CO: Polis Says Legal Discrimination Is Okee Dokee

What does it take to a nominally Democratic, openly gay governor to vote for taxpayer-funded discrimination? Apparently just some "free" federal money and a legal baloney excuse.

Governor Jared Polis has opted Colorado into the federal school voucher program. He even leaned on the Democratic lawmakers in his state to keep them from requiring voucher recipients to follow the state's anti-discrimination laws. 

Polis attended a voucher party thrown by Invest in Education, a advocacy group led by a bunch of out of state hedge fund guys (so you know education is their top priority), and explained that this was totally legal and okay, using the same rationale that led us to the baloney sandwich that is the tax credit scholarship approach to funding.

See, if Bob Gotbux handed his $1,700 to the government, and the government handed it to a private school that discriminated against some students for being LGBTQ or the wrong religion or having bad haircuts, that would be illegal. But if Bob hands the money to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) and they hand it to the discriminatory school, that's totally okay. 

This is fairly transparent bullshit. 

My spouse tells me I'd better not spend our household money on beer. My brother owes me a hundred bucks, I tell him to just give me fifty bucks and two cases of beer. Will my spouse say to me, "That's okay, because you didn't actually buy beer with the money you were supposed to collect." I don't think so.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky saw through the tax credit scholarship dodge what that state's legislature tried to defend it in court. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” Further “[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition violates the law.

Peter Murphy, who is the vice president of policy at Invest in Education, offered his two slices of baloney. “Every non-wealthy child in this country is the potential beneficiary,” Murphy said. “And what this law also does is it puts more control of a child’s education in the hands of their parents, including public school parents.”

That is, of course, a carefully hedged lie. Every parent cannot benefit because every private school that wants to suck up some of this "free federal money" can reject any student they wish to reject. Right now, Colorado is involved in a Supreme Court case about two Catholic preschools that want to be to collect state taxpayer dollars while rejecting LGBTQ families from their service.

But Polis told the dark money crowd that he doesn't think the state should decide which organizations are "worthy" (which is of course a different word than "legal') and went on “When you give $100 to any charity, it can be a church, it can be something that discriminates. It can be pro-gay or anti-gay. It doesn’t matter.” But of course, in his hypothetical, I get to decide whether or not I want to give money to a discriminatory group, which is different from deciding that the state can pass on taxes it was owed to that same group. And if discrimination manages to skirt the law, well, then, that's perfectly okay. 

The federal voucher program is simply federally-funded discrimination, a chance for the government to transfer its tax liability to private schools without holding them to any sort of anti-discrimination standards. It's the government spending what were supposed to be tax dollars on activities that only benefit a selected few. 

Watch for more of this, as pressure is put on other Democratic governors in hopes that they can be tempted with free federal dollars and a bullshit argument.