Senate Democrats want to put Republicans in the embarrassing position of voting down a $35 billion stimulus bill on teacher jobs spending, but Republicans might have a strong case against the spending based on early education expenditures.
“President Obama proposed we invest $30 billion as part of the American Jobs Act to keep our schools well-staffed to ensure our children are well-educated,” Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on the Senate floor yesterday of a proposal that threatens to put Congressional Republicans in the catch-22 of disappointing their anti-spending base or alienating independents who might support spending on teachers.
The Senate Majority Communications Office released a response to this proposal asking the question, “so the last two didn’t work?” The Senate Republicans recalled the $26 billion spending that Reid said, last year, “saved people’s jobs” and that then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said protected approximately 160,000 teachers’ jobs in particular. This measure came in addition to the 2009 stimulus bill, which Obama promised would save “at least 150,000 jobs, jobs of teachers and nurses and firefighters and police officers.”
Republicans are quick to note that the 2009 stimulus money did not always go to teacher layoff-prevention. Last month, local schools in Indiana, Texas, and Mississipi, spent hundreds of thousands of federal stimulus dollars on iPads for teachers and students. As of last year, the Alabama Department of Corrections had received more education stimulus money than any other entity in the state — fully $118 million.
On Sunday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., tried to walk the line between opposition to popular proposals and opposition to more government spending. Speaking to Chris Wallace about infrastructure spending, Cantor said that spending to prevent teacher layoffs “sustained some jobs for about a year and then the states were faced about with billions of dollars in debt once that year was over it.” Cantor also agreed on the need for infrastructure spending but called for “reforming the system so we’re not throwing good money after bad and we can actually get the job done.”
Senate Republicans have rolled those two arguments into one, and they have the anecdotal evidence to make a compelling case against more stimulus spending.
