade legislation to give Obama new “trade promotion authority,” Sandler said GSP supporters hope a deal can be reached to move it faster than that.

POLITICO – Congress

Coburn"s stand hits importers

Where Key Lawmakers Stand on Attacking Syria

The rowdy debate in Britain’s Parliament on Thursday — culminating in a vote against using U.K. military forces in strikes against Syria — had many U.S. lawmakers wondering aloud: Why aren’t we doing that?

Instead, that same night, Pentagon, national security and intelligence officials briefed about two dozen members of Congress on a conference call (with declassified information), laying out a case for some kind of U.S. military action against a Syrian regime accused of using chemical weapons on its own people.

But the administration’s phone call apparently changed few minds. Responses from lawmakers — who have been in recess for most of the month — have ranged from requests to bring members back to Washington for a vote before any missiles are launched to support for limited air strikes. Meanwhile, skepticism abounds on Capitol Hill over what the U.S. can realistically hope to accomplish in Syria.

John Boehner has not joined a bipartisan coalition of more than 100 members requesting open debate and a vote on the House floor. Instead, the speaker is pressing the president to make his case to the American public while continuing to consult with leaders in Congress. Boehner does not seem inclined to summon members (for whom the recess is not scheduled to end until Sept. 9) back to the Capitol. For one thing, President Obama said as late as Friday afternoon that he still hasn’t made a decision about what action he may take — meaning that even those who say they want input are unsure what they would be asked to support. (The president has indicated, however, that there would be no U.S. troops on the ground or long-term military presence.) 

If the president were to wait for a vote, it’s far from clear that he would receive a favorable response, especially given the public’s weariness from two Middle East wars. An NBC News poll shows that 80 percent of Americans think Obama should get approval from Congress before using military force in Syria. But there is some nuance: 50 percent favor the use of cruise missiles, while 44 percent oppose them; and 50 percent say the U.S. should not intervene at all.

Heading into Labor Day weekend, here is a roundup of key lawmakers’ stated positions on Syria:

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the ranking Republican member, have both endorsed a limited U.S. military response.

“Nothing in Syria has good choices in it,” Menendez said in a Friday television appearance. “But if you permit a global message that the use of chemical weapons can be done with impunity, then I think you are buying yourself a much bigger challenge in the world.”

Corker is on record as favoring congressional approval prior to a strike, but he stopped short of saying such a vote is requirement for action. “While I’m opposed to American boots on the ground in Syria, I would support surgical, proportional military strikes given the strong evidence of the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical warfare,” he has said. “Whatever limited action is taken should not further commit the U.S. in Syria beyond the current strategy to strengthen the vetted, moderate opposition.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, hasn’t come out squarely in opposition to airstrikes, but he did call on the administration to provide military aid to the Syrian rebels and to wait to launch an attack until United Nations inspectors complete their work.

The top Republican member on the committee, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, is opposed to a U.S. attack on Syria. “I’m opposed to military intervention,” he said Friday morning. “We don’t have the resources.”

Sen. John Cornyn didn’t go that far, but after Thursday night’s conference call, the Texas Republican told reporters he doesn’t think the White House has a strategic plan: “Tonight the administration failed to explain how they intend to effectively respond to the situation.”

Howard “Buck” McKeon, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, has criticized Obama for ignoring his own “red line” on Syrian use of weapons of mass destruction. “Using chemical weapons against innocent civilians is unacceptable,” the California Republican said early this week. “No regime can be allowed to do so with impunity”

New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been making the moral case for military intervention, citing the gruesome pictures of young children foaming at the mouth. “There’s no doubt that Bashar al-Assad was directly involved, that he knew what happened,” he said in an interview with CNN Friday morning. “He has to approve this. And he is aligning himself with a terrorist group, Hezbollah. He’s become Iran’s proxy in Syria.”

Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, supports the administration — while acknowledging the political pitfalls. “It is clear that the American people are weary of war,” she said. “However, Assad gassing his own people is an issue of our national security, regional stability and global security. We must be clear that the United States rejects the use of chemical weapons by Assad or any other regime.”

