Missouri Governor Nixon’s veto deadline is approaching. It has passed for some bills, but for those passed near the end of the legislative session, the deadline is July 14, 2014, this coming Monday. If Nixon does not veto any outstanding bill, it automatically passes into law without his signature. That tactic allows Nixon to fence-sit on some issues. He can claim he never signed the bill and the supporters get their bill passed. Neat!
One such bill is SB 656. This bill is an amalgam of several bills that update various gun issues in Missouri. Some of those issues are: allowing teachers to be armed in schools after certification by law enforcement, lowering the CCW age from 21 to 19, younger for those on active duty in the military, explicitly allowing open carry throughout the state superseding any local prohibitions.
I’ve not heard of any movements against this bill since it was passed in the legislature. The libs and gun-grabbers seem to be focusing on Amendment 5 (AKA SJR 36).
The gun-grabbers are attacking Amendment 5 again. They lost a suit in late June on how the amendment appeared on the ballot. The Cole County Judge declared the suit by a St. Louis police chief and a Bloomberg surrogate to be without merit. Now those same libs have appealed their suit to vacate or change the amendment.
The libs proclaim to support choice…as long as they can dictate what those choices are. My choice is to vote YES! on Amendment 5.
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The Louisiana state education board is backing off on their threat to sue Governor Bobby Jindal over Common Core. Jindal is against it, the board is for it. The nation’s education elite is finding support for Common Core sifting through their fingers. Centralized control of education continues to take a beating.
Louisiana School Board May Back Down In Feud With Jindal
10:14 PM 07/10/2014
The state school board of Louisiana, which is on the brink of launching a lawsuit against Gov. Bobby Jindal over his plan to pull the state out of Common Core, indicated Thursday that it may be willing to back down and negotiate.
Rather than use new Common Core-aligned standardized tests created by the multi-state consortium Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), officers with Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) indicated that they are willing to continue using a modified form of the state’s old LEAP exams for one additional year.
The modified test, said BESE Chairman Chas Roemer, would incorporate some questions from the PARCC exam in order to adhere to a state law requiring that 2015′s standardized tests be comparable to tests used in other states.
The proposal comes one week before a July 17 meeting that has been scheduled between Jindal and state Superintendent John White. It is hoped that the meeting will help forestall a possible lawsuit by BESE against Jindal.
“It’s not 100 percent what the governor wanted and is not 100 percent what BESE wanted,” said Roemer in a conference call with reporters, adding that he was “optimistic” that Jindal would be open to an agreement.
Jindal’s office appears to be holding fast for the time being, however. Kristy Nichols, the governor’s commissioner of administration, told reporters she believed BESE’s plan was unworkable because it relies on contracts the governor maintains are invalid.
Certain aspects of the deal suggest the proposed compromise could simply be smoke and mirrors. Even the original PARCC test plan would have been a mix of national and state questions, since PARCC only produces math and English tests, leaving science and social studies up to individual states.
The proposed plan to maintain the LEAP test could still allow the state to rely on PARCC for most of its English and math questions, indicating that the “compromise” could amount to the PARCC exam under a new name. With Jindal expressing a strong commitment to rooting out any trace of Common Core from the state, even allowing Common Core-derived questions onto a Louisiana-created test could be a significant concession for him.
Jindal, once a supporter of Common Core, has switched sides in the past year and become one of the most prominent Republican critics of the multistate standards, even comparing them to Soviet totalitarianism. He urged both BESE and the Louisiana legislature to pull the state out of PARCC, but when both refused he decided to take action himself, issuing a set of executive orders demanding the state craft new education standards.
Jindal also suspended a contract the state had made to supply the PARCC test next year, claiming that it violated the state’s procurement laws. The PARCC tests, one of two major multi-state exams created to align with Common Core, are considered a key component of the standards’ implementation.
Until Thursday, both BESE and Superintendent White have stood firmly against Jindal’s actions, insisting that his executive orders are illegal and that the state will both proceed with Common Core and the PARCC tests as planned. White in particular has urged BESE to file a lawsuit challenging Jindal’s orders, and last week BESE voted to retain its own legal counsel should such a course of action arise.
The feud has caused sharp divisions between figures who were once allies on the issue of education. Both Jindal and BESE Chairman Roemer are Republicans, while White is an independent who has worked closely with Jindal in defending the state’s school voucher plan from a federal challenge.
The fresh battle between the three has proven to be the most bitter of many Common Core fights across the country in 2014. If Jindal gets his way, Louisiana will be the fourth state to break off from Common Core, following Indiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma.
The problem the BESE found was not philosophical. They backed off because they came to believe they couldn’t win against Jindal’s opposition. So, they decided to take the next best, from their standpoint, step—defer the decision to next year. That tactic always works with politicians.