Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
www.dailycorinthian.com
Harvey, Irma and 9/11: We can replace the stuff
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Corinth, Miss.
BY DR. GLENN MOLLETTE Columnist
Hurricane Harvey and Irma have been bad news to all in their paths. Lives have sadly been lost, houses demolished and personal items blown or washed away. Such horrific acts of nature remind us that we are all fragile and vulnerable. The right wind and rain can wash everything away including us and people we love so much. We love our stuff. We store it. We hoard it. We want to pass it on to our children and grandchildren. There are storage facilities being built almost everywhere in America because we love our stuff so much. Harvey and Irma remind us again that our greatest assets are our lives and the people we love. If we have our health, safety and valued people in our lives then everything is either secondary or worthless in perspective to life and people. None of us want to see our houses floating down a river or covered up in trees to never be lived in again. We don’t want to lose our pictures and everything we have worked so hard to buy and cherish. Such loss is excruciating. However, it is stuff and stuff is never forever. I recognize there is much about this planet that seems to last forever. There is a huge rock formation above my old home place that we always called Buzzard Rock. It was a fun place to climb and play as a kid. I can’t see or tell where that rock has changed one bit over the last sixty years. It looks the same to me. I suspect a hundred years from now it will look much the same and another generation of people will have walked or played on that rock and passed on while Buzzard Rock remains for many others to come by for fun and play. September 11 is once again here. Those of us who lived on that day will never forget the crumbling of the twin towers. A new incredible building called the One World Trade Center has been built and is phenomenal. The tragedy of that day was so many innocent lives were snuffed out by such evil people. Those hardworking good American people are no longer with us and nothing can replace them. We remember them and their value to us all. People are suffering in America today, from the people of Texas to all over Florida, Georgia and to all who remember September 11, 2001. However, it doesn’t have to be a hurricane or act or terrorism to shake our very lives. Often it’s the everyday occurrences of life that sometimes go unnoticed by the masses of people round us. Often, it’s the death of an aging parent or the sudden loss of a young adult that shakes our lives. A person overdosing and dying from drugs breaks our hearts. Or there is the man or woman we read or hear about who can no longer cope with the difficulties of life. Take time today on this day to value who and what really counts. Cherish those around you and help those you can. We can replace the stuff. It’s the people that we can’t. Glenn Mollette is a syndicated columnist and author of twelve books. He is read in all fifty states.
Prayer for today My Father, help me to have lofty thoughts, and may I not be content until they are carried into purpose. Help me to conquer that which will keep me from an act of happiness, and grant that by thinking of that which is pure, and doing that which is good, I may be made helpful and true. Amen.
A verse to share You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. —Psalm 128:2
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School funding ideas cut against grain JACKSON — Legislative leaders recently said that they’d still like to rewrite Mississippi’s public school funding formula, and urged people with ideas to speak up. State Auditor Stacey Pickering did. At least one of the things he wants is very different than what lawmakers considered this spring. Pickering has been a longtime critic of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, the current funding formula. It’s supposed to provide enough state aid so that all of Mississippi’s 480,000 public school students get a midlevel education. Lawmakers have repeatedly failed to provide enough money to cover the amount demanded by the formula, falling short more than $200 million short this year and more than $2 billion short since 2008. In some ways, Pickering has been in tune with fellow Republicans in the Legislature. He raised the alarm about an increasing share of spending going to administration, a development that is much decried but whose causes are not well understood. He also raised concerns that some school districts were gaming attendance reporting
to increase their share of state m o n e y , since aid is parceled out based on avJeff Amy erage daily attendance. Columnist The Legislature acted to mandate that students would only be counted as attending school if they were there at least 63 percent of the day, a rule that’s much hated by school superintendents and that lawmakers have now pledged to change, instead basing aid on number of students enrolled. In a letter last week to Republican Gov. Phil Bryant and legislative leaders, Pickering recommended that the Legislature hire an outside entity to conduct a district-by-district needs assessment “to truly understand each district’s requirements to provide classroom resources that offer children an exemplary education.” Pickering said he wants to know if the current formula provides enough money to the districts with the biggest challenges. The formula provides a small funding bump for every student re-
