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Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Saturday, May 13, 2017
Corinth, Miss.
Cochran plays key role in return of Pell Grant program BY DAVID BAIME American Association of Community Colleges
Last week, Congress passed funding legislation that not only kept the federal government open for the rest of year, but also achieved something of vital importance for community college students: It made the Pell Grant program available year-round, rather than just for the traditional academic year of September through May. Senator Thad Cochran, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, deserves deep gratitude for his central role in this landmark development. Pell Grants are the primary source of federal support for the most financially needy college students. They were established in 1972, when the typical college student was 18-22 years old and attended school from the early fall through late spring. However, this traditional student has become a smaller portion of the college-going population, especially at community colleges. Nationally, the average community college student is 28 years old, attends school part-time, and works. In 2008, Congress passed legislation that created the year-round Pell Grant, but after just two years it was revoked to address thenballooning program costs. Community leaders across the country had just gotten started to ramp up programs and related support services to help their students stay enrolled continuously. Losing the year-round Pell Grant was devastating to community college students, who were turning to the institutions in huge numbers in the depths of the recession. Ever since, it has been a top priority for community colleges and their national organization, the American Association of Community Colleges, to restore year-round Pell Grants. For many community college students, the length of time it takes to achieve their educational goal is all important, because they need an academic credential now, not later, to leverage greater opportunity in the workforce. At present, students who rely on student aid to afford college are often forced to “stop out” of school in the summer months because their federal aid only covers the traditional academic year. For too many of these students a temporary break in studies becomes permanent because work or family commitments get in the way, or because they simply fall out of the academic mode. Research has shown consistently that staying in school and making continued progress propels college completion. Increasing the ability of college students to stay enrolled year-round will also help American business. The ongoing “skills gap” exists in large part because an increasing number of jobs require some postsecondary education or training, while college completion rates have basically remained flat. Multiple program start times, evening and weekend classes, and year-round programs are just some of the things that colleges are doing to better serve their students and industry partners alike. But all these reforms are for naught if a student can’t stay in college continuously because their federal aid takes the summer off. There has been bipartisan support for reinstatement of year-round Pell Grants since they were eliminated, but until now the stars had not aligned. Declining costs in the Pell Grant program helped pave the way, and indications of support from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and House Speaker Paul Ryan, among others, also helped. But in the end, it took the resolve of a few wellpositioned and dedicated leaders like Sen. Cochran to get this proposal across the finish line. Community college students in Mississippi and across the country could not be more grateful. David Baime is senior vice president for Government Relations and Policy Analysis at the American Association of Community Colleges. The American Association of Community Colleges is the primary advocacy organization for the nation’s community colleges. The association represents nearly 1,200 two-year, associate degree–granting institutions and more than 13 million students.
Prayer for today Eternal God, I praise thee, that “thy love is broader than the measure of man’s mind,” and that through all my years I may hide myself in thee, trusting thee to the end. Amen.
A verse to share Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; may your good Spirit lead me on level ground. — Psalm 143:10
What’s America’s goal in the world? For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before — in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided. Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own security, we had to go back to Europe and Asia. What was called the Cold War consensus — that only America could “contain” Stalin’s empire — led to NATO and new U.S. alliances from the Elbe to the East China Sea. Vietnam, however, shattered that Cold War consensus. The far left of the Democratic Party that had taken us into Vietnam had repudiated the war by 1968, and switched sides to sympathize with such Third World communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas. Center-right presidents — JFK, Nixon, Reagan — accepted the need to cooperate with dictators who would side with us in fighting Communism.
