For better or for worse, I believe that arguments such as this one from Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), in a letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, will carry the day in the new, smaller, more conservative House Republican caucus:
Wow! In "??'Compassionate' Conservatism Was a Mistake" (op-ed, Nov. 7) Dick Armey fails to mention that as majority leader in 2001-2002 he was the architect of "compassionate conservatism" in the legislative branch of government.I firmly believe that congressional Republicans laid the cornerstone of compassionate conservatism when individuals who had supported education reform sold out and passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. When faced with the choice of empowering parents, local schools, and state or federal bureaucrats, Dick Armey and our current and future minority leader John Boehner stood firmly on the side of federal bureaucrats. NCLB was the most massive shift from personal freedom to government intervention. They not only facilitated it, they engineered it.
The rest is history. Once you've sold out parents and children, voting for massive spending increases to fund NCLB, selling out freedom in other areas became very easy, almost necessary.
The disappointing thing is that John Boehner continues to be a staunch advocate of NCLB. I don't see a Republican Party with a future in which its leadership continues to advocate for federal government control of our local schools at the expense of choices for parents. If you're not on the side of parents when it comes to educating their children, how can the American people ever expect us to be on the side of freedom on other less important issues? They can't, they haven't, and they won't, until we more clearly admit more failures of the last eight years. Only then can we boldly move forward with clear and concrete examples of policy initiatives driven by the concept of freedom.
While I don't agree with Congressman Hoekstra that federal involvement in k-12 schools must be in opposition to parental choice, I do think support for NCLB will take a big hit as Republicans work to return to their core "brand" and principles. Like it or not, NCLB was certainly a key part of President Bush's "big government conservatism," which is now going out of style on the Right.
