Quote of note:
Representative Margaret Dayton, the Republican state representative who wrote the Utah bill, said she had worded it to assert Utah's right to control local schools without jeopardizing the state's federal education financing.
Well, good luck with that...
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings warned in a letter to Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah on Monday, however, that depending on how the state were to apply the bill's provisions, the Department of Education might withhold $76 million of the $107 million that Utah receives in federal education money. Several lawmakers said the secretary's letter seemed to be a threat.
"Seemed"?
This situation has the potential to totally screw up the works.
I wonder when Sen. Hatch has to run for reelection? Because these folks in Utah are serious, and Bush (for whom the vote to move Bolton's nomination to the Senate floor was just changed in order to avoid the possibility of embarrassment) can't afford to have his signature initiatives blown off. If the feds gank three quarters of the state's federal education funding, the next federal-level incumbent to run for office is doomed! Doomed, I tell you! BWAAAAHahahahaa!
ahem
Anyway...
Utah Vote Rejects Parts of Education Law
By SAM DILLON
SALT LAKE CITY, April 19 - In a stinging rebuke of President Bush's signature education law, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that orders state officials to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with Utah's education goals or that require state financing.
The bill is the most explicit legislative challenge to the federal law by a state, and its passage marked the collapse of a 15-month lobbying effort against it by the Bush administration.
Federal officials fear Utah's action could embolden other states to resist what many states consider intrusive or unfunded provisions of the federal law, known as No Child Left Behind.
Utah's action comes as a federal-state conflict over the education law appears to be escalating. The attorney general of Connecticut has announced that he will sue the Department of Education over the law's finances, Texas is in open defiance of a federal ruling on testing disabled children and many state legislatures have protested various provisions of the federal law, which has required a sweeping expansion of standardized testing.
The 29-member Senate passed the bill on a vote of 25 to 3, with one absence, hours after the Utah House, which has 75 members, approved it 66 to 7. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, has said he intends to sign it.
Several lawmakers said in the debates on Tuesday that they admired Mr. Bush, but they described the 1,000-page federal education law that he signed in January 2002 as an unconstitutional expansion of the federal role in education.