ceiving free and reducedprice lunches. Pickering doesn’t like that measure, because the federal government now allows districts with high poverty rates provide free lunches to all students. That means some districts get additional state aid. Consultants hired by the Legislature proposed substituting a Census Bureau measure of poverty, which Pickering said would be one option. The state could go in another direction, and conduct a cost study to determine how much schools need to spend on each student, a figure called base student cost. Now, that cost is calculated by looking at how much a group of C-rated districts spend, on average. Critics worry that means the state funds administrative bloat. Pickering’s preferred method for avoiding bloat would be to require at least some state aid be spent on specific things. Now, school districts are provided a lump sum they can spend as they please, as long as they meet accrediting requirements. But the funding formula that came before the adequate education program, called the mini-
mum program, required districts to spend certain amounts on books, buses, teacher salaries and other line items. Consultants hired by the Legislature proposed continuing to disburse lump sums, despite concerns over administrative spending. Pickering, though, says line-item budgeting would make sure schools spend money how lawmakers want them to. “Such designations not only provide accountability and transparency to taxpayers, they also insure that scarce dollars are being best used to educate children,” Pickering wrote. Overall, it’s far from clear that lawmakers, confronted by a tight budget and difficult trade-offs among districts, will be able to make any more progress on rewriting the formula in 2018 than they did in 2017. But if they do, Pickering will be trying to influence the outcome. Jeff Amy has covered politics and government for The Associated Press in Mississippi since 2011. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jeffamy. Read his work at https://www. apnews.com/search/Jeff_ Amy.
Can Trump and Democrats deal on immigration? Can President Donald Trump and the Republicanmajority Congress make a deal? That’s a question raised by the announcement that the Trump administration will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in six months. DACA, put in place by the Obama administration, provided protection from deportation to immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children and who didn’t have serious criminal records and were working or in school or the military. Trump is on strong legal ground. Barack Obama established DACA in 2012, even though, as he had earlier explained, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to set policy on immigration and naturalization. Moreover, Obama’s 2014 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which would have given protection to some 4 million parents of legal residents, was ruled invalid by federal courts. Ten state attorneys general have been threatening to challenge DACA on identical grounds. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is right when he says that DACA could be overturned by the courts, leaving the 800,000 young people
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currently covered with no protection. They may be better off with Trump’s order leaving DACA in place for six months than they would
be then. Though DACA is, as Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein agreed, “on shaky legal ground,” the political case for the policy is strong. Polls show large majorities in favor because they agree with what Trump said in his written statement: “I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents.” This is an instance, arguably a rare one, of Trump’s changing his mind after reflecting. The equities weigh heavily in its favor. The 800,000 “dreamers” who came forward and sought DACA status are no more responsible for the dubious legal basis for Obama’s program than they are for their parents’ decision to bring them in the United States illegally. They qualified under the terms of an action of the United States government then in force and have a strong moral case for permanent legal
status. Trump has made clear that he would support a legislative version of DACA, and it could get majority support in both houses of Congress. But because some Republicans, such as Rep. Steve King, are opposed, any bill must be a bipartisan compromise. That means Democrats will have to make concessions to get the issue on the calendar. Before the Obama Democrats began passing major legislation on a Democratsonly basis, this was standard operating procedure. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy was particularly expert in fashioning bipartisan compromises. He would accept provisions he didn’t like in return for others he favored and thought more important. He would oppose as “poison pills” amendments he personally supported but believed would cost a bill needed Republican votes. One such poison pill did pass, with the help of the vote of then-Sen. Obama, and torpedoed the 2007 comprehensive immigration bill, which would have been signed by Bush. Ten years later, the facts and opinion on immigration have changed. One possible path forward was suggested by Sen. Tom Cotton, co-sponsor of a different
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comprehensive immigration bill supported by Trump. Giving young people who violated the law -- even if it was through no fault of their own -- legal status would have “negative consequences,” Cotton argues, opening up chain migration of lowskilled collateral relatives and incentivizing others to bring children in illegally. So a bill to replace DACA, he says, should be accompanied with limits on extended family unification migration and with “enhanced enforcement measures,” such as mandatory E-Verify. Such provisions will most likely be opposed by the lobbies whose ultimate goal has been giving legal status to almost all of the 11 million immigrants here illegally, a measure that was part of the 2007 and 2013 comprehensive bills. But Democrats may have to accept them to help the dreamers. Much will depend on the deal-making skill of the president and congressional leaders. Will they measure up to the standard set by Ted Kennedy? 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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