At the closing of the polls on Nov. 3, the Republican Party continued life support. Leftist Democrats basking in schadenfreude are gleefully sending California GOP State Party Chairperson Jessica Patterson and the county chairs recommendations for Hospice services. Comforting email blasts went out to the party faithful, rich in palliative compliments for the Republican faithful’s efforts.
Of course, palliative care is designed to ease the way into oblivion rather than taking a profoundly serious look at the man in the mirror. The inconvenient truth is that the Republican Party has been on an oxygen and nutrition drip, for years.
The problem begins with the party not giving the public any reason to vote for the GOP. Former CAGOP Chairman Jim Brulte and the current administration enforce a policy that messaging is only the province of candidates. The result is a lack of a unified message that proclaims the positive results of Republican policies. Frankly, we have too few candidates to effectively spread the word. The CAGOP has let the Democrats define what it means to be a Republican and it is not pretty.
President Donald Trump, despite four years of continuous vicious unsupported attacks by Democrats, the deep state, the media, and corporate social media, has demonstrated by garnering the most votes in history except for Joe Biden, the way forward. It is about returning to our founding principles that create opportunity, prosperity, love of America and a firm reliance on divine providence without regard to race, class, or gender.
We all may come from different places, but he proclaimed that we are all Americans first. The wisdom that President Trump had instinctively and from his experience in business has been expunged by our K-12 government schools, universities and media.
The battle to win the hearts and minds of Californians must come from an energized grass roots effort combined with conventional political support and the values and passions of our religious communities.
The only way to prepare the battlefield is to bring real school choice equally to all K-12 students without regard to any type or need of means testing. We must allow parents, taking advantage of free-market competition, to take charge of where and what type of school their precious children, our rising generation, will attend.
Not only will parents be able to opt out of the indoctrination and abusive sex education in government schools, we see that private, charter and religious schools constantly show higher academic performance in the same neighborhoods as the failing government schools.
This kind of change can only happen by means of a people’s initiative to change the California Constitution, so that all Proposition 98 education funding be equally divided into individual education savings accounts for every K-12 student in California.
The parents or guardians of the students can direct that funding to be paid directly to the accredited government, charter, private or religious school of their choice to pay tuition. Any unspent funds will accumulate and can be used for college or vocational training. Currently that amount would be about $12,500 per year. That means that home-schooled children could easily have a college fund waiting for them in excess of $120,000. All at no change in expense to the taxpayer.
The advantages are twofold.
First: We will have a population with far greater performance in the core subjects of reading, writing, math and science. Further, parents can choose free-market alternatives that teach American civics, Americanism, Western civilization and religious values. Our students can once again learn the importance of the separation of powers and the protections provided by a limited government.
Second: Currently most of the bad educational policies put into place by our elected officials in Sacramento and the California Department of Education are the result of the influence exerted by the teachers unions through their corrupt campaign contributions to our leftist-progressive elected officials. Once this type of initiative is on the ballot, hundreds of millions of dollars formerly sent to Democratic leftists will be directed against the Education Freedom Act, reducing the corruption.
School choice will be a win-win for the children and people of California. It needs to be the primary issue for all concerned Republicans, independents and Democrats. Learn more at https://www.californiaschoolchoice.org/
Stephen Smith is with the California School Choice Foundation and can be reached there. He ran for Congress twice against Xavier Becerra. He served one term as first vice chairman for the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.