Republican Rep. Scott Rigell, a member of Armed Services who represents a Navy-heavy district in Norfolk, Va., is a leader among lawmakers demanding that the president seek authorization from Congress before striking. So far, over 100 House members — of both parties — have signed his letter to the president. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

Where Key Lawmakers Stand on Attacking Syria

Proposed bill will prohibit ‘Stand Your Ground’, require Neighborhood Watch to register with local and Fed. authorities

Guns.com

Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced a bill on the House floor Wednesday that will prohibit states from having “Stand Your Ground” laws, and require neighborhood watch programs to register with local law enforcement and the Department of Justice. States that fail to follow these guidelines will be penalized by a 20 percent cut in federal funding.

According to Jackson Lee, “We will … decrease the incidence of gun violence resulting from vigilantes by reducing by 20 percent the funds that would otherwise be allocated … to any state that does not require local neighborhood watch programs to be registered with a local [law] enforcement agency.”  

The Justice Exists for All of Us Act would require that states change Stand Your Ground Laws to Duty to Retreat. In other words, if a person is found in a situation in where they feel threatened, they will not be allowed to use force unless they have first “retreated” or tried to avoid an escalating situation by removing themselves from the location.

In other words, the person must avoid conflict with their aggressor by “retreating” in order to be justified in using force, even if the person has every right to be in that place to begin with. The aggressor then must follow and continue to initiate threatening behavior for the person to use force. Even then, the person still has the burden of proving that they were justified in that use of force.

Currently, Stand Your Ground laws allow for the use of force when one’s life is threatened provided that person has a lawful right to be in the location.

However, laws vary tremendously from state to state and while some laws are more specific, some leave gray areas that are ultimately interpreted by either a judge or jury.

The proposed act would also require that the establishment, organization or operation of a neighborhood watch program be registered with local law enforcement and the DOJ. Additionally, anyone who participates in such watch programs must also be registered within the same system.

While some neighborhood watch programs already work closely with local law enforcement, others do not. There are no strict and rigid rules and regulations for establishment or participation in neighborhood watch programs, as they were originally introduced as a way of neighbors simply looking out for neighbors. Additionally, in many areas, especially those riddled with high crime or rural locations, law enforcement is already stretched thin. Many of these areas simply do not have the extra resources to work with neighborhood watch programs to ensure that they are up to Jackson Lee’s standards.

The bill was originally introduced by Jackson Lee in June of last year in a previous session of Congress, but it has yet to be enacted. The proposed legislation was drafted as a result of the shooting of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman.

Although Zimmerman was recently found not guilty on both murder and manslaughter charges, the case has thrown Stand Your Ground laws into the media and political spotlight, regardless of the fact that such laws had no effect on the case, as it was essentially a matter of self-defense, not Stand Your Ground.

While this fact was pointed out to Jackson Lee, her press secretary Mike McQuerry stated, “She just thinks it’s the right time to pursue it now.”

“Let’s speak to the pain of the American people,” Jackson Lee reiterated. “Let’s look at ways of fixing the law.”

But is the Stand Your Ground law broken and something that’s in need of fixing? That depends on who you ask.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who believes Martin was unlawfully murdered by Zimmerman as a result of racial profiling, agrees with Jackson Lee’s thinking, and feels that Stand Your Ground laws need to be repealed.

“We must confront the underlying attitudes, the mistaken beliefs and the unfortunate stereotypes that serve too often as the basis for police action and private judgments. Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention, it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhood,” Holder said earlier this month.

But what Jackson Lee and Holder have yet to publicly address is that the black community has actually benefited from the Stand Your Ground laws at a disproportionate rate, at least in the state of Florida anyway.

http://www.guns.com/2013/07/27/tx-rep-seeks-to-prohibit-stand-your-ground-laws-place-restrictions-on-neighborhood-watch-programs/

Proposed bill will prohibit ‘Stand Your Ground’, require Neighborhood Watch to register with local and Fed. authorities

GOP hawks: This will not stand, Rand

They’re nearing a critical mass of impatience with what some call ‘Rand-ism.’ | AP Photo

The Republican Party’s hawks are finally saying it out in the open: This aggression will not stand, Rand.

