Ted Cruz and Chris Murphy Are Equally Unserious about School Safety
Americans want results, not spoiled children wasting our time and money
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and I largely agree on a philosophy of government. Smaller is better, local and State governance is preferable to centralizing power in the Federal Government, the permanent bureaucracy is not only bloated and expensive but represents an erosion of freedom and civic involvement. I normally welcome his public comments and approve of his position statements.
So it was for a day or two when I saw him give a 7-minute speech on the floor of the Senate about a school safety bill he was endorsing. Moments before his speech, Senator Chris Murphy (D) rose to say “I object” when Cruz asked for unanimous consent to move the bill forward. Cruz seized on this to wax eloquently about Democrats who don’t care about children’s safety in school, who only use any new tragedy to try to strip law-abiding citizens of our Second Amendment rights.
The Act would provide for a range of safety-enhancing investments:
There are more specifics around possible use of funds:
All of that seems pretty great, right? So why would Senator Chris Murphy not want to allocate Federal taxpayer money to such a worthy cause? Democrats like to spend money, right? Everyone wants to keep kids safe, right? His two-word objection sure made him and the entire pack of Democrat Senators look like heartless pricks, who would rather pick political fights than protect children, which is what Sen. Cruz spent the next seven minutes declaiming.
What Cruz failed to mention during his impassioned speech on the Senator floor were the conditions tied to these cash grants. To use this money to harden schools, hire armed guards, improve security tools - all of which are great things - if a State wanted to access these kid-protecting goodies, the State had to agree to the following conditions.
A rational American might wonder what any of those three things have to do with protecting school children from the next evil gun-toting sociopath.
Chris Murphy and Ted Cruz are equally to blame here. Murphy, instead of saying “I object” to the bill and walking off the floor could have said, “We will get 100 unanimous votes in the Senate if we remove these conditions. There is a time and opportunity to debate the issues raised by these conditions, including whether the Federal Government has any role to play. If school safety is the only - and highly valuable - goal of this legislation, then protecting children is all that matters, no matter what topics a given school in a given State happens to teach.”
Cruz by tossing in this garden salad of right-wing bogeymen guaranteed the bill’s failure. I imagine he calculated that the bill to save kids from potential danger would be so compelling that no Democrat would want to go on record saying “no” to it two months before the midterm elections, so they would have to swallow these three contentious conditions.
Cruz was wrong to append these conditions, which have now delayed important investments in school safety. Murphy was wrong when he called his bluff instead of calling Cruz out and saying, “You take these conditions out, and we’ll support this bill.”
Both are unserious about school safety. A pox on both their houses.