And we did. Park Chung-Hee in Korea. The Shah in Iran. President Diem Patrick in Saigon. Buchanan Gen. Franco in Spain. Columnist Somoza in Nicaragua. Gen. Mobuto in the Congo. Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Ferdinand Marcos in Manila. The list goes on. Under Reagan, the Soviet Empire finally fell apart and the USSR then disintegrated in one of the epochal events of history. The American Century had ended in America’s triumph. Yet, after 1989, no new national consensus emerged over what ought to be our role in the World. What should we stand for? What should we fight for? What Dean Acheson had said of our cousins in 1962: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” was true of us. What was our role in the world, now that the Cold War was history? George H.W. Bush took us to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Soaring to 90 percent approval, he declared America’s new role was to construct a New World Order. Those who opposed him, Bush acidly dismissed in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1991, the
50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor: “We stand here today on the site of a tragedy spawned by isolationism. ... And it is here we must learn — and this time avoid — the dangers of today’s isolationism and its ... accomplice, protectionism.” Neither Bush nor his New World Order survived the next November. Then came payback for our sanctions that had brought death to thousands of Iraqis, and for the U.S. bases we had foolishly planted on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia — Sept. 11, 2001. George W. Bush reacted by launching the two longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and announced that our new role was to “end tyranny in our world.” The Bush II crusade for global democracy also fizzled out. Barack Obama tried to extricate us from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he, too, failed, and got us into wars in Yemen and Syria, and then started his own war in Libya, producing yet another failed state. What does the balance sheet of post-Cold War interventions look like? Since 1991, we have lost our global preeminence, quadrupled our national debt, and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring
for a sixth, with Iran. A quarter century after the Cold War, we remain committed to 60-year-old Cold War alliances to defend scores of nations on the other side of the world. Consider some of the places where America collides today with nuclear powers: the DMZ, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Crimea, the Donbass. What is vital to us in any of these venues to justify sending an American army to fight, or risking a nuclear war? We have lost control of our destiny. We have lost the freedom our Founding Fathers implored us to maintain — the freedom to stay out of wars of foreign counties on faraway continents. Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet. If we do not review and discard some of these war guarantees, we shall never know peace. Donald Trump once seemed to understand this. Does he still? Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, out May 9, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Comey is latest victim of the Clintons Why did President Donald Trump fire FBI Director James Comey now? The answer, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York has argued, is that he waited until after his impeccably apolitical deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was in place as Comey’s direct superior. Rosenstein was confirmed April 25, and his memorandum titled “Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI” was appended to Trump’s firing letter exactly two weeks later. In that document, Rosenstein characterized Comey’s July 5 statement on the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret email system as “a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.” In support of that proposition, he cited comments from five former deputy attorneys general and four former attorneys general of both major political parties (including Eric Holder, who held both offices). Who is Rosenstein? He started off as a career Justice Department lawyer and was appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland by George W. Bush in 2005. He was one of only three -- out of 93
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nationwide -- U.S. attorneys kept on during the Obama administration. This could Michael not have Barone h a p p e n e d without the Columnist approval of Maryland’s Democratic senators, Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin. Both of them are paragons of integrity with long experience in the swampland of Maryland politics. Rosenstein will be in charge of that, seeing as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. And Trump’s nominee for FBI director will receive close scrutiny from the Senate. It’s similarly far-fetched to compare this to Richard Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973. For some Democrats and journalists, every Republican military initiative is Vietnam and every possible scandal Watergate. That’s a measure of the nostalgic perspective of the baby-boom generation. Can something be said in defense of Comey? He was put in a terrible position by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Justice De-
partment. Justice officials downplayed the criminal nature of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and granted immunity to Clinton aides rather than summon them before a grand jury. That amounts to weighting the scales of justice in favor of the administration’s preferred candidate for president. So does the June 27 meeting on the Phoenix airport tarmac of Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who revealed herself to be a shameless political hack. When the meeting was revealed, Lynch said she would go along with the FBI’s decision on prosecution but didn’t formally recuse herself. One can understand why Comey could have felt miffed when Lynch left him publicly exposed as the one who would decide whether the putative Democratic presidential nominee would be criminally prosecuted. If an FBI director shouldn’t decide who gets prosecuted, as Rosenstein correctly argued, he certainly shouldn’t have to make that call when the decision could determine who will be elected president of the United States. Comey’s July 5 statement made clear that Hillary Clin-
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ton had violated Title 18, Section 793(f) of U.S. Code, put in place by the Espionage Act. But he added to the words of the statute an intent requirement and so recommended that she not be prosecuted. It’s not hard to imagine that he felt entitled to inflict political damage on someone for whom the Obama Justice Department had put in the fix. That makes Comey only the latest victim of the Clintons, who, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy Buchanan, smash up “things and creatures” and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it (is) that (keeps) them together, and let other people clean up the mess they (have) made.” The mess continues, as Democrats howl against the removal of an official whose removal they demanded up through lunchtime Tuesday and continue to search, Ahab-like, for evidence that Russia somehow stole the election. Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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