After three years of watching the GOP’s non-interventionist wing gather strength, there are mounting signs that a more combative set of national security conservatives have reached their breaking point. Now, prominent conservative leaders in what used to be considered the Bush-Cheney mold are increasingly taking the offensive against their intra-party rivals.

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie publicly challenged libertarian Republicans Thursday to explain their skepticism about government surveillance to the families of 9/11 victims, declaring at a Republican Governors Association event: “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.”

(PHOTOS: Rand Paul’s career)

New York Rep. Peter King said this week that he will explore a 2016 presidential run to wrest control of the defense debate from small-government advocates such as Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, and warned that an America-first candidate would stand little chance of defeating Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the most dramatic provocation to Paul-aligned conservatives came earlier this month, when Republican national security activist Liz Cheney – the former vice president’s daughter – announced a primary challenge to Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, a low-key incumbent backed by Paul and a number of other Senate colleagues.

(PHOTOS: 2016: Who’s next?)

Republican hawks say these developments amount to something less than a coordinated counteroffensive. But no one disputes that they’re nearing a critical mass of impatience with what some call “Rand-ism” – resistance to foreign entanglements and deep, confrontational skepticism about the expansion of the federal defense apparatus, particularly in the areas of surveillance and drone warfare.

“I want a strong national defense and I don’t want Rand Paul to be the face of the Republican Party,” King said in an interview. “I’ve felt this way for a while [and] once it gets out there, people say, ‘God, this is wrong, we’re killing ourselves. This is not the Republican Party.’”

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was a vocal and at times caustic critic of Rand Paul’s father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, during the 2012 primaries, called it a welcome development that “people are starting to push back.”

“There was a lot of talk, particularly during the Republican primary last year, of, ‘Well, we don’t want to alienate these voters,” Santorum said, recalling that he’d been criticized as “too bellicose” and “too warlike. “I can tell you, the Paulistas who were active on the state level in 2012 were not interested in the Republican Party as it now exists. They are interested in a very different kind of model.”

(PHOTOS: Highlights from Rand Paul’s filibuster)

King acknowledged that public opinion has turned against some Bush-era security policies, such as the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But he suggested that it doesn’t take much to jolt voters from their sense of complacency.

“I see every time there’s a terror attack, or even a thwarted terror attack, people’s views change dramatically,” the Long Island lawmaker said, conceding: “They want out after 12 years in Afghanistan, and really after President Obama not explaining for the last five years why we’re there.”

For the emboldened phalanx of defense-minded conservatives, it remains to be seen how difficult a task they’ll have in turning the tide of the GOP’s national security conversation. Republican hawks say they are firmly confident that the party is, in its heart, more sympathetic to the George W. Bush agenda of expanding freedom and fighting terrorism, than to the Rand-style focus on limiting the government’s security powers that many congressional Republicans have recently embraced.

That’s certainly true of most national Republican elites. In some Republican donor and operative circles, there’s active talk of whether the GOP’s strong-on-defense wing may need new infrastructure and organizations to promote their priorities during primary season in 2014 and beyond.

Among those groups, optimistic Republicans argue that the GOP base cheers for tirades against drones and the NSA out of hostility toward the Obama administration, rather than the actual substance of those issues. They point out that the GOP-held House defeated an amendment this week offered by libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, which would have sharply curtailed the NSA’s domestic spying powers (though about two in five Republicans supported the measure.)

Amid the continuing Edward Snowden saga, there have been few Republican voices sympathetic to the NSA leaker outside the Paul family.

“I’m honestly not too worried,” said Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the influential foreign policy conservative. “I’m confident the Reagan Republicans will prevail over the Snowden Republicans.”

Alluding to hawkish Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, an Iraq war vet and potential 2014 Senate candidate, Kristol quipped: “I think Christie-Cotton is much more likely in 2016 than Paul-Amash.”

POLITICO – TOP Stories

GOP hawks: This will not stand, Rand