Day: <span>October 18, 2016</span>

Education, the Supreme Court and Trump

 

Now that we know which presidential candidate really should be locked up – and it’s not Hillary – it is interesting to observe the rationalizations that some partisan officeholders and hypocritical Christian religious “leaders” have for holding their noses and sticking with Donald Trump.

“Interesting” is not the word I wanted to use, but it will have to do.

One of the often-repeated excuses for putting an admitted sexual molester in charge of our country’s future is that he would appoint the “right” ideologically inclined people to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In truth, we don’t know who Trump would appoint to the Supreme Court or anything else, for that matter, since about every other sentence that comes out of his mouth is a distortion, fantasy or outright lie. But if you want to take him at his word on the high court issue, educators and parents should consider that one of the potential Supreme Court nominees on the “short list” he released a few months ago is Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett.

Willett is among the nine justices who recently turned their backs on Texas public schools and millions of school children suffering from under-funded classrooms.

Willett wrote the grandiosly worded but mealy mouthed Texas Supreme Court opinion that admitted the state’s school funding system is awful but concluded that it didn’t violate the state constitution. That decision gave the governor and the legislative majority a free pass to continue short-changing school kids.

I wonder if Willett will be joining other partisan officeholders and voting for Trump. Maybe, maybe not. During the Republican presidential nominating follies, Willett repeatedly mocked Trump on Twitter.

So, let us hope the justice’s interest in the future of our country is stronger than his apparent lack of interest in the future of public education in Texas.